THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES IN MEMORY OF PAUL TURNER, U.S.M.CR. KILLED IN ACTION, SAIPAN JUNE, 1944 The New Adam and Eve by Nathaniel Hawthorne author of True Stories from History and Biography With Frontispiece by T. Eyre Macklin London Walter Scott Limited Paternoster Square fs 181?- CONTENTS. THE NEW ADAM AND EVE, 5~ EGOTISM ; OR, THE BOSOM SERPENT, . *. ... 27 THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET 44 BROWNE'S WOODEN IMAGE 67 THE INTELLIGENCE OFFICE, 82 ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL, 98 P.'s CORRESPONDENCE, 122 /'EARTH'S HOLOCAUST, 143 PASSAGES FROM A RELINQUISHED WORK, . . .167 SKETCHES FROM MEMORY , 184 THE OLD APPLE DEALER, 202' / THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL, .... 210 A VIRTUOSO'S COLLECTION, 240 838297 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE. THE NEW ADAM AND EVE. WE who are born into the world's artificial system can never adequately know how little in our present state and circumstances is natural, and how much is merely the interpolation of the perverted mind and heart of man. Art has become a second and stronger nature; she is a stepmother, whose crafty tenderness has taught us to despise the bountiful and wholesome ministrations ef our true parent. It is only through the medium of the imagination that we can lessen those iron fetters, which we call truth and reality, and make ourselves even partially sensible what prisoners we are. For instance, let us conceive good Father Miller's inter- pretation of the prophecies to have proved true. The Day of Doom has burst upon the globe and swept away the whole race of men. From cities and fields, seashore and midland mountain region, vast continents, and even the remotest islands of the ocean, each living thing is gone. No breath of a created being disturbs this earthly atmosphere. But the abodes of man, and all that he has accomplished, the footprints of his wanderuigs and the results of his toil, the visible symbols of his intellectual cultivation and moral progress in short, every thing physical that can give eyidence of his pfesenTposition 6 Mosses from an Old Msinse. shall remain untouched by the hand of destiny. Then, to inherit and repeople this waste and deserted earth, we will suppose a new Adam and a new Eve to have been created, in the full development of mind and heart, but with no knowledge of their predecessors nor of the diseased circumstances that had become encrusted around them. Such a pair would at once distinguish between art and nature. Their instincts and intuitions would immediately recognize the wisdom and simpli- city of the latter; while the former, with its elaborate perversities, would offer them a continual succession of puzzles. Let us attempt, in a mood half sportive and half thoughtful, to track these imaginary heirs of our mor- tality through their first day's experience. No longer ago than yesterday the flame of human life was extin- guished ; there has been a breathless night ; and now another morn approaches, expecting to find the earth no less desolate than at eventide. It is dawn. The east puts on its immemorial blush, although no human eye is gazing at it ; for all the pheno- mena of the natural world renew themselves, in spite of the solitude that now broods around the globe. There is still beauty of earth, sea, and sky, for beauty's sake. But soon there are to be spectators. Just when the earliest sunshine gilds earth's mountain tops, two beings have come into life, not in such an Eden as bloomed to welcome our first parents, but in the heart of a modern city. They find themselves in existence, and gazing into one another's eyes. Their emotion is not astonish- ment ; nor do they perplex themselves with efforts to discover what, and whence, and why they are. Each is satisfied to be, because the other exists likewise ; and their first consciousness is of calm and mutual enjoyment, which seems not to have been the birth of that very moment, but prolonged from a past eternity. Tin New Adam and Eve. 7 Thus content with an inner sphere which they inhabit together, it is not immediately that the outward world can obtrude itself upon their notice. Soon, however, they feel the invincible necessity of this earthly life, and begin to make acquaintance with the objects and circumstances that surround them. Perhaps no other stride so vast remains to be taken as when they first turn from the reality of their mutual glance to the dreams and shadows that perplex them every where else. "Sweetest Eve, where are we?" exclaims the new Adam ; for speech, or some equivalent mode of expres- sion, is born with them, and comes just as natural as breath. " Methinks I do not recognize this place." "Nor I, dear Adam," replies the new Eve. "And what a strange place, too ! Let me come closer to thy side and behold thee only; for all other sights trouble and perplex my spirit." "Nay, Eve," replies Adam, who appears to have the stronger tendency towards the material world; "it were well that we gain some insight into these matters. We are in an odd situation here. Let us look about us." Assuredly there are sights enough to throw the new inheritors of earth into a state of hopeless perplexity. The long lines of edifices, their windows glittering in the yellow sunrise, and the narrow street between, with its barren pavement tracked and battered by wheels that have now rattled into an irrevocable past! The signs, with their unintelligible hieroglyphics ! The squareness and ugliness, and regular or irregular de- formity of every thing that meets the eye ! The marks of wear and tear, and unrenewed decay, which distin- guish the works of man from the growth of nature! What is there in all this, capable of the slightest signi- ficance to minds that know nothing of the artificial 8 Mosses from an Old Manse. system which is implied in every lamp post and each brick of the houses? Moreover, the utter loneliness and silence, in a scene that originally grew out of noise and bustle, must needs impress a feeling of desolation even upon Adam and Eve, unsuspicious as they are of the recent extinction of human existence. In a forest, solitude would be life ; in a city, it is death. The new Eve looks round with a sensation of doubt and distrust, such as a city dame, the daughter of num- berless generations of citizens, might experience if suddenly transported to the garden of Eden. At length her downcast eye discovers a small tuft of grass, just beginning to sprout among the stones of ,ithe pavement; she eagerly grasps it, and is sensible Athat this little herb awakens some response within her Veart. Nature finds nothing else to offer her. Adam, after staring up and down the street without detecting a single object that his comprehension can lay hold of, finally turns his forehead to the sky. There, indeed, is something which the soul within him recognizes. " Look up yonder, mine own Eve," he cries ; " surely we ought to dwell among those gold-tinged clouds or in the blue depths beyond them. I know not how nor when, but evidently we have strayed away from our home; for I see nothing hereabouts that seems to belong to us." f " Can we not ascend thither?" inquires Eve. "Why not?" answers Adam, hopefully. "But no; something drags us down in spite of our best efforts. Perchance we may find a path hereafter." In the energy of new life it appears no such imprac- ticable feat to climb into the sky. But they have already received a woful lesson, which may finally go far towards reducing them to the level of the departed race, when they acknowledge the necessity of keeping the beaten track of earth. They now set forth on a ramble through The New Adam and Eve. 9 the city, in the hope of making their escape from this uncongenial sphere. Already in the fresh elasticity of their spirits they have found the idea of weariness. We will watch them as they enter some of the shops and public or private edifices; for every door, whether of alderman or beggar, church or hall of state, has been flung wide open by the same agency that swept away the inmates. It so happens and not unluckily for an Adam and Eve who are still in the costume that might better have befitted Eden it so happens that their first visit is to a fashionable dry goods store. No courteous and im- portunate attendants hasten to receive their orders ; no throng of ladies are tossing over the rich Parisian fabrics. All is deserted ; trade is at a stand still ; and not even an echo of the national watchword, "Go ahead !" disturbs the quiet of the new customers. But specimens of the latest earthly fashions, silks of every shade, and whatever is most delicate or splendid for the decoration of the human form, lie scattered around, profusely as bright autumnal leaves in a forest. Adam looks at a few of the articles, but throws them carelessly aside with whatever exclamation may correspond to " Pish !" or " Pshaw !" in the new vocabulary of nature. Eve, however, be it said without offence to her native modesty, examines these treasures of her sex with some- what livelier interest. A pair of corsets chance to lie upon the counter; she inspects them curiously, but knows not what to make of them. Then she handles a fashionable silk with dim yearnings, thoughts that wander hither and thither, instincts groping in the dark. " On the whole, I do not like it," she observes, laying the glossy fabric upon the counter. " But, Adam, it is very strange. What can these things mean ? Surely I ought to know; yet they put me in a perfect maze." " Poll ! my dear Eve, why trouble thy little head io Mosses from an Old Manse. about such nonsense ?" cries Adam, in a fit of impatience. " Let us go somewhere else. But stay; how very beauti- ful ! My loveliest Eve, what a charm you have imparted to that robe by merely throwing it over your shoulders !" For Eve, with the taste that nature moulded into her composition, has taken a remnant of exquisite silver gauze and drawn it around her form, with an effect that gives Adam his first idea of the witchery of dress. He beholds his spouse in a new light and with renewed admiration ; yet is hardly reconciled to any other attire than her own golden locks. However, emulating Eve's example, he makes free with a mantle of blue velvet, and puts it on so picturesquely that it might seem to have fallen from heaven upon his stately figure. Thus garbed they go in search of new discoveries. They next wander into a Church, not to make a dis- play of their fine clothes, but attracted by its spire, pointing upwards to the sky, whither they have already yearned to climb. As they enter the portal, a clock, which it was the last earthly act of the sexton to wind up, repeats the hour in deep reverberating tones; for Time has survived his former progeny, and, with the iron tongue that man gave him, is now speaking to his two grandchildren. They listen, but understand him not. Nature would measure time by the succession of thoughts and acts which constitute real life, and not by hours of emptiness. They pass up the church aisle, and raise their eyes to the ceiling. Had our Adam and Eve become mortal in some European city, and strayed into the vastness and sublimity of an old cathe- dral, they might have recognized the purpose for which the deep-souled founders reared it. Like the dim awful- ness of an ancient forest, its very atmosphere would have incited them to prayer. Within the snug walls of a metropolitan church there can be no such influence. Yet some odor of religion is still lingering here, the The New Adam and Eve. \ i bequest of pious souls, who had grace to enjoy a fore- taste of immortal life. Perchance they breathe a pro- phecy of a better world to their successors, who have become obnoxious to all their own cares and calamities in the present one. " Eve, something impels me to look upward," says Adam ; " but it troubles me to see this roof between us and the sky. Let us go forth, and perhaps we shall discern a Great Face looking down upon us." " Yes ; a Great Face, with a beam of love brightening over it, like sunshine," responds Eve. " Surely we have seen such a countenance somewhere." They go out of the church, and kneeling at its threshold give way to the spirit's natural instinct of adoration towards a beneficent Father. But, in truth, their life thus far has been a continual prayer. Purity and simplicity hold converse at every moment with their Creator. We now observe them entering a Court of Justice. But what remotest conception can they attain of the purposes of such an edifice? How should the idea occur to them that human brethren, of like nature with themselves, and originally included in the^ same law of love which is their only rule of- life, should ever need an outward enforcement of the true voice within their souls ? And what, save a woful experience, the dark result of many centuries, could teach them the sad mysteries of ( crime? O, Judgment Seat, not by the pure in heart wast thou established, nor in the simplicity of nature; but by hard and wrinkled men, and upon the accuinu- lated heap of earthly wrong. Thou art the very symbol of man's perverted state. On as fruitless an errand our wanderers next visit a Hall of Legislature, where Adam places Eve in the Speaker's chair, unconscious of the moral which he thus exemplifies. Man's intellect, moderated by Woman's A 12 Mosses from an Old Manse. tenderness and moral sense ! Were such the legislation of the world there would be no need of State Houses, Capitols, Halls of Parliament, nor even of those little assemblages of patriarchs beneath the shadowy trees, by whom freedom was first interpreted to mankind on our native shores. Whither go they next ? A perverse destiny seems to perplex them with one after another of the riddles which mankind put forth to the wandering universe, and left \Xunsolved in their own destruction. They enter an edifice of stern gray stone standing insulated in the midst of others, and gloomy even in the sunshine, which it barely suffers to penetrate through its iron grated windows. It is a prison. The jailer has left his post at the summons of a stronger authority than the sheriff's. But the prisoners? Did the messenger of fate, when he shook open all the doors, respect the magistrate's warrant and the judge's sentence, and leave the inmates of the dungeons to be delivered by due course of earthly law ? No ; a new trial has been granted in a higher court, which may set judge, jury, and prisoner at its bar all in a row, and perhaps find one no less guilty than another. The jail, like the whole earth, is now a solitude, and has thereby lost something of its dismal gloom. But here are the narrow cells, like tombs, only drearier and deadlier, because in these the immortal spirit was buried with the body. Inscriptions appear on the walls, scribbled with a pencil or scratched with a rusty nail; brief words of agony, perhaps, or guilt's desperate defiance to the world, or merely a record of a date by which the writer strove to keep up the march of life. There is not a living eye that could now decipher these memorials. Nor is it while so fresh from their Creator's hand that the new denizens of earth no, nor their descendants for a thousand years could discover that this edifice was a The New Adam and Eve. 13 hospital for the direst disease which could afflict their predecessors. Its patients bore the outward marks of that leprosy with which all were more or less infected. They were sick and so were the purest of their brethren jlvith the plague of sin.j A deadly sickness, indeed ! Reeling its symptoms within the breast, men concealed it with fear and shame, and were only the more cruel to those unfortunates whose pestiferous sores were flagrant to the common eye. Nothing save a rich garment could ever hide the plague spot. In the course of the world's lifetime, every remedy was tried for its cure and extirpation, except the single one, the(flowe7 that-\ grew in Heaven and was sovereign for all the miseries of / earth. Man never had attempted to cure sin by LOVE ! ,-"'' Had he but once made the effort it might well have" happened that there would have been no more need of the dark lazar house into which Adam and Eve have wandered. Hasten forth with your native innocence, lest the damps of these still conscious walls infect you likewise, and thus another fallen race be propagated ! Passing from the interior of the prison into the space within its outward wall, Adam pauses beneath a structure of the simplest contrivance, yet altogether unaccount- able to him. It consists merely of two upright posts, supporting a transverse beam, from which dangles a cord. " Eve, Eve ! " cries Adam, shuddering with a nameless horror. " What can this thing be ? " "I know not," answers Eve; but, Adam, my heart is sick ! There seems to be no more sky no more sunshine ! " Well might Adam shudder and poor Eve be sick at heart ; foc-this mysterious^ jobjest -W^s_the__type_ of man- kind's whole system in regard to the great difficulties which God had given to be solved a system of fear and vengeance, never successful, yet followed to the last. // \* 14 Mosses from an Old Manse. Here, on the morning when the final summons came, a criminal pnje criminal, where none were guiltless had died upon the gallows. Had the world heard the footfall of its own approaching doom, it would have been no in- appropriate act thus to close the record of its deeds by one so characteristic. The two pilgrims now hurry from the prison. Had ) they known how the former inhabitants of earth were I shut up in artificial error and cramped and chained by jtheir perversions, they might have compared the whole (moral world to a prison house, and have deemed the removal of the race a general jail delivery. They next enter, unannounced, but they might have rung at the door in vain, a private mansion, one of the stateliest in Beacon Street. A wild and plaintive strain of music is quivering through the house, now rising like a solemn organ peal, and now dying into the faintest murmur, as if some spirit that had felt an interest in the departed family were bemoaning itself in the solitude of hall and chamber. Perhaps a virgin, the purest of mortal race, has been left behind to perform a requiem for the whole kindred of humanity. Not so. These are the tXtones^pf_an -^Eolian hajp, through which Nature pours the harmony that lies concealed in her every breath, whether of summer breeze or tempest. Adam and Eve are lost in rapture, unmingled with surprise. The pass- ing wind, that stirred the harp strings, has been hushed, before they can think of examining the splendid furniture, the gorgeous carpets, and the architecture of the rooms. These things amuse their unpractised eyesjout appealjo_ nothing within their hearts. Even the pictures upon the vvallb scaitclyelccite a^Teeper interest ; for there is some- */ thing radically artificial and deceptive in painting with which minds in the primal simplicity cannot sympathize. The unbidden guests examine a row of family portraits, but are too dull to recognize them as men and women, The New Adam and Eve. 13 beneath the disguise of a preposterous garb, and with features and expression debased, because inherited through ages of moral and physical decay. Chance, however, presents them with pictures of human beauty, fresh from the hand of Nature. As they enter a magnificent apartment they are astonished, but not affrighted, to perceive two figures advancing to meet them. Is it not awful to imagine that any life, save their own, should remain in the wide world ? " How is this?" exclaims Adam. " My beautiful Eve, are you in two places at once ? " "And you, Adam !" answers Eve, doubtful, yet delighted. " Surely that noble and lovely form is yours. Yet here you are by my side. J.. am content with one methinks there should not be two." This miracle is wrought by a tall looking glass, the mystery of which they soon fathom, because Nature creates a mirror for the human face in every pool of water, and for her own great features in waveless lakes. Pleased and satisfied with gazing at themselves, they now discover the marble statue of a child in a corner of the room so exquisitely idealized that it is almost worthy to be the prophetic likeness of their first born. Sculpture, in its highest excellence, is more genuine than painting, and might seem to be evolved from a natural germ, by the same law as a leaf or flower. The statue of the child impresses the solitary pair as if it were a companion ; it likewise hints at secrets both of the past and future. " My husband ! " whispers Eve. " What would you say, dearest Eve ? " inquires Adam. " I wonder if we are alone in the world," she continues, with a sense of something like fear at the thought of other inhabitants. " This lovely little form ! Did it ever breathe ? Or is it only the shadow of something real, like our pictures m thelnlrrbr ? " 1 6 Mosses from an Old Manse. " It is strange ! " replies Adam, pressing his hand to his brow. "There are mysteries all around us. An idea flits continually before me would that I could seize it ! Eve, Eve, are we treading in the footsteps of beings that bore a likeness to ourselves? If so, whither are they gone ? and why is their world so unfit for our dwelling place?" "Our great Father only knows," answers Eve. "But something tells me that we shall not always be alone. And how sweet if other beings were to visit us in the shape of this fair image ! " Then they wander through the house, and every \rhere find tokens of human life, which now, with the idea recently suggested, excite a deeper curiosity in their bosoms. Woman has here left traces of her delicacy and refinement, and of her gentle labors. Eve ransacks a work basket and instinctively thrusts the rosy tip of her finger into a thimble. . She takes up a piece of embroidery, glowing with (mimic flowers, in one of which a fair damsel of the departecTraceTTias left her needle. Pity that the Day of Doom should have anticipated the completion of such a useful task ! Eve feels almost conscious of the skill to finish it. A pianoforte has been left open. She flings her hand carelessly over the keys, and strikes out a sudden melody, no less natural than the strains of the jEolian harp, but joyous with the dance of her yet un- burdened life. Passing through a dark entry they find a broom behind the door ; and Eve, who comprises the whole nature of womanhood, has a dim idea that it is an instrument proper for her hand. In another apartment they behold a canopied bed, and all the appliances of luxurious repose. A heap of forest leaves would be more to the purpose. They enter the nursery, and are per- plexed with the sight of little gowns and caps, tiny shoes, and a cradle, amid the drapery of which is still to be seen the impress of a baby's form. Adam slightly notices The New A Jam and Eve. 17 these trifles ; but Eve becomes involved in a fit of mute reflection from which it is hardly possible to rouse her. By a most unlucky arrangement there was to have been a grand dinner party in fliis mansion on the very day when the whole human family, including the invited guests, were summoned to the unknown regions of illimitable space. At the moment of fate, the table was actually spread, and the company on the point of sitting down. Adam and Eve come unbidden to the banquet ; it has now been some time cold, but otherwise furnishes them with highly favorable specimens of the gastronomy of their predecessors. But it is difficult to imagine the perplexity of the unperverted couple, in endeavoring to find proper food for their first meal, at a table where the cultivated appetites of a fashionable party were to have been gratified. Will Nature teach them the mystery of a plate of turtle soup ? Will she embolden them to attack a haunch of venison ? Will she initiate them into the merits of a Parisian pasty, imported by the last steamer that ever crossed the Atlantic ? Will she not, rather, bid them turn with disgust from fish, fowl,., and flesh, which) to their pure nostrils, steam with a loathsome odor of death and corruption ? Food? The bill of fare contains nothing which they recognizers such. Fortunately, however, the dessert is ready upon a neighboring table. Adam, whose appetite and animal instincts are quicker than those of Eve, discovers this fitting banquet. "Here, dearest Eve," he exclaims, "here is food." " Well," answered she, with the germ of a housewife stirring within her, " we have been so busy to-day, that a picked-up dinner must serve." So Eve comes to the table and receives a red-cheeked apple from her husband's hand in requital of her prede- cessor's fatal gift to our common grandfather. ^JShe eats it without sin, and, let us hope, with no disastrous ^2~ 10 1 8 Mosses from an Old Manse. consequences to her future progeny. They make a plentiful, yet temperate, meal of fruit, which, though not gathered in paradise, is legitimately derived from the seeds that were planted there. Their primal appetite is satisfied. " What shall we drink, Eve ? " inquires Adam. Eve peeps among some bottles and decanters, which, as they contain fluids, she naturally conceives must be proper to quench thirst. But never before did claret, hock, and madeira, of rich and rare perfume, excite such disgust as now. " Pah ! " she exclaims, after smelling at various wines. " What stuff is here ? The beings who have gone before us could not have possessed the same nature that we do ; for neither their hunger nor thirst were like our own.'' " Pray hand me yonder bottle," says Adam. " If it be drinkable by any manner of mortal, I must moisten my throat with it." After some remonstrances, she takes up a champagne bottle, but is frightened by the sudden explosion of the cork, and drops it upon the floor. There the untasted liquor effervesces. Had they quaffed it they would have experienced that brief delirium whereby, whether excited by moral or physical causes, man sought to recompense himself for the calm, lifelong joys which he had lost by his revolt from Nature. At length, in a refrigerator, Eve finds a glass pitcher of water, pure, cold, and bright as ever gushed from a fountain among the hills. Both drink ; and such refreshment does it bestow, that they question one another if this precious liquid be not identical with the stream of life within them. "And now," observes Adam, "we must again try to V discover what sort of a world this is, and why we have been sent hither." Ui " Why ? to love one another," cries Eve. "Is not \> that employment enough?" The New Adam and Eve. 19 " Truly is it," answers Adam, kissing her ; " but still I know not something tells us there is labor to be done. Perhaps our allotted task is no other than to climb into the sky, which is so much more beautiful than earth." "Then would we were there now," murmurs Eve, " that no task or duty might come between us ! " They leave the hospitable mansion, and we next see them passing down State Street. The clock on the old State House points to high noon, when the Exchange should be in its glory and present the liveliest emblem of what was the sole business of life, as regarded a multi- tude of the foregone worldings. It is over now. The Sabbath of eternity has shed its stillness along the street. Not even a newsboy assails the two solitary passers by with an extra penny paper from the office of the Times or Mail, containing a full account of yesterday's terrible catastrophe. Of all the dull times that merchants and speculators have known, this is the very worst ; for, so far as they were concerned, creation itself has taken the benefit of the bankrupt act. After all, it is a pity. Those mighty capitalists who had just attained the wished-for wealth ! Those shrewd men of traffic who had devoted so many years to the most intricate and artificial of sciences, and had barely mastered it when the universal bankruptcy was announced by peal of trumpet ! Can they have been so incautious as to pro- vide no currency of the country whither they have gone, nor any bills of exchange, or letters of credit from the needy on earth to the cash keepers of heaven ? Adam and Eve enter a Bank. Start not, ye whose funds are treasured there ! You will never need them now. Call not for the police. The stones of the street and the coin of the vaults are of equal value to this simple pair. Strange sight ! They take up the bright gold in handfuls and throw it sportively into the air for 2O Mosses from an Old Manse. the sake of seeing the glittering worthlessness descend again in a shower. They know not that each of those small yellow circles was once a magic spell, potent to sway men's hearts and mystify their moral sense. Here let them pause in the investigation of the past. They have discovered the mainspring, the life, the very essence of the system that had wrought itself into the vitals of mankind, and choked their original nature in its deadly gripe. Yet how powerless over these young inheritors of earth's hoarded wealth ! And here, too, are huge packages of bank notes, those talismanic slips of paper which once had the efficacy to build up enchanted palaces like exhalations, and work all kinds of perilous wonders, yet were themselves but the ghosts of money, the shadows of a shade. How like is this vault to a magician's cave when the all-powerful wand is broken, and the visionary splendor vanished, and the floor strown with fragments of shattered spells, and lifeless shapes, once animated by demons ! "Every where, my dear Eve," observes Adam, "we find heaps of rubbish of one kind or another. Some- body, I am convinced, has taken pains to collect them, but for what purpose ? Perhaps, hereafter, we shall be moved to do the like. Can that be our business in the world?" " O, no, no, Adam ! " answers Eve. " It would be better to sit down quietly and look upward to the sky." They leave the Bank, and in good time ; for had they tarried later they would probably have encountered some gouty old goblin of a capitalist, whose soul could not long be any where save in the vault with his treasure. Next they drop into a jeweller's shop. They are pleased with the glow of gems ; and Adam twines a string of beautiful pearls around the head of Eve, and fastens his own mantle with a magnificent diamond brooch. Eve thanks him, and views herself with delight The New Adam and Eve. 21 in the nearest looking glass. Shortly afterward, observ- ing a bouquet of roses and other brilliant flowers in a vase of water, she flings away the inestimable pearls, and adorns herself with these lovelier gems of nature. They charm her with sentiment as well as beauty. " Surely they archiving beings^_she remarks to Adam. " I think so," replies Adam, " and they seem to be as little at home in the world as ourselves." We must not attempt to follow every footstep of these investigators whom their Creator has commissioned to pass unconscious judgment upon the works and ways of the vanished race. By this time, being endowed with quick and accurate perceptions, they begin to under- stand the purpose of the many things around them. They conjecture, for instance, that the edifices of the city were erected, not by the immediate hand that made the world, but by beings somewhat similar to them- selves, for shelter and convenience. But how will they explain the magnificence of one habitation as compared with the squalid misery of another? Through what medium can the idea of servitude enter their minds ? When will they comprehend the great and miserable fact the evidences of which appeal to their senses every where that one portion of earth's lost inhabitants was rolling in luxury while the multitude was toiling for Scanty food? A wretched change, indeed, must be wrought in their own hearts ere they can conceive the primal decree of Love to have been so completely abrogated, that a brother should ever want what his brother had. When their intelligence shall have reached so far, Earth's new progeny will have little reason to exult over her old rejected one. Their wanderings have now brought them into the suburbs of the city. They stand on a grassy brow of a hiil at the foot of a granite obelisk which points its great finger upwards, as if the human family had agreed, by a 22 Mosses from an Old Manse. visible symbol of age-long endurance, to offer some high sacrifice of thanksgiving or supplication. The solemn height of the monument, its deep simplicity, and the absence of any vulgar and practical use, all strengthen its effect upon Adam and Eve, and leave them to inter- pret it by a purer sentiment than the builders thought of expressing. "Eyejjtjs^a visible^prayer," observed Adam. " And we will pray too," she replies. Let us pardon these poor children of neither father nor mother for so absurdly mistaking the purport of the memorial which man founded and woman finished on far-famed Bunker Hill. The idea of war is not native to their souls. Nor have they sympathies for the brave defenders of liberty, since oppression is one of their unconjectured mysteries. Could they guess that the green sward on which they stand so peacefully was once strewn with human corpses and purple with their blood, it would equally amaze them that one generation of men should perpetrate such carnage, and that a subsequent generation should triumphantly commemo- rate it. With a sense of delight they now stroll across green ^' fields and along the margin of a quiet river. Not to track them too closely, we next find the wanderers enter- ing a Gothic edifice of gray stone, where the by-gone world has left whatever it deemed worthy of record, in , the rich library of Harvard University. No student ever yet enjoyed such solitude and silence as now broods within its deep alcoves. Little do the present visitors understand what opportunities are thrown away upon them. Yet Adam looks anxiously at the long rows of volumes, those storied heights of human lore, ascending one above another from floor to ceiling. He takes up a bulky folio. It opens in his hands as if spontaneously to impart the spirit of its author to the yet The New Adam and Eve. 23 unworn and untainted intellect of the fresh-created mortal. He stands poring over the regular columns of mystic characters, seemingly in studious mood ; for the unintelligible thought upon the page has a mysterious relation to his mind, and makes itself felt as if it were a burden flung upon him. He is even painfully perplexed, and grasps vainly at he knows not what. O, Adam, it is too soon, too soon by at least five thousand years, to put on spectacles and bury yourself in the alcoves of a library ! " What can this be ? " he murmurs at last. " Eve, methinks nothing is so desirable as to find out the mystery of this big and heavy object with its thousand thin divisions. See ! it stares me in the face as if it were about to speak ! " Eve, by a feminine instinct, is dipping into a volume of fashionable poetry, the production certainly the most fortunate of earthly bards, since his lay continues in vogue when all the great masters of the lyre have passed into oblivion. But let not his ghost be too exultant ! The world's one "lady tosses the book upon the floor and laugh's merrily at her husband's abstracted mien. "My dear Adam," cries she, "you look pensive and dismal. Do fling down that stupid thing ; for even if it should speak it would not be worth attending to. Let us talk with one another, and with the sky, and the green earth, and its trees and flowers. They will teach us better knowledge than we can find here." .S ^ "Well, Eve, perhaps you are right," replies Adam, with a sort of sigh. " Still I cannot help thinking that the interpretation of the riddles amid which we have been wandering all day long might here be dis- covered." "It may be better not to seek the interpretation," persists Eve. " For my part, the air of this place does not suit me. If you love me, come away 1 " 24 Mosses from an Old Manse. She prevails, and rescues him from the mysterious perils of -the library. Happy influence of woman ! Had he lingered there long enough to obtain a clue to it? treasures, as was not impossible, his intellect being of human structure, indeed, but with an untransmitted vigor and acuteness, had he then and there become a student, the annalist of our poor world would soon have recorded the downfall of a second Adam. The v-'fatal apple of another Tree of Knowledge would have been eaten. All the perversions, and sophistries, and > false wisdom so aptly mimicking the.Jlrue all the narrow } truth, so partial that it becomes more deceptive than \ falsehood all the wrong principles and worse practice, l t the pernicious examples and mistaken rules of life ;all_ the specious theories which turn earth into .doudland.and !men into shadows all the sad experience which it took mankind so many ages to accumulate, and from which i they never drew a moral for their future guidance, the whole heap of this disastrous lore would have tumbled at once upon Adam's head. There would have been nothing left for him but to take up the already abortive experiment of life where we had dropped it, and toil onward with it a little further. But, blessed in his ignorance, he may still enjoy a -'new world in our wornout one. Should he fall short of good, even as far as we did, he has at least the free- dom no worthless one to make errors__for himself And his literature, when the progress of centuries shall create it, will be no interminably repeated echo of our own poetry and reproduction of the images that were moulded by our great fathers of song and fiction, but a ''""melody never yet heard on earth, and intellectual forms unbreathed upon by our conceptions. Therefore let the dust of ages gather upon the volumes of the library, and in due season the roof of the edifice crumble down upon the whole. When the second Adam's descendants The New Adam and Eve. 25 shall have collected as much rubbish of their own, it will be time enough to dig into our ruins and compare the literary advancement of two independent races. But we are looking forward too far. It seems to be the vice of those who have a long past behind them. We will return to the new Adam and Eve, who, having no reminiscences sjive dim and fleeting visions of a pre-existence, are content to live and be happy in the present. The day is near its close when these pilgrims, who derive their being from no dead progenitors, reach the cemetery of Mount Auburn. With light hearts for earth and sky now gladden each other with beauty they tread along the winding paths, among marble pillars, mimic temples, urns, obelisks, and sarcophagi, sometimes pausing to contemplate these fantasies of human growth, and sometimes to admire the flowers wherewith Nature converts decay to loveliness. Can death, in the midst of his old triumphs, make them sensible that they have taken up the heavy burden of mortality which a whole species had thrown down ? Dust kindred to their own has never lain in the grave. Will they then recognize, and so soon, that Time and the elements have an indefeasible claim upon their bodies ? Not improbably they may. There must have been shadows enough, evenT amid the primal sunshine of their existence, to suggest the thought of the soul's incongruity with its circumstances. They have, already learned that something is to be thrown aside. The idea of death is in them, of'not far~off7~ BuTwere they to choose a symbol for him, it would bejhQ butterfly soaring ujDvyard^pj^ the ^bright angel beckoning them liloftro^the child asleep, with. ~soft-xkeams~yisible through her transparent purity. Such a Child, in whitest marble, they have found among the monuments of Mount Auburn. 26 Mosses from an Old Manse. " Sweetest Eve," observes Adam, while hand in hand they contemplate this beautiful object, " yonder sun has left us, and the whole world is fading from our sight. Let us sleep as this lovely little figure is sleeping. Our Father only knows whether what outward things we have possessed to-day are to be snatched from us forever. But should our earthly life be leaving us with the departing light, we need not doubt that another morn will find us somewhere beneath the smile of God. I feel that he has imparted the boon of existence never to be resumed." "And no matter where we exist," replies Eve, "for we shall always be together." EGOTISM;* OR, THE BOSOM SERPENT. [FROM THE UNPUBLISHED "ALLEGORIES OF THE HEART."] " HERE he comes !" shouted the boys along the street. " Here comes the man with a snake in his bosom ! " This outcry, saluting Herkimer's ears as he was about to enter the iron gate of the Elliston mansion, made him pause. It was not without a shudder that he found himself on the point of meeting his former acquaint- ,,ance, whom he had known in the glory of youth, and whom now, after an interval of five years, he was to find the victim either of a diseased fancy or a horrible physical misfortune. "A snake in his bosom !" repeated the young sculptor ] to himself. ' It must Jjejie. No second man on_-ea^tE" I has such a bosom friend. 7 And now", my poor J^osinaT) ~~' iHeaven grant me wisdom to discharge my errand aright ! [Woman's faith must be strong indeed since thine has |not yet failed ". v Thus musing, he took his stand at the entrance of the gate and waited until the personage so singularly announced should make his appearance. After an instant or two he beheld the figure of a lean man, of - / unwholesome look, with glittering eyes and -long black hair, who seemed to imitate~the motion of a snake ; for, instead of walking straight forward with open front, he undulated along the pavement in a curved line. It may * The physical fact, to which it is here attempted to give a moral signi- fication, has been known to occur in more than one instance. 28 Mosses from an Old Manse. be too fanciful to say that something, either in his moral or material aspect, suggested the idea that a \ jniracle had been wrought by transforming a serpent into a man, but so imperfectly that the snaky nature was yet hidden, and scarcely hidden, under the mere out- ward guise of humanity. Herkimer remarked that his complexion had a^ greenish tinge over its sickly white, reminding him of a specTes of marble out of which he had once wrought a head of Envy, with her snaky locks. The wretched being approached the gate, but, instead of entering, stopped short and fixed the glitter of his eye full upon the compassionate yet steady countenance of the sculptor. " It gnaws me ! it gnaws me !" he exclaimed, t^ And then there was an audible hiss, but whether it came from the apparent lunatic's own lips, or was the l xreal hiss of a serpent, might admit of a discussion. At all events, it made Herkimer shudder to his heart's core. " Do you know me, George Herkimer ?" asked the snake-possessed. Herkimer did know him; but it demanded all the I intimate and practical acquaintance with the human I face, acquired by modelling actual likenesses in clay, \ to recognize the features of Roderick Elliston in the ,/i visage that now met the sculptor's gaze. Yet it was he. ! It added nothing to the wonder to reflect that the once brilliant young man had undergone this odious and fearful change during the no more than five brief years of Herkimer's abode at Florence. The possibility of such a transformation being granted, it was as easy to conceive it effected in a moment as in an age. Inex- pressibly shocked and startled, it was still the keenest pang when Herkimer remembered that --th_e_Jate_of_his cousin R.osina, the ideal of gentle womanhood, was Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent. 29 indissolubly interwoven with that of a being whom Pro- vidence seemed to have unhumanized, i " Elliston ! Roderick !" cried he, " I had heard of this ; but my conception came far short of the truth. What has befallen you ? Why do I find you thus ?" " O, 'tis a mere nothing ! A snake ! a snake ! The commonest thing in the world. A snake in the bosom that 's all," answered Roderick Elliston. " But how is your own breast?" coutinued he, looking the sculptor in the eye with the most acute and penetrating glance that it had ever been his fortune to encounter. " All pure and wholesome? No reptile there? By my faith and conscience, and by the devil within me, here is a wonder ! A man without a serpent in his bosom !" , " Be calm, Elliston," whispered George Herkimer, lay- ing his hand upon the shoulder of the snake-possessed. " I have crossed the ocean to meet you. Listen ! Let us be private. I bring a message from Rosina from your wife ! " " It gnaws me ! it gnaws me !" muttered Roderick. With this exclamation, the most frequent in his mouth, the unfortunate man clutched both hands upon his breast as if an intoIerabTe"sting or torture impelled him to rend it open and let out the living mischief, even should it be intertwined with his own life. He then freed himself from Herkimer's grasp by a subtle motion, and, gliding through the gate, took refuge in his antiquated family residence. The sculptor did not pursue him. He saw that no available intercourse could be expected at such a moment, and was desirous, before another meeting, to inquire closely into the nature of Roderick's disease and the circumstances that had reduced him to so lamentable a condition. He succeeded in obtaining the necessary information from an eminent medical gentle- man. Shortly after Elliston's separation from his wife now 30 Mosses from an Old Manse. nearly four years ago his associates had observed a singular gloom spreading over his daily life, like those chill, gray mists that sometimes steal away the sunshine from a summer's morning. The symptoms caused them endless perplexity. They knew not whether ill health were robbing his spirits of elasticity, or whether a canker of the mind was gradually eating, as such cankers do, from his moral system into the physical frame, which is but the shadow of the former. They looked for the root of this trouble in his shattered schemes of domestic bliss, wilfully_shattered by himself, but could not be satisfiecTbf its existence there. Some thought that their once brilliant friend was in an incipient stage of insanity, of which his passionate impulses had perhaps been the forerunners ; others prognosticated a general blight and gradual decline. From Roderick's own lips they could learn nothing. More than once, it is true, he had been heard to say, clutching his hands convulsively upon his breast " It gnaws me ! it gnaws me !" but, by different auditors, a great diversity of explanation was assigned to this ominous expression. What could it be, that gnawed the breast of Roderick Elliston ? Was it sor- row ? Was it merely the tooth of physical disease ? _Or, in his reckless course, often verging upon profligacy, if not plunging into its depths, had he been guilty of some deed, which made his bosom a prey to the deadlier fangs of remorse? There was plausible ground for each of these conjectures ; but it must not be concealed that more than one elderly gentleman, the victim of good cheer and slothful habits, magisterially pronounced the secret of the whole matter to be Dyspepsia ! Meanwhile, Roderick seemed aware how generally he had become the subject of curiosity and conjecture, and, with a morbid repugnance to such notice, or to any notice whatsoever, estranged himself from all companion- ship. Not merely the eye of man was a horror to him ; Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent. 31 not merely the light of a friend's countenance ; but^even the blessed sunshine, likewise, which, in its universal beneficence, typifies the radiance of the Creator's face, expressing his love for all the creatures of his hand. The dusky twilight was now too transparent for Rode- rick Elliston ; the blackest midnight was his chosen hour to steal abroad ; and if ever he were seen, it was when the watchman's lantern gleamed upon his figure, gliding along the street, with his hands clutched upon his bosom, still muttering, "It gnaws me ! it gnaws me !" What could it be that gnawed him ? After a time, it became known that Elliston was in the habit of resorting to all the noted quacks that infested the city, or whom money would tempt to journey thither from a distance. By one of these persons, in the exulta- tion of a supposed cure, it was proclaimed far and wide, by dint of handbills and little pamphlets on dingy paper, that a distinguished gentleman, Roderick Elliston, Esq., had been relieved of a SNAKE in his stomach ! So here was the monstrous secret, ejected from its lurking place into public view, in all its horrible deformity. The mystery was out ; but not so the bosom serpent. He, if it were any thing but a delusion, still lay coiled in his living den. The empiric's cure had been a sham, the effect, it was supposed, of some stupefying drug, which more nearly caused the death of the patient than of the odious reptile that possessed him. When Roderick Elliston regained entire sensibility, it was to find his misfortune the town talk the more than nine days' wonder and horror while, at his bosom, he felt the sickening motion of a thing alive, and the gnawing of that restless fang, which seemed to gratify at once a physicial appetite and a fiendish spite. He summoned the old black servant, who had been bred up in his father's house, ajid was a middle-aged man' while Roderick lay in his cradle. 3-J Mosses from an Old Manse. " Scipio ! " he began ; and then paused, with his arms folded over his heart. " What do people say of me, Scipio?" " Sir ! my poor master ! that you had a serpent in your bosom," answered the servant, with hesitation. "And what else?" asked Roderick, with a ghastly look at the man. " Nothing else, dear master," replied Scipio ; " only that the doctor gave you a powder, and that the snake leaped out upon the floor." " No, no ! " muttered Roderick to himself, as he shook his head, and pressed his hands with a more convulsive force upon his breast, " I feel him still. It gnaws me ! It gnaws me ! " From this time the miserable sufferer ceased to shun the world, but rather solicited and forced himself upon the notice of acquaintances and strangers. It .was partly the result of desperation on rinding that the cavern of his own bosom had not proved deep and dark enough to hide the secret, even while it was so secure a fortress for the loathsome fiend that had crept into it. But still more, this craving for notoriety was a symptom of the u^intense morbidness which now pervaded his nature. All persons, chronically diseased, are egotists, whether the disease be of the mind or body ; whether it be sin, sorrow, or merely the more tolerable calamity of some endless pain, or mischief among the cords of mortal life. ^ Such individuals are made acutely conscious of a self, by \he torture in which it dwells. Self, therefore, grows to be so prominent an object with them that they cannot but present it to the face of every casual passer by. There is a pleasure perhaps the greatest of which the sufferer is susceptible in displaying the wasted or ulcerated limb, or the cancer in the breast ; and the fouler the crime, with so much the more difficulty does the perpetrator prevent it from thrusting up its snakelike Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent. 33 head to frighten the world ; for it is that cancer, or that crime, which constitutes their respective individuality. Roderick Elliston, who, a little while before, had held himself so scornfully above the common lot of men, now paid full allegiance to this humiliating law. The snake in his bosom seemed the symbol of a monstrous egotism to which every thing was referred, and which he pampered, night and day, with a continual and exclusive sacrifice of devil worship. He soon exhibited what most people considered indu- bitable tokens of insanity. In some of his moods, strange to say, he prided and gloried himself on being marked \ out from the ordinary experience of mankind, by the j possession of a double nature, and a life within a life. He appeared to imagine that the snake was a divinity not celestial, it is true, but darkly infernal and that he thence derived an eminence and a sanctity, horrid, indeed, yet more desirable than whatever ambition aims at. Thus he drew his misery around him like a regal mantle, and looked down triumphantly upon those whose vitals nourished no deadly monster. Oftener, however, his human nature asserted its empire over~him in the shape of a yearning for fellowship. It grew to be his custom to spend the whole day in wandering about the streets, aimlessly, unless it might be called an aim to establish a species of brotherhood between himself and the world. With cankered ingenuity, he sought out his own disease in every breast. Whether insane or not, he showed so keen a perception of frailty, error, and vice, ^ that many persons gave him credit for being possessed not merely with a serpent but with an actual fiend, who imparted this evil faculty of recognizing whatever was ugliest in man's heart. For instance, he met an individual, who, for thirty years, had cherished a hatred against his own brother. Roderick, amidst the throng of the street, laid his hand 3 10 34 Mosses from an Old Manse. on this man's chest, and looking full into his forbiding face, " How is the snake to-day ? " he inquired, with a mock expression of sympathy. " The snake ! " exclaimed the brother hater " what do you mean ? " "The snake! The snake! Does he gnaw you?" persisted Roderick. "Did you take counsel with him this morning, when you should have been saying your prayers? Did he sting, when you thought of your brother's health, wealth, and good repute? Did he caper for joy, when you remembered the profligacy of his only son ? And whether he stung, or whether he frolicked, did you feel his poison throughout your body and soul, converting every thing to sourness and bitterness? That is the way of such serpents. I have learned the whole nature of them from my own ! " "Where is the police?" roared the object of Rod- erick's persecution, at the same time giving an instinctive clutch to his breast. " Why is this lunatic allowed to go at large ? " " Ha, ha ! " chuckled Roderick, releasing his grasp of the man. " His bosom serpent has stung him, then ! " Often it pleased the unfortunate young man to vex people with a lighter satire, yet still characterized by somewhat of snakelike virulence. One day he en- countered an ambitious statesman, and gravely inquired 'after the welfare of his boa constrictor; for of that species, Roderick affirmed, this gentleman's serpent must needs be, since its appetite was enormous enough to devour the whole country and constitution. At another time, he stopped a close-fisted old fellow, of great wealth, but who skulked about the city in the guise of a scarecrow, with a patched blue surtout, brown hat, and mouldy boots, scraping pence together, and picking up rusty nails. Pretending to look earnestly Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent. 35 at this respectable person's stomach, Roderick assured him that his snake was a copperhead, and had been generated by the immense quantities of that base metal, with which he daily defiled his fingers. Again, he assaulted a man of rubicund visage, and told him that few bosom serpents had more of the devil in them than those that breed in the vats of a distillery. The next whom Roderick honored with his attention was a dis- tinguished clergyman, who happened just then to be engaged in a theological controversy, where human wrath was more perceptible than divine inspiration. " You have swallowed a snake in a cup of sacramental wine," quoth he. " Profane wretch ! " exclaimed the divine ; but, never- theless, his hand stole to his breast. He met a person of sickly sensibility, who, on some early disappointment, had retired from the world, and thereafter held no intercourse with his fellow-men, but brooded sullenly or passionately over the irrevocable past. This man's very heart, if Roderick might be believed, had been changed into a serpent, which would finally torment both him and itself to death. Observ- ing a married couple, whose domestic troubles were matter of notoriety, he condoled with both on having mutually taken a house adder to their bosoms. To an envious author, who depreciated works which he could never equal, he said that his snake was the slimiest and filthiest of all the reptile tribe, but was fortunately with- out a sting. A man of impure life, and a brazen face, asking Roderick if there were any serpent in his breast, he told him that there was, and of the same species that once tortured Don Rodrigo, the Goth. He took a fair young girl by the hand, and gazing sadly into her eyes, warned her that she cherished a serpent of the deadliest kind within her gentle breast ; and the world found the truth of those ominous words, when, a few 36 Mosses from an Old Manse. months afterwards, the poor girl died of love and shame. Two ladies, rivals in fashionable life, who tormented one another with a thousand little stings of womanish spite, were given to understand that each of their hearts was a nest of diminutive snakes, which did quite as much mischief as one great one. But nothing seemed to please Roderick better than to lay hold of a person infected with jealousy, which he represented as an enormous green reptile, with an ice- cold length of body, and the sharpest sting of any snake save one. "And what one is that?" asked a bystander, over- hearing him. , It was a dark-browed man, who put the question; he ' had an evasive eye, which, in the course of a dozen ' years, had looked no mortal directly in the face. There was an jinrbiguity about this person's character a stain upon his^reputation yet none could tell precisely of what nature, although the city gossips, male and female, whispered the most atrocious surmises. Until a recent " period he had followed the sea, and was, in fact, the very \/'\ shipmaster whom George Herkimer had encountered, under such singular circumstances, in the Grecian Archi- pelago. 1 " What bosom serpent has the sharpest sting ? " repeated this man ; but he put the question as if by a reluctant necessity, and grew pale while he was uttering it. " Why need you ask ? " replied Roderick, with a fc^-iook of dark intelligence. " Look into your own breast. Hark! my serpent bestirs himself! He acknowledges the presence of a master fiend ! " And then, as the bystanders afterwards affirmed, a hissing sound was heard, apparently in Roderick 'Ellis- ton's breast. It was said, too, that an answering hiss came from the vitals of the shipmaster, as if a snake Egotism; or t The Bosom Serpent. 37 were actually lurking there and had been aroused by the call of its brother reptile. If there were in fact any such sound, it might have been caused by a malicious exercise of ventriloquism on the part of Roderick. Thus, making his own actual serpent if a serpent there actually was in his bosom the type of each man's fatal error, or hoarded sin, or unquiet conscience, and striking his sting so unremorsefully into the sorest spot, we may well imagine that Roderick became the pest of the city. Nobody could elude him none could withstand him. He grappled with the ugliest truth that he could lay his hand on, and compelled his adversary to do the same. Strange spectacle in human life where it is the instinctive effort of one and all to hide those sad realities, and leave them undisturbed beneath a heap of superficial topics, which constitute the materials of intercourse between man and man ! It was not to be tolerated that Roderick Elliston should break through the tacit compact by which the world has done its best to secure repose without relinquishing evil. The victims of his malicious remarks, it is true, had brothers enough to keep them in countenance ; for, by Roderick's theory, every mortal bosom harbored either a brood of small serpents or one overgrown monster that had devoured all the rest. Still the city could not bear this new apostle. It was demanded by nearly all, and particularly by the most respectable inhabi- tants, that Roderick should no longer be permitted to violate the received rules of decorum by obtruding his own bosom serpent to the public gaze, and dragging those of decent people from their lurking places. Accordingly, his relatives interfered and placed him in a private asylum for the insane. When the news was noised abroad, it was observed that many persons walked the streets with freer countenances and covered their breasts less carefully with their hands. 38 Mosses from an Old Manse. His confinement, however, although it contributed not a little to the peace of the town, operated unfavorably upon Roderick himself. In solitude his melancholy grew more black and sullen. He spent whole days indeed, it was his sole occupation in communing with fine serpent. A conversation was sustained, in which, as it seemed, the hidden monster bore a part, though unintelligibly to the listeners, and inaudible except in a hiss. Singular as it may appear, the sufferer had now contracted a sort of affection for his tormentor, mingled, however, with the intensest loathing and horror. Nor \^ were such discordant emotions incompatible. Each, on the contrary, imparted strength and poignancy to its opposite. Horrible love horrible antipathy embracing one another in his bosom, and both concentrating them- selves upon a being that had crept into his vitals or been engendered there and which was nourished with his food, ^ and lived upon his life, and was as intimate with him as his own heart, and yet was the foulest of all created things ! But not the less was it the true type of a morbid nature. ~~Solfietimes, in his moments of rage and bitter hatred against the snake and himself, Roderick determined to "-tie the death of him, even at the expense of his own life. Once he attempted it by starvation ; but, while the wretched man was on the point of famishing, the monster seemed to feed upon his heart, and to thrive and wax gamesome, as if it were his sweetest and most congenial diet. Then he privily took a dose of active poison, imagining that it would not fail to kill either himself or the devil that possessed him, or both together. Another mistake ; for if Roderick had not yet been destroyed by his own poisoned heart, nor the snake by gnawing it, they had little to fear from arsenic or corrosive sublimate. Indeed, the venomous pest appeared to operate as an antidote against all other Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent. 39 pois.ons. The physicians tried to suffocate the fiend with~tobacco smoke. He breathed it as freely as if it were his native atmosphere. Again, they drugged their patient with opium and drenched him with intoxicating liquors, hoping that the snake might thus be reduced to stupor and perhaps be ejected from the stomach. They succeeded in rendering Roderick insensible ; but, placing their hands upon his breast, they were inex- pressibly horror stricken to feel the monster wriggling, twining, and darting to and fro within his narrow limits, evidently enlivened by the opium or alcohol, and incited to unusual feats of activity. Thenceforth they gave up all attempts at cure or paliation. The doomed sufferer submitted to his fate, resumed his former loathsome affection for the bosom fiend, and spent whole miserable days before a looking glass, with his mouth wide open, watching, in hope and horror, to catch a glimpse of the snake's head far down within his throat. It is supposed that he succeeded ; for the attendants once heard a frenzied shout, and, rushing into the room, found Roderick lifeless upon the floor. He was kept but little longer under restraint. After minute investigation, the medical directors of the asylum decided that his mental disease did not amount to insanity nor would warrant his confinement, especially as its influence upon his spirits was unfavorable, and might produce the evil which it was meant to remedy. His eccentricities were doubtless great; he had habit- ually violated many of the customs and prejudices of society ; but the world was not, without surer ground, entitled to treat him as a madman. On this decision of such competent authority Roderick was released, and ' had returned to his native city the very day before his encounter with George Herkimer. As soon as possible after learning these particulars the sculptor, together with., a sad and tremulous companion, 40 Mosses from an Old Manse. sought Elliston at his own house. It was a large, sombre edifice of wood, with pilasters and a balcony, and was divided from one of the principal streets by a terrace of three elevations, which was ascended by successive flights of stone steps. Some immense old almost concealed the front of the mansion. This spacious and once magnificent family residence was hiiilt by a grandee of the race early in the past century, at which epoch, land being of small comparative value, the garden and other grounds had formed quite an extensive domain. Although a portion of the ancestral heritage had been alienated, there was still a shadowy enclosure in the rear of the mansion where a student, or a dreamer, or a man of stricken heart might lie all day upon the grass, amid the solitude of murmuring boughs, and forget that a city had grown up around him. Into this retirement the sculptor and his companion were ushered by Scipio, the old black servant, whose wrinkled visage grew almost sunny with intelligence and joy as he paid his humble greetings to one of the two visitors. "Remain_ in the arbor," whispered the sculptor to the figure that leaned upon his arm. "You will know whether, and when, to make your appearance." " God__will teach me," was the reply. " May he support me too ! " Roderick was reclining on the margin of a fountain, which gushed into the fleckered sunshine with the same clear sparkle and the same voice of airy quietude as when trees of primeval growth flung their shadows across its bosom. How strange is the life of a fountain ! born at every moment, yet of an age coeval with the rocks, and far surpassing the venerable antiquity of a forest. " You are come ! I have expected you," said Elliston, when be became aware of the sculptor's presence. Egotism j or, The Bosom Serpent. 41 His manner was very different from that of the pre- ceding day quiet, courteous, and, as Herkimer thought, watchful both over his guest and himself. This un- natural restraint was almost the only trait that betok- ened any thing amiss. He had just thrown a book upon the grass, where it lay half opened, thus disclosing itself to be a natural history of the serpent tribe, illustrated by lifelike plates. Near it lay that bulky volume, the Ductor Dubitantium of Jeremy Taylor, full of cases of consqience,_and in which most men, possessed of a conscience, may find something applicable to their pur- pose. " You see," observed Elliston, pointing to the book of serpents, while a smile gleamed upon his lips, " I am making an effort to become better^acquainted with my bosom friend ; but I find nothing satisfactory in this volume. If I mistake not, he will prove to be sui ' generis, and akin to no other reptile in creation." "Whence ^ame^this^strange^calamity ? " inquired the sculptor. "My sable friend Scipio has a story," replied Rod- erick, " of a snake that had lurked in this fountain pure and innocent as it looks ever since it was known to the first settlers. This insinuating personage once crept into the vitals of my great grandfather and dwelt there many "years, tormenting the old gentleman beyond mortal en- durance. In short, it is a family peculiarity. But to tell you the truth, I have no faith in this idea of the snake's being an heirloom. He is my own snake, and no man' else." "But what was his origin?" demanded Herkimer. " O, there is poisonous stuff in any man's heart suf- ficient to generate a brood of serpents," said Elliston, with a hollow laugh. "You should have heard my homilies to the good town's people. Positively, I deem myself fortunate in having bred but a single serpent. 42 Mosses from an Old Manse. You, however, have none in your bosom, and therefore cannot sympathize with the rest of the world. It gnaws me ! It gnaws me ! " With this exclamation, Roderick lost his self-control and threw himself upon the grass, testifying his agony by intricate writhings, in which Herkimer could not but fancy a resemblance to the motions of a snake. Then, likewise, was heard that frightful hiss, which often ran through the sufferer's speech, and crept between the words and syllables without interrupting their succes- sion. " This is awful, indeed ! " exclaimed the sculptor " an awful infliction, whether it be actual or imaginary. Tell me, Roderick Elliston, is there any remedy for this loath- some evil ? " " Yes, but an impossible one," muttered Roderick, as he lay wallowing with his face in the grass. " Could I for one instant forget myself, the serpent might not abide within me. It is my diseased self-contemplation that has engendered and nourished him." ^'Then forget yourself, my husband," said a gentle voice above him ; " forget yourself in the idea of an other !__" Rosina had emerged from the arbor, and was bending over him with the shadow of his anguish reflected in her countenance^jet so mingled with hope and unselfish love thajLalL -anguish seemed but an earthly shadow and a dream. She touched Roderick with her hand. A tremor shivered through his frame. At that moment, if report be trustworthy, the sculptor beheld a waving motion through the grass, and heard a tinkling sound, as if something had plunged into the fountain. Be the truth as it might, it is certain that Roderick Elliston sat up like a man renewed, restored to his right mind, and rescued from the fiend which had so miserably overcome him in the battle field of his own breast. Egotism; or. The Bosom Serpent. 43 " Rosina ! " cried he, in broken and passionate tones, but with nothing of the wild wail that had haunted his voice so long, " forgive ! forgive ! " Her happy tears bedewed" Efs" face. " The punishment has been severe," observed the sculptor. " Even Justice might now forgive ; how much more a woman's tenderness ! Roderick Elliston, whether the serpent was a physical reptile, or whether the morbid- ness of your nature suggested that symbol to your fancy, the moral of the story is not the less true and strong. A tremendous Egotism, manifesting itself in your case in the form of jealousy, is as fearful a fiend as ever stole into the human heart. Can a breast, where it has dwelt so long, be purified ? " " O yes," said Rosina, with a heavenly smile. " The serpent was but a dark fantasy, and what it typified was as shadowy as itself. The past, dismal as it seems, shall fling no gloom upon the future. To give it its due importance we must think of jt but as an anecdote in our Eternity^' THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET. [FROM THE UNPUBLISHED "ALLEGORIES OF THE HEART."] "I HAVE here attempted," said Roderick, unfolding a few sheets of manuscript, as he sat with Rosina and the sculptor in the summer house, " I have attempted to seize hold of a personage who glides past me, occasion- ally, in my walk through life. My former sad experience, as you know, has gifted me with some degree of insight into the gloomy mysteries of the human heart, through which I have wandered like one astray in a dark cavern, with his torch fast flickering to extinction. But this man, this class of men, is a hopeless puzzle." " Well, but propound him," said the sculptor. " Let us have an idea of him, to begin with." " Why, indeed," replied Roderick, " he is such a being as I could conceive you to carve out of marble, and some yet unrealized perfection of human science to endow with an exquisite mockery of intellect ; but still there lacks the last inestimable touch of a divine Creator. He looks like a man ; and, perchance, like a better specimen of man than you ordinarily meet. You might esteem him wise ; he is capable of cultivation and refinement, and has at least an external conscience ; but the demands that spirit makes upon spirit are precisely those to which he cannot respond. When at last you come close to him you find him chill and unsubstantial a mere vapor." " I believe," said Rosina, " I have a glimmering idea of what you mean." The Christmas Banquet. 45 " Then be thankful," answered her husband, smiling ; " but do not anticipate any further illumination from what I am about to read. I have here imagined such a man to be what, probably, he never is conscious of the deficiency in his spiritual organization. Methinks the result would be a sense of cold unreality wherewith he would go shivering through the world, longing to exchange his load of ice for any burden of real grief that fate can fling upon a human being." Contenting himself with this preface, Roderick began to read. In a certain old gentleman's last will and testament there appeared a bequest, which, as his final thought and deed, was singularly in keeping with a long life of melancholy eccentricity. He devised a considerable sum for establishing a fund, the interest of which was to be expended, annually forever, in preparing a Christmas banquet for ten of the most miserable persons that could be found. It seemed not to be the testator's purpose to make these half a score of sad hearts merry, but to pro- vide that the stern or fierce expression of human discon- tent should not be drowned, even for that one holy and joyful day, amid the acclamations of festal gratitude which all Christendom sends up. And he desired, like- wise, to perpetuate his own remonstrance against the earthly course of Providence, and his sad and sour dissent from those systems of religion or philosophy which either find sunshine in the world or draw it down from heaven. The task of inviting the guests, or of selecting among such as might advance their claims to partake of this dismal hospitality, was confided to the two trustees or stewards of the fund. These gentlemen, like their de- ceased friend, were sombre humorists, who made it their principal occupation to number the sable threads in the 46 Mosses from an Old Manse. web of human life, and drop all the golden ones out of the reckoning. They performed their present office with integrity and judgment. The aspect of the assembled company, on the day of the first festival, might not, it is true, have satisfied every beholder that these were especially the individuals, chosen forth from all the world, whose griefs were worthy to stand as indicators of the mass of human suffering. Yet, after due con- sideration, it could not be disputed that here was a variety of hopeless discomfort, which, if it sometimes arose from causes apparently inadequate, was thereby only the shrewder imputation against the nature and mechanism of life. The arrangements and decorations of the banquet were probably intended to signify that death in life which had been the testator's definition of existence. The hall, illuminated by torches, was hung round with curtains of deep and dusky purple, and adorned with branches of cypress and wreaths of artificial flowers, imitative of such as used to be strown over the dead. A sprig of parsley was laid by every plate. The main reservoir of wine was a sepulchral urn of silver, whence the liquor was distributed around the table in small vases, accurately copied from those that held the tears of ancient mourners. Neither had the stewards if it were their taste that arranged these details forgotten the fantasy of the old Egyptians, who seated a skeleton at every festive board, and mocked their own merriment with the imperturbable grin of a death's head. Such a fearful guest, shrouded in a black mantle, sat now at the head of the table. It was whispered, I know not with what truth, that the testator himself had once walked the visible world with the machinery of that same skele- ton, and that it was one of the stipulations of his will, that he should thus be permitted to sit, from year to year, at the banquet which he had instituted. If so, The Christmas Banquet. 47 it was perhaps covertly implied that he had cherished no hopes of bliss beyond the grave to compensate for the evils which he felt or imagined here. And if, in their bewildered conjectures as to the purpose of earthly existence, the banqueters should throw aside the veil, and cast an inquiring glance at this figure of death, as seeking thence the solution otherwise unattainable, the only reply would be a stare of the vacant eye caverns and a grin of the skeleton jaws. Such was the response that the dead man had fancied himself to receive when he asked of Death to solve the riddle of his life; and it was his desire to repeat it when the guests of his dismal hospitality should find themselves perplexed with the same question. "What means that wreath?" asked several of the company, while viewing the decorations of the table. They alluded to a wreath of cypress, which was held on high by a skeleton arm, protruding from within the black mantle. " It is a crown," said one of the stewards, "not for the worthiest, but for the wofulest, when he shall prove his claim to it." The guest earliest bidden to the festival was a man of soft and gentle character, who had not energy to struggle against the heavy despondency to which his temperament rendered him liable; and therefore with nothing outwardly to excuse him from happiness, he had spent a life of quiet misery that made his blood torpid, and weighed upon his breath and sat like a ponderous night fiend upon every throb of his unresist- ing heart. His wretchedness seemed as deep as his original nature, if not identical with it. It was the mis- fortune of a second guest to cherish within his bosom a diseased heart, which had become so wretchedly sore that the continual and unavoidable rubs of the world, the blow of an enemy, the careless jostle of a stranger, 48 Mosses from an Old Manse. and even the faithful and loving touch of a friend, alike made ulcers in it. As is the habit of people thus afflicted, he found his chief employment in exhibiting these miser- able sores to any who would give themselves the pain of viewing them. A third guest was a hypochondriac, whose imagination wrought necromancy in his outward and inward world, and caused him to see monstrous faces in the household fire, and dragons in the clouds of sunset, and fiends in the guise of beautiful women, and something ugly or wicked beneath all the pleasant sur- faces of nature. His neighbor at table was one who, in his early youth, had trusted mankind too much, and hoped too highly in their behalf, and, in meeting with many disappointments, had become desperately soured. For several years back this misanthrope had employed himself in accumulating motives for hating and despising his race such as murder, lust, treachery, ingratitude, faithlessness of trusted friends, instinctive vices of chil- dren, impurity of women, hidden guilt in men of saintlike aspect and, in short, all manner of black realities that sought to decorate themselves with outward grace or glory. But at every atrocious fact that was added to his catalogue, at every increase of the sad knowledge which he spent his life to collect, the native impulses of the poor man's loving and confiding heart made him groan with anguish. Next, with his heavy brow bent down- ward, there stole into the hall a man naturally earnest and impassioned, who, from his immemorial infancy, had felt the consciousness of a high message to the world ; but, essaying to deliver it, had found either no voice or form of speech, or else no ears to listen. There- fore his whole life was a bitter questioning of himself " Why have not men acknowledged my mission ? Am I not a self-deluding fool? What business have I on earth ? Where is my grave ?" Throughout the festival, he quaffed frequent draughts from the sepulchral urn of The Christmas Banquet. 49 wine, hoping thus to quench the celestial fire that tor- tured his own breast and could not benefit his race. Then there entered, having flung away a ticket for a ball, a gay gallant of yesterday, who had found four or five wrinkles in his brow, and more gray hairs than he could well number on his head. Endowed with sense and feeling, he had nevertheless spent his youth in folly, but had reached at last that dreary point in life where Folly quits us of her own accord, leaving us to make friends with Wisdom if we can. Thus, cold and desolate, he had come to seek Wisdom at the banquet, and won- dered if the skeleton were she. To eke out the company, the stewards had invited a distressed poet from his home in the almshouse, and a melancholy idiot from the street corner. The latter had just the glimmering of sense that was sufficient to make him conscious of a vacancy, which the poor fellow, all his life long, had mistily sought to fill up with intelligence, wandering up and down the streets, and groaning miserably because his attempts were ineffectual. The only lady in the hall was one who had fallen short of absolute and perfect beauty, merely by the trifling defect of a slight cast in her left eye. But this blemish, minute as it was, so shocked the pure ideal of her soul, rather than her vanity, that she passed her life in solitude, and veiled her countenance even from her own gaze. So the skeleton sat shrouded at one end of the table and this poor lady at the other. One other guest remains to be described. He was a young man of smooth brow, fair cheek, and fashionable mien. So far as his exterior developed him, he might much more suitably have found a place at some merry Christmas table, than have been numbered among the blighted, fate-stricken, fancy-tortured set of ill-starred banqueters. Murmurs arose among the guests as they noted the glance of general scrutiny which the intruder threw over his companions. What had he to do among 4 10 50 Mosses from an Old Manse. them ? Why did not the skeleton of the dead founder of the feast unbend its rattling joints, arise, and motion the unwelcome stranger from the board? " Shameful ! " said the morbid man, while a new ulcer broke out in his heart. " He comes to mock us ! we shall be the jest of his tavern friends ! he will make a farce of our miseries, and bring it out upon the stage ! " " O, never mind him ! " said the hypochondriac, smil- ing sourly. "He shall feast from yonder tureen of viper soup ; and if there is a fricassee of scorpions on the table, pray let him have his share of it. For the dessert, he shall taste the apples of Sodom. Then, if he like our Christmas fare, let him return again next year!" " Trouble him not," mnrmured the melancholy man, with gentleness. "What matters it whether the con- sciousness of misery come a few years sooner or later ; If this youth deem himself happy now, yet let him sit with us for the sake of the wretchedness to come." The poor idiot approached the young man with that mournful aspect of vacant inquiry which his face con- tinually wore, and which caused people to say that he was always in search of his missing wits. After no little examination he touched the stranger's hand, but immediately drew back his own, shaking his head and shivering. " Cold, cold, cold ! " muttered the idiot. The young man shivered too, and smiled. "Gentlemen and you, madam," said one of the stewards of the festival, " do not conceive so ill either of our caution or judgment, as to imagine that we have admitted this young stranger Gervayse Hastings by name without a full investigation and thoughtful bal- ance of his claims. Trust me, not a guest at the table is better entitled to his seat." The steward's guaranty was perforce satisfactory. The Christinas Banquet. 51 The company, therefore, took their places, and ad- dressed themselves to the serious business of the feast, but were soon disturbed by the hypochondriac, who thrust back his chair, complaining that a dish of stewed toads and vipers was set before him, and that there was green ditch water in his cup of wine. This mistake being amended, he quietly resumed his seat. The wine, as it flowed freely from the sepulchral urn, seemed to come imbued with all gloomy inspirations ; so that its influence was not to cheer, but either to sink the revel- lers into a deeper melancholy, or elevate their spirits to an enthusiasm of wretchedness. The conversation was various. They told sad stories about people who might have been worthy guests at such a festival as the pre- sent. They talked of grisly incidents in human history ; of strange crimes, which, if truly considered, were but convulsions of agony ; of some lives that had been altogether wretched, and of others, which, wearing a general semblance of happiness, had yet been deformed, sooner or later, by misfortune, as by the intrusion of a grim face at a banquet ; of death-bed scenes, and what dark intimations might be gathered from the words of dying men ; of suicide, and whether the more eligible mode were by halter, knife, poison, drowning, gradual starvation, or the fumes of charcoal. The majority of the guests, as is the custom with people thoroughly and profoundly sick at heart, were anxious to make their own woes the theme of discussion, and prove themselves most excellent in anguish. The misanthropist went deep into the philosophy of evil, and wandered about in the darkness, with now and then a gleam of discolored light hovering on ghastly shapes and horrid scenery. Many a miserable thought, such as men have stumbled upon from age to age, did he now rake up again, and gloat over it as an inestimable gem, a diamond, a treasure far preferable to those bright, spiritual revela- 52 Mosses from an Old Manse. tions of a better world, which are like precious stones from heaven's pavement. And then, amid his lore of wretchedness, he hid his face and wept. It was a festival at which the woful man of Uz might suitably have been a guest, together with all, in each succeeding age, who have tasted deepest of the bitter, ness of life. And be it said, too, that every son or daughter of woman, however favored with happy fortune, might, at one sad moment or another, have claimed the privilege of a stricken heart, to sit down at this table. But, throughout the feast, it was remarked that the young stranger, Gervayse Hastings, was unsuccessful in his attempts to catch its pervading spirit. At any deep, strong thought that found utterance, and which was torn out, as it were, from the saddest recesses of human consciousness, he looked mystified and bewildered ; even more than the poor idiot, who seemed to grasp at such things with his earnest heart, and thus occasionally to comprehend them. The young man's conversation was of a colder and lighter kind, often brilliant, but lacking the powerful characteristics of a nature that had been developed by suffering. "Sir," said the misanthropist, bluntly, in reply to some observation by Gervayse Hastings, " pray do not address me again. We have no right to talk together. Our minds have nothing in common. By what claim you appear at this banquet I cannot guess ; but me- thinks, to a man who could say what you have just now said, my companions and myself must seem no more than shadows flickering on the wall. And precisely such a shadow are you to us." The young man smiled and bowed, but drawing him- self back in his chair, he buttoned his coat over his breast, as if the banqueting hall were growing chill. Again the idiot fixed his melancholy stare upon the youth, and murmured, " Cold ! cold ! cold ! " The Christmas Banquet. 53 The banquet drew to its conclusion, and the guests departed. Scarcely had they stepped across the thresh- old of the hall, when the scene that had there passed seemed like the vision of a sick fancy, or an exhalation from a stagnant heart. Now and then, however, during the year that ensued, these melancholy people caught glimpses of one another, transient, indeed, but enough to prove that they walked the earth with the ordinary allotment of reality. Sometimes a pair of them came face to face, while stealing through the evening twilight, enveloped in their sable cloaks. Sometimes they casu- ally met in churchyards. Once, also, it happened that two of the dismal banqueters mutually started at recog- nizing each other in the noonday sunshine of a crowded street, stalking there like ghosts astray. Doubtless they wondered why the skeleton did not come abroad at noonday too. But whenever the necessity of their affairs compelled these Christmas guests into the bustling world, they were sure to encounter the young man who had so unaccountably been admitted to the festival. They saw him among the gay and fortunate ; they caught the sunny sparkle of his eye ; they heard the light and care- less tones of his voice, and muttered to themselves with such indignation as only the aristocracy of wretchedness could kindle " The traitor ! The vile imposter ! Providence, in its own good time, may give him a right to feast among us !" But the young man's unabashed eye dwelt upon their gloomy figures as they passed him, seem- ing to say, perchance with somewhat of a sneer, " First, know my secret ! then, measure your claims with mine ! " The step of Time stole onward, and soon brought merry Christmas round again, with glad and solemn worship in the churches, and sports, games, festivals, and every where the bright face of Joy beside the house- hold fire. Again likewise the hall, with its curtains of 54 Mosses from an Old Manse. dusky purple, was illuminated by the death torches gleaming on the sepulchral decorations of the banquet. The veiled skeleton sat in state, lifting the cypress wreath above its head, as the guerdon of some guest illustrious in the qualifications which there claimed pre- cedence. As the stewards deemed the world inexhaus- tible in misery, and were desirous of recognizing it in all its forms, they had not seen fit to reassemble the company of the former year. New faces now threw their gloom across the table. There was a man of nice conscience, who bore a blood stain in his heart the death of a fellow-creature which, for his more exquisite torture, had chanced with such a peculiarity of circumstances, that he could not absolutely determine whether his will had entered into the deed or not. Therefore, his whole life was spent in the agony of an inward trial for murder, with a continual sifting of the details of his terrible calamity, until his mind had no longer any thought, nor his soul any emotion, disconnected with it. There was a mother, too a mother once, but a desolation now who, many years before, had gone out on a pleasure party, and. returning, found her infant smothered in its little bed. And ever since she has been tortured with the fantasy that her buried baby lay smothering in its coffin. Then there was an aged lady, who had lived from time imme- morial with a constant tremor quivering through her frame. It was terrible to discern her dark shadow tremulous upon the wall ; her lips, likewise, were tremulous ; and the expression of her eye seemed to indicate that her soul wns trembling too. Owing to the bewilderment and confusion which made almost a chaos of her intellect, it was impossible to discover what dire misfortune had thus shaken her nature to its depths ; so that the stewards had admitted her to the table, not from any acquaintance with her history, The Christmas Banquet. 55 but on the safe testimony of her miserable aspect. Some surprise was expressed at the presence of a bluff, red-faced gentleman, a certain Mr. Smith, who had evidently the fat of many a rich feast within him, and the habitual twinkle of whose eye betrayed a disposi- tion to break forth into uproarious laughter for little cause or none. It turned out, however, that with the best possible flow of spirits, our poor friend was afflicted with a physical disease of the heart, which threatened instant death on the slightest cachinnatory indulgence, or even that titillation of the bodily frame produced by merry thoughts. In this dilemma he had sought admittance to the banquet, on the ostensible plea of his irksome and miserable state, but, in reality, with the hope of imbibing a life-preserving melancholy. A married couple had been invited from a motive of bitter humor, it being well understood that they rendered each other unutterably miserable whenever they chanced to meet, and therefore must necessarily be fit associates at the festival. In contrast with these was another couple still unmarried, who had interchanged their hearts in early life, but had been divided by circumstances as impalpable as morning mist, and kept apart so long that their spirits now found it impossible to meet. Therefore, yearning for communion, yet shrinking from one another and choosing none beside, they felt themselves com- panionless in life, and looked upon eternity as a bound- less desert. Next to the skeleton sat a mere son of earth a hunter of the Exchange a gatherer of shining dust a man whose life's record was in his leger, and whose soul's prison house the vaults of the bank where he kept his deposits. This person had been greatly perplexed at his invitation, deeming himself one of the most fortunate men in the city; but the stewards persisted in demanding his presence, assuring him that he had no conception how miserable he was. 56 Mosses from an Old Manse. And now appeared a figure which we must acknow- ledge as our acquaintance of the former festival. It was Gervayse Hastings, whose presence had then caused so much question and criticism, and who now took his place with the composure of one whose claims were satisfactory to himself and must needs be allowed by others. Yet his easy and unruffled face betrayed no sorrow. The well-skilled beholders gazed a moment into his eyes and shook their heads, to miss the un- uttered sympathy the countersign, never to be falsified of those whose hearts are cavern mouths, through which they descend into a region of illimitable woe and recognize other wanderers there. "Who is this youth?" asked the man with a blood stain on his conscience. " Surely he has never gone down into the depths ! I know all the aspects of those who have passed through the dark valley. By what right is he among us ? " "Ah, it is a sinful thing to come hither without a sorrow," murmured the aged lady, in accents that partook of the eternal tremor which pervaded her whole being. " Depart, young man ! Your soul has never been shaken, and, therefore, I tremble so much the more to look at you." " His soul shaken ! No ; I '11 answer for it," said bluff Mr. Smith, pressing his hand upon his heart and making himself as melancholy as he could, for fear of a fatal explosion of laughter. " I know the lad well ; he has as fair prospects as any young man about town, and has no more right among us miserable creatures than the child unborn. He never was miserable and probably never will be ! " " Our honored guests," interposed the stewards, " pray have patience with us, and believe, at least, that our deep veneration for the sacredness of this solemnity would preclude any wilful violation of it. Receive this young The Christinas Banquet. 57 man to your table. It may not be too much to say, that no guest here would exchange his own heart for the one that beats within that youthful bosom ! " " I ! d call it a bargain, and gladly too," muttered Mr. Smith, with a perplexing mixture of sadness and mirthful conceit. " A plague upon their nonsense ! My own heart is the only really miserable one in the company ; it will certainly be the death of me at last ! " Nevertheless, as on the former occasion, the judgment of the stewards being without appeal, the company sat down. The obnoxious guest made no more attempt to obtrude his conversation on those about him but appeared to listen to the table talk with peculiar assiduity, as if some inestimable secret, otherwise beyond his reach, might be conveyed in a casual word. And in truth, to those who could understand and value it, there was rich matter in the upgushings and outpourings of these initiated souls to whom sorrow had been a talisman, admitting them into spiritual depths which no other spell can open. Sometimes out of the midst of densest gloom there flashed a momentary radiance, pure as crystal, bright as the flame of stars, and shedding such a glow upon the mysteries of life that the guests were ready to exclaim, " Surely the riddle is on the point of being solved ! " At such illuminated intervals the saddest mourners felt it to be revealed that mortal griefs are but shadowy and external ; no more than the sable robes voluminously shrouding a certain divine reality, and thus indicating what might otherwise be altogether invisible to mortal eye. "Just now," remarked the trembling old woman, "I seemed to see beyond the outside. And then my ever- lasting tremor passed away ! " " Would that I could dwell always in these momentary gleams of light ! " said the man of stricken conscience. 5 8 Mosses from an Old Manse. "Then the blood stain in my heart would be washed clean away." This strain of conversation appeared so unintelligibly absurd to good Mr. Smith, that he burst into precisely the fit of laughter which his physicians had warned him against, as likely to prove instantaneously fatal. In effect, he fell back in his chair a corpse, with a broad grin upon his face, while his ghost, perchance, remained beside it bewildered at its unpremeditated exit. This catastrophe of course broke up the festival. "How is this? You do not tremble?" observed the tremulous old woman to Gervayse Hastings, who was gazing at the dead man with singular intentness. "Is it not awful to see him so suddenly vanish out of the midst of life this man of flesh and blood, whose earthly nature was so warm and strong ? There is a never- ending tremor in my soul, but it trembles afresh at this ! And you are calm ! " " Would that he could teach me somewhat ! " said Gervayse Hastings, drawing a long breath. " Men pass before me like shadows on the wall ; their actions, passions, feelings are flickerings of the light, and then they vanish ! Neither the corpse, nor yonder skeleton, nor this old woman's everlasting tremor, can give me what I seek." And then the company departed. We cannot linger to narrate, in such detail, more circumstances of these singular festivals, which, in ac- cordance with the founder's will, continued to be kept with the regularity of an established institution. In process of time the stewards adopted the custom of inviting, from far and near, those individuals whose misfortunes were prominent above other men's, and whose mental and moral development might, therefore, be supposed to possess a corresponding interest. The exiled noble of the French Revolution, and the broken The Christmas Banquet. 59 soldier of the Empire, were alike represented at the table. Fallen monarchs, wandering about the earth, have found places at that forlorn and miserable feast. The statesman, when his party flung him off, might, if he chose it, be once more a great man for the space of a single banquet. Aaron Burr's name appears on the record at a period when his ruin the profoundest and most striking, with more of moral circumstance in it than that of almost any other man was complete in his lonely age. Stephen Girard, when his wealth weighed upon him like a mountain, once sought admittance of his own accord. It is not probable, however, that these men had any lesson to teach in the lore of discontent and misery which might not equally well have been studied in the common walks of life. Illustrious unfor- tunates attract a wider sympathy, not because their griefs are more intense, but because, being set on lofty pedestals, they the better serve mankind as instances and bywords of calamity. It concerns our present purpose to say that, at each successive festival, Gervayse Hastings showed his face, gradually changing from the smooth beauty of his youth to the thoughtful comeliness of manhood, and thence to the bald, impressive dignity of age. He was the only individual invariably present. Yet on every occasion there were murmurs, both from those who knew his character and position, and from them whose hearts shrank back as denying his companionship in their mystic fraternity. "Who is this impassive man?" had been asked a hundred times. "Has he suffered? Has he sinned? There are no traces of either. Then wherefore is he here?" " You must inquire of the stewards or of himself," was the constant reply. " We seem to know him well here in our city, and know nothing of him but what is 60 Mosses from an Old Manse. creditable and fortunate. Yet hither he comes, year after year, to this gloomy banquet, and sits among the guests like a marble statue. Ask yonder skeleton, per- haps that may solve the riddle ! " It was in truth a wonder. The life of Gervayse Hastings was not merely a prosperous, but a brilliant one. Every thing had gone well with him. He was wealthy, far beyond the expenditure that was required by habits of magnificence, a taste of rare purity and cultivation, a love of travel, a scholar's instinct to collect a splendid library, and, moreover, what seemed a magnificent liberality to the distressed. He had sought happiness, and not vainly, if a lovely and tender wife, and children of fair promise, could insure it. He had, besides, ascended above the limit which separates the obscure from the distinguished, and had won a stainless reputation in affairs of the widest public importance. Not that he was a popular character, or had within him the mysterious attributes which are essential to that species of success. To the public he was a cold abstrac- tion, wholly destitute of those rich hues of personality, that living warmth, and the peculiar faculty of stamping his own heart's impression on a multitude of hearts by which the people recognize their favorites. And it must be owned that, after his most intimate associates had done their best to know him thoroughly, and love him warmly, they were startled to find how little hold he had upon their affections. They approved, they admired, but still in those moments when the human spirit most craves reality, they shrank back from Gervayse Hastings, as powerless to give them what they sought. It was the feeling of distrustful regret with which we should draw back the hand after extending it, in an illusive twilight, to grasp the hand of a shadow upon the wall. As the superficial fervency of youth decayed, this peculiar effect of Gervayse Hastings's character grew The Christmas Banquet. 61 more perceptible. His children, when he extended his arms, came coldly to his knees, but never climbed them of their own accord. His wife wept secretly, and almost adjudged herself a criminal because she shivered in the chill of his bosom. He, too, occasionally appeared not unconscious of the chillness of his moral atmosphere, and willing, if it might be so, to warm himself at a kindly fire. But age stole onward and benumbed him more and more. As the hoarfrost began to gather on him his wife went to her grave, and was doubtless warmer there; his children either died or were scattered to different homes of their own ; and old Gervayse Hastings, unscathed by grief alone, but needing no companion- ship, continued his steady walk through life, and still on every Christmas day attended at the dismal banquet. His privilege as a guest had become prescriptive now. Had he claimed the head of the table, even the skeleton would have been ejected from its seat. Finally, at the merry Christmas tide, when he had numbered fourscore years complete, this pale, high- browed, marble-featured old man once more entered the long-frequented hall, with the same impassive aspect that had called forth so much dissatisfied remark at his first attendance. Time, except in matters merely ex- ternal, had done nothing for him, either of good or evil. As he took his place he threw a calm, inquiring glance around the table, as if to ascertain whether any guest had yet appeared, after so many unsuccessful banquets, who might impart to him the mystery the deep, warm secret the life within the life which, whether mani- fested in joy or sorrow, is what gives substance to a world of shadows. "My friends," said Gervayse Hastings, assuming a position which his long conversance with the festival caused to appear natural, " you are welcome ! I drink to you all in this cup of sepulchral wine." 62 Mosses from an Old Manse. The guests replied courteously, but still in a manner that proved them unable to receive the old man as a member of their sad fraternity. It maybe well to give the reader an idea of the present company at the banquet. One was formerly a clergyman, enthusiastic in his profession, and apparently of the genuine dynasty of those old puritan divines whose faith in their calling, and stern exercise of it, had placed them among the mighty of the earth. But yielding to the speculative tendency of the age, he had gone astray from the firm foundation of an ancient faith, and wandered into a cloud region, where every thing was misty and deceptive, ever mocking him with a semblance of reality, but still dissolving when he flung himself upon it for support and rest. His instinct and early training demanded something steadfast ; but, looking forward, he beheld vapors piled on vapors, and behind him an impassable gulf between the man of yesterday and to-day, on the borders of which he paced to and fro, sometimes wring- ing his hands in agony, and often making his own woe a theme of scornful merriment. This surely was a miserable man. Next, there was a theorist one of a numerous tribe, although he deemed himself unique since the creation a theorist, who had conceived a plan by which all the wretchedness of earth, moral and physical, might be done away, and the bliss of the millennium at once accomplished. But, the incredulity of mankind debarring him from action, he was smitten with as much grief as if the whole mass of woe which he was denied the opportunity to remedy were crowded into his own bosom. A plain old man in black attracted much of the company's notice, on the supposition that he was no other than Father Miller, who, it seemed, had given himself up to despair at the tedious delay of the final conflagration. Then there was a man distinguished for native pride and obstinacy, who, a little while before, had The Christmas Banqtici. 63 possessed immense wealth, and held the control of a vast moneyed interest which, he had wielded in the same spirit as a despotic monarch would wield the power of his empire, carrying on a tremendous moral warfare, the roar and tremor of which was felt at every fireside in the land. At length came a crushing ruin a total overthrow of fortune, power, and character the effect of which on his imperious and, in many respects, noble and lofty nature, might have entitled him to a place, not merely at our festival, but among the peers of Pandemonium. There was a modern philanthropist, who had become so deeply sensible of the calamities of thousands and millions of his fellow-creatures, and of the impracticable- ness of any general measures for their relief, that he had no heart to do what little good lay immediately within his power, but contented himself with being miserable for sympathy. Near him sat a gentleman in a predicament hitherto unprecedented, but of which the present epoch probably affords numerous examples. Ever since he was of capacity to read a newspaper this person had prided himself on his consistent adherence to one political party, but, in the confusion of these latter days, had got be- wildered and knew not whereabouts his party was. This wretched condition, so morally desolate and dis- heartening to a man who has long accustomed himself to merge his individuality in the mass of a great body, can only be conceived by such as have experienced it. His next companion was a popular orator who had lost his voice, and as it was pretty much all that he had to lose had fallen into a state of hopeless melancholy. The table was likewise graced by two of the gentle sex one, a half-starved, consumptive seamstress, the represen- tative of thousands just as wretched ; the other, a woman of unemployed energy, who found herself in the world with nothing to achieve, nothing to enjoy, and nothing even to suffer. She had, therefore, driven herself to the 64 Mosses from an Old Manse. verge of madness by dark breedings over the wrongs of her sex, and its exclusion from a proper field of action. The roll of guests being thus complete, a side table had been set for three or four disappointed office seekers, with hearts as sick as death, whom the stewards had admitted partly because their calamities really entitled them to entrance here, and partly that they were in especial need of a good dinner. There was likewise a homeless dog, with his tail between his legs, licking up the crums and gnawing the fragments of the feast such a melancholy cur as one sometimes sees about the streets without a master, and willing to follow the first that will accept his service. In their own way, these were as wretched a set of people as ever had assembled at the festival. There they sat, with the veiled skeleton of the founder holding aloft the cypress wreath, at one end of the table, and at the other, wrapped in furs, the withered figure of Gervayse Hastings, stately, calm, and cold, impressing the company with awe, yet so little interesting their sympathy that he might have vanished into thin air without their once exclaiming, " Whither is he gone ? " " Sir," said the philanthropist, addressing the old man, " you have been so long a guest at this annual festival, and have thus been conversant with so many varieties of human affliction, that, not improbably, you have thence derived some great and important lessons. How blessed were your lot could you reveal a secret by which all this mass of woe might be removed ! " " I know of but one misfortune," answered Gervayse Hastings, quietly, " and that is my own." " Your own ! " rejoined the philanthropist. " And, looking back on your serene and prosperous life, how can you claim to be the sole unfortunate of the human race ? " " You will not understand it," replied Gervayse Hast- The Christmas Banquet. 65 ings, feebly, and with a singular inefficiency of pronun- ciation, and sometimes putting one word for another. " None have understood it not even those who experi- ence the like. It is a chillness a want of earnestness a feeling as if what should be my heart were a thing of vapor a haunting perception of unreality ! Thus seem- ing to possess all that other men have all that men aim at I have really possessed nothing, neither joy nor griefs. All things, all persons as was truly said to me at this table long and long ago have been like shadows flickering on the wall. It was so with my wife and chil- dren with those who seemed my friends : it is so with yourselves, whom I see now before me. Neither have I myself any real existence, but am a shadow like the rest.' "And how is it with your views of a future life?" in- quired the speculative clergyman. " Worse than with you," said the old man, in a hollow and feeble tone; "for I cannot conceive it earnestly enough to feel either hope or fear. Mine mine is the wretchedness ! This cold heart this unreal life ! Ah ! it grows colder still." It so chanced that at this juncture the decayed liga- ments of the skeleton gave way, and the dry bones fell together in a heap, thus causing the dusty wreath of cypress to drop upon the table. The attention of the company being thus diverted for a single instant from Gervayse Hastings, they perceived, on turning again towards him, that the old man had undergone a change. His shadow had ceased to flicker on the wall. " Well, Rosina, what is your criticism ?" asked Rode- rick, as he rolled up the manuscript. " Frankly, your success is by no means complete," replied she. " It is true, I have an idea of the character you endeavor to describe ; but it is rather by dint of my own thought than your expression." 5 10 66 Mosses from an Old Manse. " That is unavoidable," observed the sculptor, " be- cause the characteristics are all negative. If Gervayse Hastings could have imbibed one human grief at the gloomy banquet, the task of describing him would have been infinitely easier. Of such persons and we do meet with these moral monsters now and then it is difficult to conceive how they came to exist here, or what there is in them capable of existence hereafter. They seem to be on the outside of every thing; and nothing wearies the soul more than an attempt to com- prehend them within its grasp." BROWNE'S WOODEN IMAGE. ONE sunshiny morning, in the good old times of the town of Boston, a young carver in wood, well known by the name of Drowne, stood contemplating a large oaken log, which it was his purpose to convert into the figure head of a vessel. And while he discussed within his own mind what sort of shape or similitude it were well to bestow upon this excellent piece of timber, there came into Drowne's workshop a certain Captain Hunnewell, owner and commander of the good brig called the Cynosure, which had just returned from her first voyage to Fayal. "Ah! that will do, Drowne, that will do !" cried the jolly captain, tapping the log with his rattan. " I be- speak this very piece of oak for the figure head of the Cynosure. She has shown herself the sweetest craft that ever floated, and I mean to decorate her prow with the handsomest image that the skill of man can cut out of timber. And, Drowne, you are the fellow to execute it." " You give me more credit than I deserve, Captain Hunnewell," said the carver, modestly, yet as one con- scious of eminence in his art. "But, for the sake of the good brig, I stand ready to do my best. And which of these designs do you prefer? Here" pointing to a staring, half-length figure, in a white wig and scarlet coat " here is an excellent model, the likeness of our gracious king. Here is the valiant Admiral Vernon. 68 Mosses from an Old Manse, Or, if you prefer a female figure, what say you to Bri- tannia with the trident?" " All very fine, Drowne ; all very fine," answered the mariner. " But as nothing like the brig ever swam the ocean, so I am determined she shall have such a figure head as old Neptune never saw in his life. And what is more, as there is a secret in the matter, you must pledge your credit not to betray it." " Certainly," said Drowne, marvelling, however, what possible mystery there could be in reference to an affair so open, of necessity, to the inspection of all the world as the figure head of a vessel. " You may depend, captain, on my being as secret as the nature of the case will permit." Captain Hunnewell then took Drowne by the button, and communicated his wishes in so low a tone that it would be unmannerly to repeat what was evidently in- tended for the carver's private ear. We shall, therefore, take the opportunity to give the reader a few desirable particulars about Drowne himself. He was the first American who is known to have attempted in a very humble line, it is true that art in which we can now reckon so many names already distinguished, or rising to distinction. From his earliest boyhood he had exhibited a knack for it would be too proud a word to call it genius a knack, therefore, for the imitation of the human figure in whatever material came most readily to hand. The snows of a New England winter had often supplied him with a species of marble as dazzlingly white, at least, as the Parian or the Carrara, and if less durable, yet sufficiently so to correspond with any claims to permanent existence possessed by the boy's frozen statues. Yet they won admiration from maturer judges than his schoolfellows, and were, indeed, remarkably clever, though destitute of the native warmth that might have made the snow Drownjs Wooden Image. 69 melt beneath his hand. As he advanced in life, the young man adopted pine and oak as eligible materials for the display of his skill, which now began to bring him a return of solid silver as well as the empty praise that had been an apt reward enough for his productions of evanescent snow. He became noted for carving ornamental pump heads, and wooden urns for gate posts, and decorations, more grotesque than fanciful, for mantel- pieces. No apothecary would have deemed himself in the way of obtaining custom without setting up a gilded mortar, if not a head of Galen or Hippocrates, from the skilful hand of Drowne. But the great scope of his business lay in the manu- facture of figure heads for vessels. Whether it were the monarch himself, or some famous British admiral or general, or the governor of the province, or perchance the favorite daughter of the ship owner, there the image stood above the prow, decked out in gorgeous colors, magnificently gilded, and staring the whole world out of countenance, as if from an innate consciousness of its own superiority. These specimens of native sculpture had crossed the sea in all directions, and been not ignobly noticed among the crowded shipping of the Thames, and wherever else the hardy mariners of New England had pushed their adventures. It must be confessed that a family likeness pervaded these respect- able progeny of Browne's skill ; that the benign counte- nance of the king resembled those of his subjects, and that Miss Peggy Hobart, the merchant's daughter, bore a remarkable similitude to Britannia, Victory, and other ladies of the allegoric sisterhood ; and, finally, that they all had a kind of wooden aspect, which proved an intimate relationship with the unshaped blocks of timber in the carver's workshop. But at least there was no inconsiderable skill of hand, nor a deficiency of any attribute to render them really works of art, except that 7O Mosses from an Old Manse. deep quality, be it of soul or intellect, which bestows life upon the lifeless and warmth upon the cold, and which, had it been present, would have made Drowne's wooden image instinct with spirit. The captain of the Cynosure had now finished his instructions. "And Drowne," said he, impressively, "you must lay aside all other business and set about this forthwith. And as to the price, only do the job in first rate style, and you shall settle that point yourself." " Very well, captain," answered the carver, who looked grave and somewhat perplexed, yet had a sort of smile upon his visage ; " depend upon it, I'll do my utmost to satisfy you." From that moment the men of taste about Long Wharf and the Town Dock who were wont to show their love for the arts by frequent visits to Drowne's workshop, and admiration of his wooden images, began to be sensible of a mystery in the carver's conduct. Often he was absent in the daytime. Sometimes, as might be judged by gleams of light from the shop win- dows, he was at work until a late hour of the evening ; although neither knock nor voice, on such occasions, could gain admittance for a visitor, or elicit any word of response. Nothing remarkable, however, was observed in the shop at those hours when it was thrown open. A fine piece of timber, indeed, which Drowne was known to have reserved for some work of especial dignity, was seen to be gradually assuming shape. What shape it was destined ultimately to take was a problem to his friends and a point on which the carver himself pre- served a rigid silence. But day after day, though Drowne was seldom noticed in the act of working upon it, this rude form began to be developed until it became evident to all observers that a female figure was growing into mimic life. At each new visit they beheld a larger Drowne's Woo Jen Image. 71 pile of wooden chips and a nearer approximation to something beautiful. It seemed as if the hamadryad of the oak had sheltered herself from the unimaginative world within the heart of her native tree, and that it was only necessary to remove the strange shapelessness that had incrusted her, and reveal the grace and loveliness of a divinity. Imperfect as the design, the attitude, the costume, and especially the face of the image still remained, there was already an effect that drew the eye from the wooden cleverness of Drowne's earlier produc- tions and fixed it upon the tantalizing mystery of this new project. Copley, the celebrated painter, then a young man and a resident of Boston, came one day to visit Browne ; for he had recognized so much of moderate ability in the carver as to induce him, in the dearth of professional sympathy, to cultivate his acquaintance. On entering the shop the artist glanced at the inflexible image of king, commander, dame, and allegory that stood around, on the best of which might have been bestowed the questionable praise that it looked as if a living man had here been changed to wood, and that not only the physical, but the intellectual and spiritual part, partook of the stolid transformation. But in not a single instance did it seem as if the wood were imbibing the ethereal essence of humanity. What a wide distinction is here ! and how far would the slightest portion of the latter merit have outvalued the utmost degree of the former ! " My friend Drowne," said Copley, smiling to himself, but alluding to the mechanical and wooden cleverness that so invariably distinguished the images, ''you are really a remarkable person ! I have seldom met with a man in your line of business that could do so much ; for one other touch might make this figure of General Wolfe, for instance, a breathing and intelligent human creature." 72 Mosses from an Old Manse. " You would have me think that you are praising me highly, Mr. Copley," answered Drowne, turning his back upon Wolfe's image in apparent disgust. " But there has come a light into my mind. I know, what you know as well, that the one touch which you speak of as deficient is the only one that would be truly valuable, and that without it these works of mine are no better than worthless abortions. There is the same difference between them and the works of an inspired artist as between a sign-post daub and one of your best pic- tures." " This is strange," cried Copley, looking him in the face, which now, as the painter fancied, had a singular depth of intelligence, though hitherto it had not given him greatly the advantage over his own family of wooden images. " What has come over you ? How is it that, possessing the idea which you have now uttered, you should produce only such works as these ? " The carver smiled, but made no reply. Copley turned again to the images, conceiving that the sense of de- ficiency which Drowne had just expressed, and which is so rare in a merely mechanical character, must surely imply a genius, the tokens of which had heretofore been overlooked. But no ; there was not a trace of it. He was about to withdraw when his eyes chanced to fall upon a half-developed figure which lay in a corner of the workshop, surrounded by scattered chips of oak. It arrested him at once. "What is here? Who has done this?" he broke out, after contemplating it in speechless astonishment for an instant. " Here is the divine, the life-giving touch. What inspired hand is beckoning this wood to arise and live ? Whose work is this ? " " No man's work," replied Drowne. " The figure lies within that block of oak, and it is my business to find it." Drowne' s Wooden Image. 73 "Drowne," said the true artist, grasping the carver fervently by the hand, " you are a man of genius ! " As Copley departed, happening to glance backward from the threshold, he beheld Drowne bending over the half-created shape, and stretching forth his arms as if he would have embraced and drawn it to his heart ; while, had such a miracle been possible, his countenance expressed passion enough to communicate warmth and sensibility to the lifeless oak. " Strange enough ! " said the artist to himself. " Who would have looked for a modern Pygmalion in the person of a Yankee mechanic ! " As yet, the image was but vague in its outward present- ment ; so that, as in the cloud shapes around the western sun, the observer rather felt, or was led to imagine, than really saw what was intended by it. Day by day, how- ever, the work assumed greater precision, and settled its irregular and misty outline into distincter grace and beauty. The general design was now obvious to the common eye. It was a female figure, in what appeared to be a foreign dress ; the gown being laced over the bosom, and opening in front so as to disclose a skirt or petticoat, the folds and inequalities of which were admir- ably represented in the oaken substance. She wore a hat of singular gracefulness, and abundantly laden with flowers, such as never grew in the rude soil of New England, but which, with all their fanciful luxuriance, had a natural truth that it seemed impossible for the most fertile imagination to have attained without copying from real prototypes. There were several little append- ages to this dress, such as a fan, a pair of earrings, a chain about the neck, a watch in the bosom, and a ring upon the finger, all of which would have been deemed beneath the dignity of sculpture. They were put on, however, with as much taste as a lovely woman might have shown in her attire, and could therefore have 74 Mosses from an Old Manse. shocked none but a judgment spoiled by artistic rules. The face was still imperfect ; but gradually, by a magic touch, intelligence and sensibility brightened through the features, with all the effect of light gleaming forth from within the solid oak. The face became alive. It was a beautiful, though not precisely regular, and somewhat haughty aspect, but with a certain piquancy about the eyes and mouth, which, of all expressions, would have seemed the most impossible to throw over a wooden countenance. And now, so far as carving went, this wonderful production was complete. "Browne," said Copley, who had hardly missed a single day in his visits to the carver's workshop, " if this work were in marble it would make you famous at once ; nay, I would almost affirm that it would make an era in the art. It is as ideal as an antique statue, and yet as real as any lovely woman whom one meets at a fireside or in the street. But I trust you do not mean to desecrate this exquisite creature with paint, like those staring kings and admirals yonder ? " "Not paint her ! " exclaimed Captain Hunnewell, who stood by ; " not paint the figure head of the Cynosure ! And what sort of a figure should I cut in a foreign port with such an unpainted oaken stick as this over my prow ! She must, and she shall, be painted to the life, from the topmost flower in her hat down to the silver spangles on her slippers." " Mr. Copley," said Drowne, quietly, " I know nothing of marble statuary, and nothing of the sculptor's rules of art ; but of this wooden image, this work of my hands, this creature of my heart," and here his voice faltered and choked in a very singular manner, " of this of her I may say that I know something. A wellspring of inward wisdom gushed within me as I wrought upon the oak with my whole strength, and soul, and faith. Let Drcnvnds Wooden Image. 75 others do what they may with marble, and adopt what rules they choose. If I can produce my desired effect by painted wood, those rules are not for me, and I have a right to disregard them." " The very spirit of genius," muttered Copley to him- self. "How otherwise should this carver feel himself entitled to transcend all rules, and make me ashamed of quoting them ? " He looked earnestly at Drowne, and again saw that expression of human love which, in a spiritual sense, as the artist could not help imagining, was the secret of the life that had been breathed into this block of wood. The carver, still in the same secrecy that marked all his operations upon this mysterious image, proceeded to paint the habiliments in their proper colors, and the countenance with Nature's red and white. When all was finished he threw open his workshop, and admitted the townspeople to behold what he had done. Most persons, at their first instance, felt impelled to remove their hats, and pay such reverence as was due to the richly-dressed and beautiful young lady who seemed to stand in a corner of the room, with oaken chips and shavings scattered at her feet. Then came a sensation of fear ; as if, not being actually human, yet so like humanity, she must therefore be something preternatural. There was, in truth, an indefinable air and expression that might reasonably induce the query, Who and from what sphere this daughter of the oak should be ? The strange, rich flowers of Eden on her head ; the com- plexion, so much deeper and more brilliant than those of our native beauties ; the foreign, as it seemed, and fantastic garb, yet not too fantastic to be worn decorously in the street ; the delicately-wrought embroidery of the skirt ; the broad gold chain about her neck ; the curious ring upon her finger ; the fan, so exquisitely sculptured 76 Mosses from an Old Manse. in open work, and painted to resemble pearl and ebony ; where could Drowne, in his sober walk of life, have beheld the vision here so matchlessly embodied ! And then her face ! In the dark eyes and around the volup- tuous mouth there played a look made up of pride, coquetry, and a gleam of mirthfulness, which impressed Copley with the idea that the image was secretly enjoying the perplexing admiration of himself and other beholders. "And will you," said he to the carver, "permit this masterpiece to become the figure head of a vessel? Give the honest captain yonder figure of Britannia it will answer his purpose far better and send this fairy queen to England, where, for aught I know, it may bring you a thousand pounds." " I have not wrought it for money," said Drowne. "What sort of a fellow is this?" thought Copley "A Yankee, and throw away the chance of making his fortune! He has gone mad; and thence has come this gleam of genius." There was still further proof of Browne's lunacy, if credit were due to the rumor that he had been seen kneeling at the feet of the oaken lady, and gazing with a lover's passionate ardor into the face that his own hands had created. The bigots of the day hinted that it would be no matter of surprise if an evil spirit were allowed to enter this beautiful form, and seduce the carver to destruction. The fame of the image spread far and wide. The inhabitants visited it so universally, that after a few days of exhibition there was hardly an old man or a child who had not become minutely familiar with its aspect. Even had the story of Drowne's wooden image ended here, its celebrity might have been prolonged for many years by the reminiscences of those who looked upon it in their childhood, and saw nothing else so DrownJs Wooden Image. 77 beautiful in after life. But the town was now astounded by an event the narrative of which has formed itself into one of the most singular legends that are yet to be met with in the traditionary chimney corners of the New England metropolis, where old men and women sit dreaming of the past, and wag their heads at the dreamers of the present and the future. One fine morning, just before the departure of the Cynosure on her second voyage to Fayal, the com- mander of that gallant vessel was seen to issue from his residence in Hanover Street. He was stylishly dressed in a blue broadcloth coat, with gold lace at the seams and button holes, an embroidered scarlet waistcoat, a triangular hat, with a loop and broad binding of gold, and wore a silver-hilted hanger at his side. But the good captain might have been arrayed in the robes of a prince or the rags of a beggar, without in either case attracting notice, while obscured by such a companion as now leaned on his arm. The people in the street started, rubbed their eyes, and either leaped aside from their path, or stood as if transfixed to wood or marble in astonishment. " Do you see it ? do you see it ? " cried one, with tremulous eagerness. " It is the very same ! " "The same?" answered another, who had arrived in town only the night before. " What do you mean ? I see only a sea captain in his shore-going clothes, and a young lady in a foreign habit, with a bunch of beautiful flowers in her hat. On my word, she is as fair and bright a damsel as my eyes have looked on this many a day ! " " Yes ; the same ! the very same ! " repeated the other. " Drowne's wooden image has come to life ! " Here was a miracle indeed ! Yet, illuminated by the sunshine, or darkened by the alternate shade of the houses, and with its garments fluttering lightly in the morning breeze, there passed the image along the 78 Mosses from an Old Manse. street. It was exactly and minutely the shape, the garb, and the face which the townspeople had so recently thronged to see and admire. Not a rich flower upon her head, not a single leaf, but had had its prototype in Browne's wooden workmanship, although now their fragile grace had become flexible, and was shaken by every footstep that the wearer made. The broad gold chain upon the neck was identical with the one repre- sented on the image, and glistened with the motion imparted by the rise and fall of the bosom which it decorated. A real diamond sparkled on her finger. In her right hand she bore a pearl and ebony fan, which she flourished with a fantastic and bewitching coquetry, that was likewise expressed in all her movements as well as in the style of her beauty and the attire that so well harmonized with it. The face, with its brilliant depth of complexion, had the same piquancy of mirthful mischief that was fixed upon the countenance of the image, but which was here varied and continually shifting, yet always essentially the same, like the sunny gleam upon a bubbling fountain. On the whole, there was some- thing so airy and yet so real in the figure, and withal so perfectly did it represent Browne's image, that people knew not whether to suppose the magic wood ethe- realized into a spirit or warmed and softened into an actual woman. "One thing is certain," muttered a Puritan of the old stamp, " Browne has sold himself to the devil ; and doubtless this gay Captain Hunnewell is a party to the bargain." "And I," said a young man who overheard him, " would almost consent to be the third victim, for the liberty of saluting those lovely lips." " And so would I," said Copley, the painter, " for the privilege of taking her picture." The image, or the apparition, whichever it might be, Drowne's Wooden Image. 79 still escorted by the bold captain, proceeded from Hanover Street through some of the cross lanes that make this portion of the town so intricate, to Ann Street, thence into Dock Square, and so downward to Browne's shop, which stood just on the water's edge. The crowd still followed, gathering volume as it rolled along. Never had a modern miracle occurred in such broad daylight, nor in the presence of such a multitude of witnesses. The airy image, as if conscious that she was the object of the murmurs and disturbance that swelled behind her, appeared slightly vexed and flustered, yet still in a manner consistent with the light vivacity and sportive mischief that were written in her countenance. She was observed to flutter her fan with such vehement rapidity that the elaborate delicacy of its workmanship gave way, and it remained broken in her hand. Arriving at Drowne's door, while the captain threw it open, the marvellous apparition paused an instant on the threshold, assuming the very attitude of the image, and casting over the crowd that glance of sunny co- quetry which all remembered on the face of the oaken lady. She and her cavalier then disappeared. " Ah ! " murmured the crowd, drawing a deep breath, as with one vast pair of lungs. " The world looks darker now that she has vanished,'' said some of the young men. But the aged, whose recollections dated as far back as witch times, shook their heads, and hinted that our forefathers would have thought it a pious deed to burn the daughter of the oak with fire. "If she be other than a bubble of the elements," exclaimed Copley, " I must look upon her face again." He accordingly entered the shop ; and there, in her usual corner, stood the image, gazing at him, as it might seem, with the very same expression of mirthful mischief that had been the farewell look of the apparition when, So Mosses from an Old Manse. but a moment before, she turned her face towards the crowd. The carver stood beside his creation mending the beautiful fan, which by some accident was broken in her hand. But there was no longer any motion in the lifelike image, nor any real woman in the workshop, nor even the witchcraft of a sunny shadow, that might have deluded people's eyes as it flitted along the street. Captain Hunnewell, too, had vanished. His hoarse, sea- breezy tones, however, were audible on the other side of a door that opened upon the water. " Sit down in the stern sheets, my lady," said the gallant captain. " Come, bear a hand, you lubbers, and set us on board in the turning of a minute glass." And then was heard the stroke of oars. " Drowne," said Copley, with a smile of intelligence, " you have been a truly fortunate man. What painter or statuary ever had such a subject ! No wonder that she inspired a genius into you, and first created the artist who afterwards created her image." Drowne looked at him with a visage that bore the traces of tears, but from which the light of imagination and sensibility, so recently illuminating it, had departed. He was again the mechanical carver that he had been known to be all his lifetime. "I hardly understand what you mean, Mr. Copley," said he, putting his hand to his brow. " This image ! Can it have been my work ? Well, I have wrought it in a kind of dream ; and now that I am broad awake I must set about finishing yonder figure of Admiral Vernon." And forthwith he employed himself on the stolid countenance of one of his wooden progeny, and com- pleted it in his own mechanical style, from which he was never known afterwards to deviate. He followed his business industriously for many years, acquired a com- petence, and in the latter part of his life attained to a dignified station in the church, being remembered in Drowne's Wooden Image. 81 records and traditions as Deacon Drowne, the carver. One of his productions, an Indian Chief, gilded all over, stood during the better part of a century on the cupola of the Province House, bedazzling the eyes of those who looked upward, like an angel of the sun. Another work of the good deacon's hand a reduced likeness of his friend Captain Hunnewell, holding a telescope and quad- rant may be seen to this day, at the corner of Broad and State Streets, serving in the useful capacity of sign to the shop of a nautical instrument maker. We know not how to account for the inferiority of this quaint old figure, as compared with the recorded excellence of the Oaken Lady, unless on the supposition that in every human spirit there is imagination, sensibility, creative power, genius, which, according to circumstances, may either be developed in this world, or shrouded in a mask of dulness until another state of being. To our friend Drowne there came a brief season of excitement kindled by love. It rendered him a genius for that one occasion, but, quenched in disappointment, left him again the mechanical carver in wood, without the power even of appreciating the work that his own hands had wrought. Yet who can doubt that the very highest state to which a human spirit can attain, in its loftiest aspirations, is its truest and most natural state, and that Drowne was more consistent with himself when he wrought the admirable figure of the mysterious lady, than when he perpetrated a whole progeny of blockheads ? There was a rumor in Boston, about this period, that a young Portuguese lady of rank, on some occasion of political or domestic disquietude, had fled from her home in Fayal and put herself under the protection of Captain Hunnewell, on board of whose vessel, and at whose residence, she was sheltered until a change of affairs. This fair stranger must have been the original of Drowne's Wooden Image. 6 10 THE INTELLIGENCE OFFICE. A GRAVE figure, with a pair of mysterious spectacles on his nose and a pen behind his ear, was seated at a desk in the corner of a metropolitan office. The apartment was fitted up with a counter, and furnished with an oaken cabinet and a chair or two, in simple and business-like style. Around the walls were stuck advertisements of articles lost, or articles wanted, or articles to be disposed of; in one or another of which classes were compre- hended nearly all the conveniences, or otherwise, that the imagination of man has contrived. The interior of the room was thrown into shadow, partly by the tall edifices that rose on the opposite side of the street, and partly by the immense show bills of blue and crimson paper that were expanded over each of the three windows. Undisturbed by the tramp of feet, the rattle of wheels, the hum of voices, the shout of the city crier, the scream of the news boys, and other tokens of the multitudinous life that surged along in front of the office, the figure at the desk pored diligently over a folio volume, of ledger- like size and aspect. He looked like the spirit of a record the soul of his own great volume made visible in mortal shape. But scarcely an instant elapsed without the appearance at the door of some individual from the busy population whose vicinity was manifested by so much buzz, and clatter, and outcry. Now, it was a thriving mechanic in quest of a tenement that should come within his moderate means of rent ; now, a ruddy Irish girl from the banks The Intelligence Office. 83 of Killarney, wandering from kitchen to kitchen of our land, while her heart still hung in the peat smoke of her native cottage ; now, a single gentleman looking out for economical board ; and now for this establishment offered an epitome of worldly pursuits it was a faded beauty inquiring for her lost bloom ; or Peter Schlemihl for his lost shadow ; or an author of ten years' standing for his vanished reputation ; or a moody man for yester- day's sunshine. At the next lifting of the latch there entered a person with his hat awry upon his head, his clothes perversely ill suited to his form, his eyes staring in directions oppo- site to their intelligence, and a certain odd unsuitableness pervading his whole figure. Wherever he might chance to be, whether in palace or cottage, church or market, on land or sea, or even at his own fireside, he must have worn the characteristic expression of a man out of his right place. " This," inquired he, putting his question in the form of an assertion, "this is the Central Intelligence Office?" " Even so," answered the figure at the desk, turning another leaf of his volume ; he then looked the applicant in the face and said briefly, " Your business ?" " I want," said the latter, with tremulous earnestness, "a place!" " A place ! and of what nature ? asked the Intelli- gencer. " There are many vacant, or soon to be so, some of which will probably suit, since they range from that of a footman up to a seat at the council board, or in the cabinet, or a throne, or a presidential chair." The stranger stood pondering before the desk with an unquiet dissatisfied air a dull, vague pain of heart, expressed by a slight contortion of the brow an earnest- ness of glance, that asked and expected, yet continually wavered as if distrusting. In short, he evidently wanted, not in a physical or intellectual sense, but with an urgent 84 Mosses from an Old Manse. moral necessity that is the hardest of all things to satisfy, since it knows not its own object. " Ah, you mistake me ! " said he at length, with a gesture of nervous impatience. " Either of the places you mention, indeed, might answer my purpose ; or, more probably, none of them. I want my place! my own place ! my true place in the world ! my proper sphere ! my thing to do, which nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my lifetime ! Whether it be a footman's duty or a king's is of little consequence, so it be naturally mine. Can you help me here ? " " I will enter your application," answered the Intelli- gencer, at the same time writing a few lines in his volume. " But to undertake such a business, I tell you frankly, is quite apart from the ground covered by my official duties. Ask for something specific, and it may doubtless be negotiated for you, on your compliance with the condi- tions. But were I to go further, I should have the whole population of the city upon my shoulders ; since far the greater proportion of them are, more or less, in your predicament." The applicant sank into a fit of despondency, and passed out of the door without again lifting his eyes ; and, if he died of the disappointment, he was probably buried in the wrong tomb, inasmuch as the fatality of such people never deserts them, and, whether alive or dead, they are invariably out of place. Almost immediately another foot was heard on the threshold. A youth entered hastily, and threw a glance around the office to ascertain whether the man of in- telligence was alone. He then approached close to the desk, blushed lil.e a maiden, and seemed at a loss how to broach his business. "You come upon an affair of the heart," said the official personage, looking into him through his mys- The Intelligence Office. 85 terious spectacles. "State it in as few words as may be." " You are right," replied the youth. " I have a heart to dispose of." "You seek an exchange?" said the Intelligencer. " Foolish youth, why not be contented with your own ? " "Because," exclaimed the young man, losing his embarrassment in a passionate glow, " because my heart burns me with an intolerable fire ; it tortures me all day long with yearnings for I know not what, and feverish throbbings, and the pangs of a vague sorrow ; and it awakens me in the night time with a quake, when there is nothing to be feared. I cannot endure it any longer. It were wiser to throw away such a heart, even if it brings me nothing in return." " O, very well," said the man of office, making an entry in his volume. " Your affair will be easily trans- acted. This species of brokerage makes no inconsider- able part of my business ; and there is always a large assortment of the article to select from. Here, if I mistake not, comes a pretty fair sample." Even as he spoke the door was gently and slowly thrust ajar, affording a glimpse of the slender figure of a young girl, who, as she timidly entered, seemed to bring the light and cheerfulness of the outer atmosphere into the somewhat gloomy apartment. We know not her errand there, nor can we reveal whether the young man gave up his heart into her custody. If so, the arrangement was neither better nor worse than in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, where the parallel sensibilities of a similar age, importunate affections, and the easy satisfaction of characters not deeply conscious of themselves, supply the place of any profounder sympathy. Not always, however, was the agency of the passions and affections an office of so little trouble. It happened, rarely, indeed, in proportion to the cases that came 86 Mosses from an Old Manse. under an ordinary rule, but still it did happen that a heart was occasionally brought hither of such exquisite material, so delicately attempered, and so curiously wrought, that no other heart could be found to match it. It might almost be considered a misfortune, in a worldly point of view, to be the possessor of such a diamond of the purest water ; since in any reasonable probability it could only be exchanged for an ordinary pebble, or a bit of cunningly-manufactured glass, or, at least, for a jewel of native richness, but ill set, or with some fatal flaw, or an earthy vein running through its central lustre. To choose another figure, it is sad that hearts which have their wellspring in the infinite, and contain inexhaustible sympathies, should ever be doomed to pour themselves into shallow vessels, and thus lavish their rich affections on the ground. Strange that the finer and deeper nature, whether in man or woman, while possessed of every other delicate instinct, should so often lack that most invaluable one of preserving itself from contamination with what is of a baser kind ! Sometimes, it is true, the spiritual fountain is kept pure by a wisdom within itself, and sparkles into the light of heaven without a stain from the earthly strata through which it had gushed upward. And sometimes, even here on earth, the pure mingles with the pure, and the inexhaustible is recompensed with the infinite. But these miracles, though he should claim the credit of them, are far beyond the scope of such a superficial agent in human affairs as the figure in the mysterious spectacles. Again the door was opened, admitting the bustle of the city with a fresher reverberation into the Intelligence Office. Now entered a man of wo-begone and downcast look ; it was such an aspect as if he had lost the very soul out of his body, and had traversed all the world over, searching in the dust of the highways, and along the shady footpaths, and beneath the leaves of The Intelligence Office. 87 the forest, and among the sands of the sea shore in hopes to recover it again. He had bent an anxious glance along the pavement of the street as he came hitherward ; he looked also in the angle of the doorstep, and upon the floor of the room ; and, finally, coming up to the Man of Intelligence, he gazed through the inscrutable spectacles which the latter wore as if the lost treasure might be hidden within his eyes. " I have lost " he began ; and then he paused. " Yes," said the Intelligencer, " I see that you have lost but what ? " " I have lost a precious jewel !" replied the unfortunate person, " the like of which is not to be found among any prince's treasures. While I possessed it, the contempla- tion of it was my sole and sufficient happiness. No price should have purchased it of me ; but it has fallen from my bosom where I wore it in my careless wanderings about the city." After causing the stranger to describe the marks of his lost jewel, the Intelligencer opened a drawer of the oaken cabinet which has been mentioned as forming a part of the furniture of the room. Here were deposited whatever articles had been picked up in the streets, until the right owners should claim them. It was a strange and heterogeneous collection. Not the least remarkable part of it was a great number of wedding rings, each one of which had been riveted upon the finger with holy vows, and all the mystic potency that the most solemn rites could attain, but had, nevertheless, proved too slippery for the wearer's vigilance. The gold of some was worn thin, betokening the attrition of years of wedlock ; others, glittering from the jeweller's shop, must have been lost within the honeymoon. There were ivory tablets, the leaves scribbled over with sentiments that had been the deepest truths of the writer's earlier years, but which were now quite obliterated from his memory. So scrupu- 88 Mosses from an Old Manse. lously were articles preserved in this depository, that not even withered flowers were rejected ; white roses, and blush roses, and moss roses, fit emblems of virgin purity and shamefacedness, which had been lost or flung away, and trampled into the pollution of the streets ; locks of hair the golden and the glossy dark the long tresses of woman and the crisp curls of man, signified that lovers were now and then so heedless of the faith en- trusted to them as to drop its symbol from the treasure place of the bosom. Many of these things were imbued with perfumes, and perhaps a sweet scent had departed from the lives of their former possessors ever since they had so wilfully or negligently lost them. Here were gold pencil cases, littie ruby hearts with golden arrows through them, bosom pins, pieces of coin, and small articles of every description, comprising nearly all that have been lost since a long time ago. Most of them, doubtless, had a history and a meaning, if there were time to search it out and room to tell it. Whoever has missed any thing valuable, whether out of his heart, mind, or pocket, would do well to make inquiry at the Central Intelligence Office. And in the corner of one of the drawers of the oaken cabinet, after considerable research, was found a great pearl, looking like the soul of celestial purity, congealed and polished. "There is my jewel! my very pearl!" cried the stranger, almost beside himself with rapture. "It is mine ! Give it me, this moment ! or I shall perish !" " I perceive," said the Man of Intelligence, examining it more closely, " that this is the Pearl of Great Price." "The very same," answered the stranger. "Judge, then, of my misery at losing it out of my bosom ! Re- store it to me 1 I must not live without it an instant longer." " Pardon me," rejoined the Intelligencer, calmly, "You The Intelligence Office. 89 ask what is beyond my duty. This pearl, as you well know, is held upon a peculiar tenure ; and having once let it escape from your keeping, you have no greater claim to it nay, not so great as any other person. I cannot give it back." Nor could the entreaties of the miserable man who saw before his eyes the jewel of his life without the power to reclaim it soften the heart of this stern being, impassive to human sympathy, though exercising such an apparent influence over human fortunes. Finally the loser of the inestimable pearl clutched his hands among his hair, and ran madly forth into the world, which was affrighted at his desperate looks. There passed him on the doorstep a fashionable young gentleman, whose busi- ness was to inquire for a damask rosebud, the gift of his lady love, which he had lost out of his button hole within an hour after receiving it. So various were the errands of those who visited this Central Office, where all human wishes seemed to be made known, and so far as destiny would allow, negotiated to their fulfilment. The next that entered was a man beyond the middle age, bearing the look of one who knew the world and his own course in it. He had just alighted from a hand- some private carriage, which had orders to wait in the street while its owner transacted his business. This person came up to the desk with a quick, determined step, and looked the Intelligencer in the face with a resolute eye ; though, at the same time, some secret trouble gleamed from it in red and dusky light. " I have an estate to dispose of," said he, with a brevity that seemed characteristic. " Describe it," said the Intelligencer. The applicant proceeded to give the boundaries of his property, its nature, comprising tillage, pasture, wood- land, and pleasure grounds, in ample circuit ; together with a mansion house, in the construction of which it 90 Mosses from an Old Manse. had been his object to realize a castle in the air, harden- ing its shadowy walls into granite, and rendering its visionary splendor perceptible to the awakened eye. Judging from his description, it was beautiful enough to vanish like a dream, yet substantial enough to endure for centuries. He spoke, too, of the gorgeous furniture, the refinements of upholstery, and all the luxurious arti- fices that combined to render this a residence where life might flow onward in a stream of golden days, undis- turbed by the ruggedness which fate loves to fling into it. " I am a man of strong will," said he, in conclusion ; " and at my first setting out in life, as a poor, unfriended youth, I resolved to make myself the possessor of such a mansion and estate as this, together with the abundant revenue necessary to uphold it. I have succeeded to the extent of my utmost wish. And this is the estate which I have now concluded to dispose of." "And your terms?" asked the Intelligencer, after taking down the particulars with which the stranger had supplied him. "Easy, abundantly easy!" answered the successful man, smiling, but with a stern and almost frightful con- traction of the brow, as if to quell an inward pang. " I have been engaged in various sorts of business a dis- tiller, a trader to Africa, an East India merchant, a speculator in the stocks and, in the course of these affairs, have contracted an incumbrance of a certain nature. The purchaser of the estate shall merely be required to assume this burden to himself." K I understand you," said the Man of Intelligence, putting his pen behind his ear. " I fear that no bargain can be negotiated on these conditions. Very probably the next possessor may acquire the estate with a similar incumbrance, but it will be of his own contracting, and will not lighten your burden in the least." " And am I to live on," fiercely exclaimed the stranger, The Intelligence Office. 91 " with the dirt of these accursed acres and the granite of this infernal mansion crushing down my soul ? How, if I should turn the edifice into an almshouse or a hospital, or tear it down and build a church ?" "You can at least make the experiment," said the Intelligencer ; " but the whole matter is one which you must settle for yourself." The man of deplorable success withdrew, and got into his coach, which rattled off lightly over the wooden pavements, though laden with the weight of much land, a stately house, and ponderous heaps of gold, all com- pressed into an evil conscience. There now appeared many applicants for places ; among the most noteworthy of whom was a small, smoke-dried figure, who gave himself out to be one of the bad spirits that had waited upon Doctor Faustus in his laboratory. He pretended to show a certificate of character, which, he averred, had been given him by that famous necromancer, and countersigned by several masters whom he had subsequently served. " I am afraid, my good friend," observed the Intelli- gencer, " that your chance of getting a service is but poor. Nowadays, men act the evil spirit for themselves and their neighbors, and play the part more effectually than ninety-nine out of a hundred of your fraternity." But, just as the poor fiend was assuming a vaporous consistency, being about to vanish through the floor in sad disappointment and chagrin, the editor of a political newspaper chanced to enter the office in quest of a scribbler of party paragraphs. The former servant of Doctor Faustus, with some misgivings as to his suffi- ciency of venom, was allowed to try his hand in this capacity. Next appeared, likewise seeking a service, the mysterious man in Red, who had aided Bonaparte in his ascent to imperial power. He was examined as to his qualifications by an aspiring politician, but finally 92 Mosses from an Old Manse. rejected, as lacking familiarity with the cunning tactics of the present day. People continued to succeed each other with as much briskness as if every body turned aside, out of the roar and tumult of the city, to record here some want, or superfluity, or desire. Some had goods or possessions, of which they wished to negotiate the sale. A China merchant had lost his health by a long residence in that wasting climate. He very liberally offered his disease, and his wealth along with it, to any physician who would rid him of both together. A soldier offered his wreath of laurels for as good a leg as that which it had cost him on the battle field. One poor weary wretch desired nothing but to be accommodated with any creditable method of laying down his life ; for misfortune and pecuniary troubles had so subdued his spirits that he could no longer conceive the possibility of happiness, nor had the heart to try for it. Nevertheless, happening to overhear some conversation in the Intelligence Office respecting wealth to be rapidly accumulated by a certain mode of speculation, he resolved to live out this one other experiment of better fortune. Many persons desired to exchange their youthful vices for others better suited to the gravity of advancing age ; a few, we are glad to say, made earnest efforts to exchange vice for virtue, and, hard as the bargain was, succeeded in effecting it. But it was remarkable that what all were the least willing to give up, even on the most advanta- geous terms, were the habits, the oddities, the charac- teristic traits, the little ridiculous indulgences, somewhere between faults and follies, of which nobody but them- selves could understand the fascination. The great folio, in which the Man of Intelligence recorded all these freaks of idle hearts, and aspirations of deep hearts, and desperate longings of miserable hearts, and evil prayers of perverted hearts, would be curious The Intelligence Office. 93 reading were it possible to obtain it for publication. Human character in its individual developments human nature in the mass may best be studied in its wishes ; and this was the record of them all. There was an end- less diversity of mode and circumstance, yet withal such a similarity in the real groundwork, that any one page of the volume whether written in the days before the Flood, or the yesterday that is just gone by, or to be written on the morrow that is close at hand, or a thou- sand ages hence might serve as a specimen of the whole. Not but that there were wild sallies of fantasy that could scarcely occur to more than one man's brain, whether reasonable or lunatic. The strangest wishes yet most incident to men who had gone deep into scientific pursuits, and attained a high intellectual stage, though not the loftiest were, to contend with Nature, and wrest from her some secret, or some power, which she had seen fit to withhold from mortal grasp. She loves to delude her aspiring students, and mock them with mysteries that seem but just beyond their utmost reach. To concoct new minerals, to produce new forms of vegetable life, to create an insect, if nothing higher in the living scale, is a sort of wish that has often revelled in the breast of a man of science. An astronomer, who lived far more among the distant worlds of space than in this lower sphere, recorded a wish to behold the opposite side of the moon, which, unless the system of the firmament be reversed, she can never turn towards the earth. On the same page of the volume was written the wish of a little child to have the stars for playthings. The most ordinary wish, that was written down with wearisome recurrence, was of course, for wealth, wealth, wealth, in sums from a few shillings up to unreckonable thousands. But in reality this often-repeated expression covered as many different desires. Wealth is the golden essence of the outward world, embodying almost every 94 Mosses from an Old Manse. thing that exists beyond the limits of the soul ; and therefore it is the natural yearning for the life in the midst of which we find ourselves, and of which gold is the condition of enjoyment, that men abridge into this general wish. Here and there, it is true, the volume testified to some heart so perverted as to desire gold for its own sake. Many wished for power ; a strange desire indeed, since it is but another form of slavery. Old people wished for the delights of youth ; a fop, for a fashionable coat ; an idle reader, for a new novel ; a versifier, for a rhyme to some stubborn word ; a painter, for Titian's secret of coloring ; a prince, for a cottage ; a republican, for a kingdom and a palace ; a libertine, for his neighbor's wife ; a man of palate, for green peas ; and a poor man, for a crust of bread. The ambitious desires of public men, elsewhere so craftily concealed, were here expressed openly and boldly, side by side with the unselfish wishes of the philanthropist for the welfare of the race, so beautiful, so comforting, in contrast with the egotism that continually weighed self against the world. Into the darker secrets of the Book of Wishes we will not penetrate. It would be an instructive employment for a student of mankind, perusing this volume carefully and com- paring its records with men's perfected designs, as expressed in their deeds and daily life, to ascertain how far the one accorded with the other. Undoubtedly, in most cases, the correspondence would be found remote. The holy and generous wish, that rises like incense from a pure heart towards heaven, often lavishes its sweet perfume on the blast of evil times. The foul, selfish, murderous wish, that steams forth from a cor- rupted heart, often passes into the spiritual atmosphere without being concreted into an earthly deed. Yet this volume is probably truer, as a representation of the human heart, than is the living drama of action as it The Intelligence Office. 95 evolves around us. There is more of good and more of evil in it ; more redeeming points of the bad and more errors of the virtuous ; higher upsoarings, and baser degradation of the soul ; in short, a more per- plexing amalgamation of vice and virtue than we witness in the outward world. Decency and external conscience often produce a far fairer outside than is warranted by the stains within. And be it owned, on the other hand, that a man seldom repeats to his nearest friend, any more than he realizes in act, the purest wishes, which, at some blessed time or other, have arisen from the depths of his nature and witnessed for him in this volume. Yet there is enough on every leaf to make the good man shudder for his own wild and idle wishes, as well as for the sinner, whose whole life is the incarnation of a wicked desire. But again the door is opened, and we hear the tu- multuous stir of the world a deep and awful sound, expressing in another form some portion of what is written in the volume that lies before the Man of Intel- ligence. A grandfatherly personage tottered hastily into the office, with such an earnestness in his infirm alacrity that his white hair floated backward as he hurried up to the desk, while his dim eyes caught a momentary lustre from his vehemence of purpose. This vener- able figure explained that he was in search of To- morrow. " I have spent all my life in pursuit of it," added the sage old gentleman, "being assured that To-morrow has some vast benefit or other in store for me. But I am now getting a little in years, and must make haste ; for, unless I overtake To-morrow soon, I begin to be afraid it will finally escape me." " This fugitive To-morrow, my venerable friend," said the Man of Intelligence, " is a stray child of Time, and is flying from his father into the region of the infinite. g6 Mosses from an Old Manse. Continue your pursuit, and you will doubtless came up with him ; but as to the earthly gifts which you expect, he has scattered them all among a throng of Yester- days." Obliged to content himself with this enigmatical response, the grandsire hastened forth with a quick clatter of his staff upon the floor ; and, as he disap- peared, a little boy scampered through the door in chase of a butterfly which had got astray amid the barren sunshine of the city. Had the old gentleman been shrewder, he might have detected To-morrow under the semblance of that gaudy insect. The golden butterfly glistened through the shadowy apartment, and brushed its wings against the Book of Wishes, and fluttered forth again with the child still in pursuit. A man now entered, in neglected attire, with the aspect of a thinker, but somewhat too roughhewn and brawny for a scholar. His face was full of sturdy vigor, with some finer and keener attribute beneath. Though harsh at first, it was tempered with the glow of a large, warm heart, which had force enough to heat his power- ful intellect through and through. He advanced to the Intelligencer and looked at him with a glance of such stern sincerity that perhaps few secrets were beyond its scope. " I seek for Truth," said he. "It is precisely the most rare pursuit that has ever come under my cognizance," replied the Intelligencer, as he made the new inscription in his volume. " Most men seek to impose some cunning falsehood upon them- selves for truth. But I can lend no help to your researches. You must achieve the miracle for yourself. At some fortunate moment you may find Truth at your side, or perhaps she may be mistily discerned far in advance, or possibly behind you." "Not behind me," said the seeker; "for I have left The Intelligence Office. 97 nothing on my track without a thorough investigation. She flits before me, passing now through a naked soli- tude, and now mingling with the throng of a popular assembly, and now writing with the pen of a French philosopher, and now standing at the altar of an old cathedral, in the guise of a Catholic priest, performing the high mass. O weary search ! But I must not falter; and surely my heart-deep quest of Truth shall avail at last." He paused and fixed his eyes upon the Intelligencer with a depth of investigation that seemed to hold com- merce with the inner nature of this being, wholly regard- less of his external development. "And what are you?" said he. "It will not satisfy me to point to this fantastic show of an Intelligence Office and this mockery of business. Tell me what is beneath it, and what your real agency in life and your influence upon mankind." "Yours is a mind," answered the Man of Intelli- gence, " before which the forms and fantasies that con- ceal the inner idea from the multitude vanish at once and leave the naked reality beneath. Know, then, the secret. My agency in worldly action, my connection with the press, and tumult, and intermingling, and de- velopment of human affairs is merely delusive. The desire of man's heart does for him whatever I seem to do. I am no minister of action, but the Recording Spirit." What further secrets were then spoken remains a mystery, inasmuch as the roar of the city, the bustle of human business, the outcry of the jostling masses, the rush and tumult of man's life, in its noisy and brief career, arose so high that it drowned the words of these two talkers ; and whether they stood talking in the moon, or in Vanity Fair, or in a city of this actual world, is more than I can say. 7 10 ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL. ONE of the few incidents of Indian warfare naturally susceptible of the moonlight of romance was that expe- dition undertaken for the defence of the frontiers in the year 1725, which resulted in the well-remembered " Lovell's Fight." Imagination, by casting certain cir- cumstances judicially into the shade, may see much to admire in the heroism of a little band who gave battle to twice their number in the heart of the enemy's coun- try. The open bravery displayed by both parties was in accordance with civilized ideas of valor ; and chivalry itself might not blush to record the deeds of one or two individuals. The battle, though so fatal to those who fought, was not unfortunate in its consequences to the country ; for it broke the strength of a tribe and con- duced to the peace which subsisted during several ensuing years. History and tradition are unusually minute in their memorials of this affair ; and the captain of a scouting party of frontier men has acquired as actual a military renown as many a victorious leader of thousands. Some of the incidents contained in the following pages will be recognized, notwithstanding the substitution of fictitious names, by such as have heard, from old men's lips, the fate of the few combatants who were in a condition to retreat after "Lovell's Fight." * * * * * The early sunbeams hovered cheerfully upon the tree tops, beneath which two weary and wounded men had Roger Malvirts Burial, 99 stretched their limbs the night before. Their bed of withered oak leaves was strewn upon the small level space, at the foot of a rock, situated near the summit of one of the gentle swells by which the face of the country is there diversified. The mass of granite, rearing its smooth, flat surface fifteen or twenty feet above their heads, was not unlike a gigantic gravestone, upon which the veins seemed to form an inscription in forgotten characters. On a tract of several acres around this rock, oaks and other hard-wood trees had supplied the place of the pines, which were the usual growth of the land ; and a young and vigorous sapling stood close beside the travellers. The severe wound of the elder man had probably deprived him of sleep ; for, so soon as the first ray of sunshine rested on the top of the highest tree, he reared himself painfully from his recumbent posture and sat erect. The deep lines of his countenance and the scattered gray of his hair marked him as past the middle age ; but his muscular frame would, but for the effects of his wound, have been as capable of sustaining fatigue as in the early vigor of life. Languor and exhaustion now sat upon his haggard features ; and the despairing glance which he sent forward through the depths of the forest proved his own conviction that his pilgrimage was at an end. He next turned his eyes to the companion who reclined by his side. The youth for he had scarcely attained the years of manhood- lay, with his head upon his arm, in the embrace of an unquiet sleep, which a thrill of pain from his wounds seemed each moment on the point of breaking. His right hand grasped a musket ; and, to judge from the violent action of his features, his slumbers were bringing back a vision of the conflict of which he was one of the few survivors. A shout deep and loud in his dreaming fancy found its way in an imperfect murmur to his lips ; TOO Mosses from an Old Manse. and, starting even at the slight sound of his own voice, he suddenly awoke. The first act of reviving recollection was to make anxious inquiries respecting the condition of his wounded fellow traveller. The latter shook his head. " Reuben, my boy," said he, " this rock beneath which we sit will serve for an old hunter's gravestone. There is many and many a long mile of howling wilderness before us yet ; nor would it avail me any thing if the smoke of my own chimney were but on the other side of that swell of land. The Indian bullet was deadlier than I thought." " You are weary with our three days' travel," replied the youth, " and a little longer rest will recruit you. Sit you here while I search the woods for the herbs and roots that must be our sustenance ; and, having eaten, you shall lean on me, and we will turn our faces home- ward. I doubt not that, with my help, you can attain to some one of the frontier garrisons." " There is not two days' life in me, Reuben," said the other, calmly, " and I will no longer burden you with my useless body, when you can scarcely support your own. Your wounds are deep and your strength is failing fast ; yet, if you hasten onward alone, you may be preserved. For me there is no hope, and I will await death here." " If it must be so, I will remain and watch by you," said Reuben, resolutely. "No, my son, no," rejoined his companion. "Let the wish of a dying man have weight with you ; give me one grasp of your hand, and get you hence. Think you that my last moments will be eased by the thought that I leave you to die a more lingering death ? I have loved you like a father, Reuben ; and at a time like this I should have something of a father's authority. I charge you to be gone, that I may die in peace." Roger Malvirfs Burial. 101 " And because you have been a father to me, should I therefore leave you to perish and to lie unburied in the wilderness ? " exclaimed the youth. " No ; if your end be in truth approaching, I will watch by you and receive your parting words. I will dig a grave here by the rock, in which, if my weakness overcome me, we will rest together ; or, if Heaven gives me strength, I will seek my way home." "In the cities and wherever men dwell," replied the other, " they bury their dead in the earth ; they hide them from the sight of the living ; but here, where no step may pass perhaps for a hundred years, wherefore should I not rest beneath the open sky, covered only by the oak leaves when the autumn winds shall strew them ? And for a monument, here is this gray rock, on which my dying hand shall carve the name of Roger Malvin ; and the traveller in days to come will know that here sleeps a hunter and a warrior. Tarry not, then, for a folly like this, but hasten away, if not for your own sake, for hers who will else be desolate." Malvin spoke the last few words in a faltering voice, and their effect upon his companion was strongly visible. They reminded him that there were other and less questionable duties than that of sharing the fate of a man whom his death could not benefit. Nor can it be affirmed that no selfish feeling strove to enter Reuben's heart, though the consciousness made him more earnestly resist his companion's entreaties. " How terrible to wait the slow approach of death in this solitude ! " exclaimed he. " A brave man does not shrink in the battle ; and, when friends stand round the bed, even women may die composedly ; but here " " I shall net shrink even here, Reuben Bourne," inter- rupted Malvin. " I am a man of no weak heart ; and, if I were, there is a surer support than that of earthly friends. You are young, and life is dear to you. Your 102 Mosses from an Old Manse. last moments will need comfort far more than mine ; and when you have laid me in the earth, and are alone, and night is settling on the forest, you will feel all the bitter- ness of the death that may now be escaped. But I will urge no selfish motive to your generous nature. Leave me for my sake, that, having said a prayer for your safety, I may have space to settle my account undisturbed by worldly sorrows." "And your daughter, how shall I dare to meet her eye ? " exclaimed Reuben. " She will ask the fate of her father, whose life I vowed to defend with my own. Must I tell her that he travelled three days' march with me from the field of battle, and that then I left him to perish in the wilderness? Were it not better to lie down and die by your side than to return safe and say this to Dorcas ? " " Tell my daughter," said Roger Malvin, " that, though yourself sore wounded, and weak, and weary, you led my tottering footsteps many a mile, and left me only at my earnest entreaty, because I would not have your blood upon my soul. Tell her that through pain and danger you were faithful, and that, if your lifeblood could have saved me, it would have flowed to its last drop; and tell her that you will be something dearer than a father, and that my blessing is with you both, and that my dying eyes can see a long and pleasant path in which you will journey together." As Malvin spoke he almost raised himself from the ground, and the energy of his concluding words seemed to fill the wild and lonely forest with a vision of happi- ness ; but, when he sank exhausted upon his bed of oak leaves, the light which had kindled in Reuben's eye was quenched. He felt as if it were both sin and folly to think of happiness at such a moment. His companion watched his changing countenance, and sought with generous art to wile him to his own good. Roger M al-