REESE LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 BY DON? G. MITCHELL, 
 
BOUND TOGETHER: 
 
 SHEAF OF PAPERS 
 
 BY THE AUTHOB OP 
 
 "WET DAYS AT EDGEWOOD," REVERIES OF 
 A BACHELOR," ETC. 
 
 NEW YOKE 
 
 CHARLES SCEIBNE&S SONS 
 1893 
 
COPYRIGHT, 
 
 BY DONALD G. MITCHELL 
 
 TROW 9 
 
 PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY, 
 NEW YORK. 
 
PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 TWO or three of the papers contained in this vol 
 ume have already appeared in print ; the others 
 are new to type, though some of them may date back a 
 half dozen years, or more. I wish they were fresher ; I 
 wish they were better. Yet they contain things which 
 seemed to me true and worth saying, when they first 
 came to my pen; and which, now that I re-read them, 
 seem still to be true ; else, I would not say them again. 
 The book is a medley, in which the grandiloquence 
 of open-air speech is set beside the easy familiarities of 
 the chimney corner. But what more could be looked 
 for in a Sheaf of Papers for which I could find after 
 considerable search no more unifying title, than to 
 say they are BO UND TOGETHER? 
 
 D. G. M. 
 
 EDGEWOOD, March, 1884. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 I. WASHINGTON IRVING, 1783-1883, . . 3 
 II. TITIAN AND HIS TIMES, ... 19 
 
 ///. PROCESSION OF THE MONTHS, . . 59 
 
 AMONG THE SNOWS, 61 
 
 SPRING -TIDE, .-79 
 
 OLD FOURTH AND FRUITS, .... 98 
 PLAYTIME, PLAYS, AND PLANTING,. . .115 
 
 IV. BEGINNINGS OF AN OLD TOWN, . .135 
 NORWICH, 1659-1859, 137 
 
 CENTENNIAL ADDRESS, . . . . . 139 
 
 V. TWO COLLEGE TALKS, ...... . . 161 
 
 FIRST TALK, 163 
 
 SECOND TALK, 192 
 
viii CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGB 
 
 VI. IN-DOORS AND OUT OF DOORS, . . 205 
 
 FIRES AND FIRESIDE, ..... 207 
 
 HIGHWAYS AND PARKS, ..... 228 
 
 HOUSE INTERIORS, , . . . . 252 
 
 HOMES AND HOLIDAYS, 27^ 
 
I. 
 
 WASHINGTON IRVING. 
 1783-1883. 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING. 
 
 Address at the Tarrytown Centennial Celebration 
 April 3, 1883. 
 
 3U are met to-night to pay tribute to the mem 
 ory of a man we all loved born a hundred 
 years ago. 
 
 Yet, we who put voice to your tribute are brought 
 to pause at the very start : Who can say over again 
 in a way that shall make listeners the praises of 
 a balmy day in June ? 
 
 Simply to recall him however is I think 
 to honor him : for there is no memory of him how 
 ever shadowy or vagrant which is not grateful to 
 you, to me and to all the reading world. 
 
 It is now well nigh upon thirty-five years since 
 I first met Mr. Irving : It was in a sunny parlor in 
 one of the houses of that Colonnade Row which 
 stands opposite the Astor Library in Lafayette Place, 
 
4 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 New York. I can recall vividly the trepidation 
 which I carried to that meeting so eager to en 
 counter the man whom all honored and admired : 
 so apprehensive lest a chilling dignity might dis 
 turb my ideal. And when that smiling, quiet, well- 
 preserved gentleman (I could hardly believe him 
 sixty-five) left his romp with some of his little kins 
 folk, to give me a hearty shake of the hand, and 
 thereafter to run on in lively humorsome chat 
 stealing all trepidation out of one, by I know not 
 what kindly magnetism of voice and manner, it was 
 as if some one were playing counterfeit : as if the 
 venerated author were yet to appear and displace this 
 beaming, winning personality, with some awful dig 
 nity that should put me again into worshipful tremor. 
 
 But no : this was indeed Mr. Irving hard as it 
 was to adjust this gracious presence so full of benig 
 nity, with the author who had told the story of the 
 Knickerbockers and of Columbus. 
 
 Another puzzle to me was how this easy-going 
 gentleman, with his winning mildness and quiet 
 deliberation as if he never could, and never did, 
 and never would knuckle down to hard task-work 
 should have reeled out those hundreds nay thou 
 sands of pages of graceful, well-ordered, sparkling 
 English. 
 
 I could not understand how he did it. I do not 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING. 5 
 
 think we ever altogether understand how the birds 
 sing and sing ; and yet, with feathers quite un 
 ruffled, and eyes always a-twinkle. 
 
 My next sight of Mr. Irving was hereabout, at his 
 own home. By his kind invitation I had come up 
 to pass a day with him at Sunnyside, and he had 
 promised me a drive through Sleepy Hollow. 
 
 What a promise that was ! No boy ever went to 
 his Christmas Holidays more joyously I think, than 
 I, to meet that engagement. 
 
 It was along this road, beside which we are as 
 sembled to-night that we drove. He all alert and 
 brisk, with the cool morning breeze blowing down 
 upon us from over Haverstraw heights and across 
 the wide sweep of River. 
 
 He called attention to the spot of poor Andre s 
 capture not forbearing that little touch of sympa 
 thy, which came to firmer, yet not disloyal expres 
 sion, afterward, in his story of Washington. A 
 sweep of his whip-hand told me the trees under 
 which Paulding and the rest chanced to be loitering 
 on that memorable day. 
 
 We were whirling along the same road a short 
 way farther northward, when I ventured a query 
 about the memorable night-ride of Ichabod Crane 
 and of the Headless Horseman. 
 
6 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 Aye, it was thereabout, that tragedy came off too. 
 
 " Down this bit of road the old horse Gunpow 
 der came thundering : there away Brom Bones 
 with his Pumpkin (I tell you this in confidence," he 
 said) "was in waiting; and along here they went 
 clattering neck and neck Ichabod holding a good 
 seat till Van Ripper s saddle-girths gave way, and 
 then bumping and jouncing from side to side as he 
 clung to mane or neck, (a little pantomime with 
 the whip making it real) and so at last away yon 
 der well, where you like, the poor pedagogue went 
 sprawling to the ground I hope in a soft place." 
 And I think the rollicking humor of it was as much 
 enjoyed by him that autumn morning, and that he 
 felt in his bones just as relishy a smack of it all 
 as if Katrina Van Tassel had held her quilting frolic 
 only on the y ester-night. 
 
 Irving first came to know Tarrytown and Sleepy 
 Hollow, when a boy of fourteen or fifteen he 
 passing some holidays in these parts, I think with 
 his friend Paulding. To those days belong much of 
 that idle sauntering along brooksides hereabout 
 with fly -books and fish-rods, and memories of Wal 
 ton, which get such delightful recognition in a cer 
 tain paper of the Sketch-Book. 
 
 Then, too, he with his companions came to know 
 the old Dutch farmers of the region whose home 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING. ^ 
 
 interiors found their way afterwards into his 
 books. 
 
 I think he pointed out also, with a significant 
 twinkle of the eye, which the dullest boy would have 
 understood, some orchards, with which he had early 
 acquaintance : and specially too upon some hill 
 top (which I think I could find now) a farmery, fa 
 mous for its cider mill and the good cider made 
 there : he, with the rest testing it over and over 
 in the old slow way with straws but provoked once 
 on a time to a fuller test, by turning the hogshead, 
 so they might sip from the open bung ; and then 
 (whether out of mischief or mishandling, he did not 
 absolutely declare to me) the big barrel got the bet 
 ter of them, and set off upon a lazy roll down the 
 hill going faster and faster they, more and more 
 frightened, and scudding away slant-wise over the 
 fences the yelling farmer appearing suddenly at 
 the top of the slope, but too broad in the beam for 
 any sharp race, and the hogshead between them 
 plunging, and bounding, and giving out ghostly, gut 
 tural explosions of sound, and cider, at every turn. 
 
 You may judge if Mr. Irving did not put a nice 
 touch to that story ! 
 
 After this memorable autumn drive amongst the 
 hills, I met with Mr. Irving frequently at his own 
 home ; and shall I be thought impertinent and in- 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
8 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 discreet if I say, that at times rare times it is 
 true I have seen this most amiable gentleman 
 manifest a little of that restive choler which some 
 time flamed up in William the Testy : not long- 
 lived, not deliberate but a little human blaze of 
 impatience at something gone awry in the dressing 
 of a garden border, in care of some stable-pet 
 that was all gone with the first blaze, but marked 
 and indicated the sources of that wrathy and pious 
 zest (with which he is not commonly credited) 
 and with which he loved to put a contemptuous 
 thrust of his sharper language into the bloat of 
 upstart pride, and of conceit, and of insolent pre 
 tension. 
 
 The boy-mischief in him which led him out from 
 his old home in William Street after hours over 
 the shed-roof, lingered in him for a good while, I 
 think, and lent not a little point to some of the 
 keener pictures of the Knickerbocker history : and 
 if I do not mistake, there was now and then a quiet 
 chuckle, as he told me of the foolish indignation 
 with which some descendants of the old Dutch 
 worthies had seen their ancestors put to a tender 
 broil over the playful blaze of his humor. 
 
 Indeed there was a spontaneity and heartiness 
 about that Knickerbocker history, which I think he 
 carried a strong liking for, all his life. 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING. 9 
 
 The Sketch-Book, written years later, and when 
 necessity enforced writing, was done with a great 
 audience in his eye ; and he won it, and keeps it 
 bravely. I know there is a disposition to speak of 
 it rather patronizingly and apologetically as if it 
 were reminiscent Anglican conventional as if 
 he would have done better if he had possessed our 
 modern critical bias or if he had been born in 
 Boston or born a philosopher outright : "Well, 
 perhaps so perhaps so ! 
 
 But I love to think and believe that our dear, old 
 Mr. Irving was born just where he should have been 
 born, and wrote in a way that it is hardly worth 
 our while to try and mend for him. 
 
 I understand that a great many promising young 
 people without the fear of the critics before their 
 eyes keep on, persistently reading that old Sketch- 
 Book, with its "Broken Hearts," and " Wife " twin 
 ing like a vine, and " Spectre Bridegroom," and all 
 the rest. 
 
 And there are old people I know, one I am 
 sure of who never visit St. Paul s churchyard 
 without wanting to peep over Irving s shoulders into 
 Mr. Newbury s shop, full of dear old toy-books ; 
 who never go to Stratford upon Avon but there is a 
 hunt first of all for the Red Horse Tavern and 
 the poker which was Irving s sceptre ; never a sail 
 
lo BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 on summer afternoons past the wall of the blue 
 Katskills, but there is a longing lookout for the 
 stray cloud-caps, and an eager listening for the 
 rumbling of the balls which thundered in the ears 
 of poor Rip Van Winkle. 
 
 What, pray, if the hero of Bracebridge Hall be 
 own cousin to Sir Roger de Coverley ? Is that a 
 relationship to be discarded ? And could any other 
 than the writer we honor, carry on more wisely the 
 record of the cousinship, or with so sure a hand and 
 so deft a touch, declare and establish our inheritance 
 in the rural beatitudes of England ? 
 
 It may be true that as we read some of those 
 earlier books of his, we shall come upon some tru 
 isms which in these fast-paced times may chafe us 
 some rhetorical furbelows or broidery, that belong 
 to the wardrobes of the past some tears that flow 
 too easily but scarce ever a page anywhere, but 
 on a sudden some shimmer of buoyant humor, 
 breaks through all the crevices of a sentence a 
 humor not born of Rhetoric or measurable by critic s 
 rules but coming as the winds come and play 
 ing up and down with a frolicsome, mischievous 
 blaze, that warms, and piques, and delights us. 
 
 In the summer of 1852, 1 chanced to be quartered 
 at the same hotel with him in Saratoga for a fort 
 night or more. He was then in his seventieth year 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING, 11 
 
 but still carrying himself easily up and down upon 
 the corridors and along the street, and through the 
 Grove at the Spring. 
 
 I recall vividly the tremulous pride with which, in 
 those far-off days, I was permitted to join in many 
 of these walks. He in his dark suit of such cut 
 and fit, as to make one forget utterly its fashion 
 and remember only the figure of the quiet gentle 
 man, looking hardly middle-aged, with head thrown 
 slightly to one side, and an eye always alert ; not 
 a fair young face dashing past us in its drapery of 
 muslin, but his eye drank in all its freshness and 
 beauty with the keen appetite and the grateful ad 
 miration of a boy : not a dowager brushed us, be 
 dizened with finery, but he fastened the apparition 
 in my memory with some piquant remark as the 
 pin of an entomologist fastens a gaudy fly. 
 
 Other times there was a playful nudge of the el 
 bow, and a curious, meaning lift of the brow to call 
 attention to something of droll aspect perhaps 
 some threatened scrimmage amongst school-boys 
 maybe, only a passing encounter between street 
 dogs for he had all the quick responsiveness to 
 canine language w r hich belonged to the author of 
 Bab and his Friends ; and I have known him to stay 
 his walk for five minutes together in a boyish, eager 
 intentness upon those premonitions of a dog en- 
 
12 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 counter watching the first inquisitive sniff the 
 reminiscent lift of the head then the derogatory 
 growl the growl apprehensive the renewed sniff 
 
 the pauses for reflection, then the milder and dis 
 cursive growls as if either dog could, if he would 
 
 until one or the other thinking more wisely of 
 the matter should turn tail, and trot quietly away. 
 
 I trust I do not seem to vulgarize the occasion in 
 bringing to view these little traits which set before 
 us the man : as I have already said, we cannot 
 honor him more than by recalling him in his full 
 personality. 
 
 Over and over in his shrugs, in a twinkle of his 
 eye, in that arching of his brow, which was curiously 
 full of meaning, did I see, as I thought, the germ 
 of some new chapter, such as crept into his sketch 
 books. Did I intimate as much ? 
 
 "Ah," he would say, "that is game for young 
 sters : we old fellows are not nimble enough to give 
 chase to sentiment." 
 
 He was engaged at that time upon his Life of 
 Washington going out, as I remember, on one 
 of these Saratoga days for a careful inspection of 
 the field of Burgoyne s surrender. 
 
 I asked after the system of his note-making for 
 history. "Ah," he said, "don t talk to me of sys 
 tem : I never had any : you must go to Bancroft for 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING. 13 
 
 that : I have, it is true, my little budgets of notes 
 some tied one way some another and which 
 when I need, I think I come upon in my pigeon 
 holes by a sort of instinct. That is all there is 
 of it." 
 
 There were some two or three beautiful dark-eyed 
 women in that summer at Saratoga, who were his 
 special admiration, and of whose charms of feature 
 he loved to discourse eloquently. 
 
 Those dark eyes led him back, doubtless, to the 
 glad young days when he had known the beauties 
 of Seville and Cordova. Indeed, there was no epi 
 sode in his life of which he was more prone to talk, 
 than of that which carried him in his Spanish stud 
 ies to the delightful regions which lie south of the 
 Guadalquiver. Granada the Alhambra those 
 names made the touchstone of his most gushing and 
 eloquent talk. 
 
 Much as he loved and well as he painted the 
 green fields of Warwickshire, and the hedges and 
 the ivy-clad towers, and the embowered lanes and 
 the primroses and the hawthorn which set off the 
 stories of Bracebridge Hall, yet I think he was never 
 stirred by these memories so much as by the sunny 
 valleys which lay in Andalusia, and by the tinkling 
 fountains and rosy walls, that caught the sunshine 
 in the palace courts of Granada. 
 
14 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 I should say that the crowning literary enthusi- 
 asms of his life were those which grouped them 
 selves first about those early Dutch foregather- 
 ings amongst the Van Twillers and the Stuyvesants 
 and the Van Tassels and next and stronger, those 
 others which grouped about the great Moorish cap 
 tains of Granada. 
 
 In the first that is to say his Knickerbocker 
 studies the historic sense was active but not 
 dominant, and his humor in its first lusty wanton 
 ness went careering through the files of the old 
 magnates, like a boy at play ; and the memory of the 
 play abode with him, and had its keen awakenings 
 all through his life : there was never a year, I sus 
 pect, when the wooden leg of the doughty Peter 
 Stuyvesant did not come clattering, spunkily, and 
 bringing its own boisterous welcome, to his pleased 
 recollection. 
 
 In the Spanish studies and amongst the Moors 
 the historic sense was more dominant, the humor 
 more in hand, and the magnificent ruins of this 
 wrecked nation which had brought its trail of 
 light across Southern Europe from the far East, 
 piqued all his sympathies, appealed to all his livelier 
 fancies, and the splendors of court and camp lent 
 v, lustre to his pages which he greatly relished. 
 
 No English-speaking visitor can go to the Alham- 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING. 15 
 
 bra now, or henceforth ever will go thither, but the 
 name of the author we honor to-night will come 
 to his lip, and will lend, by some subtle magic, 
 the master s silvery utterance to the dash of the 
 fountains, to the soughing of the winds, to the 
 chanting of the birds, who sing in the ruinous 
 courts of the Alhambra. 
 
 But I keep you too long : And yet I have said 
 no word yet of that quality in him, which will, I 
 think, most of all, make Centenary like this follow 
 upon Centenary. 
 
 Tis the kindness in him: tis the simple good- 
 heartedness of the man. 
 
 Did he ever wrong a neighbor ? Did he ever say 
 an unkind thing of you, or me, or any one ? Can 
 you cull me a sneer, that has hate in it, anywhere in 
 his books ? Can you tell me of a thrust of either 
 words, or silence, which has malignity in it ? 
 
 Fashions of books may change do change : a 
 studious realism may put in disorder the quaint 
 dressing of his thought : an elegant philosophy of 
 indifference may pluck out the bowels from his 
 books. 
 
 But the fashion of his heart and of his abiding 
 good-will toward men will last will last while the 
 hills last. 
 
16 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 And when you and I, sir, and all of us are be 
 yond the reach of centennial calls, I think that old 
 Anthony Van Corlear s trumpet will still boom along 
 the banks of the Hudson, heralding a man and a 
 master, who to exquisite graces of speech added 
 purity of life, and to the most buoyant and playful 
 of humors, added a love for all mankind. 
 
 1 Chief Justice Davis presided over the assemblage, and 
 brought to his duties a dignity, a sympathy, and a quiet 
 humor which went far to make the occasion memorable. 
 
II. 
 
 TITIAN AND HIS TIMES. 
 
TITIAN AND HIS TIMES. 
 Read before the Art-School, Yale College. 
 
 T AM to speak of that great painter Titian of 
 -*- the times in which he lived, and of the influ 
 ences under which he wrought. Born in the year 
 1477, he did not die until the year 1576 lacking 
 only one of a completed century. 
 
 Within the limits of that century, outlined by the 
 Life of Titian, Columbus found his way to the end 
 of his voyagings Westward, and Vasco de Gama 
 closed his great voyages Eastward ; Luther was born 
 and fought his fight, and died; and so did Calvin 
 and Melancthon. 
 
 The reign of Charles V. of Spain, of Francis I. of 
 France, of Henry VIII. of England, all began years 
 after Titian was born, and all ended years before 
 Titian was dead. 
 
20 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 The same is true of those kings of Art Eaphael 
 and Correggio. Bramante, the first architect of St. 
 Peter s, and Michael Angelo his successor, were both 
 his contemporaries. 
 
 Lorenzo de Medicis had hardly begun his splendid 
 domination of the Florentines at the birth of Titian, 
 and the career of his more famous son, Leo the 
 Tenth was all to make, and all to end, fifty years 
 before Titian died. He survived fourteen successive 
 popes, and fourteen successive Doges of Venice. In 
 his boyhood the foundations of Henry the Seventh s 
 Chapel were laid at Westminster, and he lived to hear 
 of Queen Elizabeth become one of the great monarchs 
 of Europe, and of her favorite, Sir Walter Raleigh, 
 plotting voyages for colonizing Virginia. Within 
 this stretch of years Loyola arose and founded his 
 great society. The Inquisition was established ; 
 the Moors were driven out forever from the halls of 
 the Alhambra. The Eastern seas and Adriatic were 
 swept by Venetian and Turkish fleets coming by 
 turns to grief. Over and over the tide of war surged 
 through the length and breadth of Italy sometimes 
 wrenching important Venetian cities on the main 
 land from their allegiance, and again drifting them 
 back to the always eager clutch of the Queen of the 
 Adriatic. 
 
 These battles, however, these reigns, these great 
 
TITIAN AND HIS TIMES. 21 
 
 names of which I have made mention only as a sort 
 of index to the great and brilliant period over which 
 Titian s life extended, will have little concern for us 
 to-day save as they may now and then throw a 
 little effective cross-light upon the subject of Titian s 
 Life, and his surroundings. 
 
 His native place was a little mountain town, Piave 
 di Cadore. One may pass through it who goes by 
 the Ampezzo Valley from Southern Bavaria to the 
 head of the Adriatic. It was dependent on Venice 
 in the fifteenth century lying southward of the 
 higher ranges of the Frioul, which made the natural 
 boundary of the German region to the north. There 
 are mountain torrents there gorges jagged 
 peaks tall dolomite cliffs and shaggy remnants of 
 forest : in his day an old castle of Cadore 
 crowned one of the lesser heights. There is not 
 much that is pastoral, save here and there a ledge 
 where goats and cattle browse ; very little to win 
 or keep regard, except of a lover of the picturesque. 
 
 The village lay some sixty miles from Venice, al 
 most due north, and from the tallest of the neigh 
 boring heights on clear days glimpses may be 
 caught of the far away silver sheet of the lagoon with 
 the city of the sea floating in the middle of it. 
 
 They show the cottage where Titian was born ; 
 certainly he had known it as a boy if not born there. 
 
22 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 His father was a man of position with such rec 
 ord of good fighting days and of fighting ancestors 
 before him as gave him rank with patricians. 
 
 How or why the young Titian made choice of the 
 art of painting in which to work out his career, 
 cannot be fairly told. There are apocryphal stories 
 of his doing boyish work with the juices of crushed 
 flowers hard to be believed. He may have heard 
 of Cimabue and Orcagna still more probably of 
 Giotto and Squarcione, who had done work in the 
 near Paduan country ; and the current stories about 
 Giotto and his great fame through Italy, were such 
 as might well kindle the ambition of an adventurous 
 boy : possibly, too, he had seen some of the prints 
 of Mantegna s engravings. However this be, it is 
 certain that he had a strong art craving, and that his 
 father took him as a boy (scarce turned of twelve 
 if so old) to Venice. His journey would lie through 
 Conegliano and Treviso, in whose neighborhood he 
 would begin to see stately villas of Venetian patri 
 cians ; and thence, by a broad drive, amid other vil 
 las growing more and more frequent, and made gay 
 with decorative frescoes, he would come to Mestre 
 upon the shores of the lagoon, whence he could see 
 the blue line of the towers and houses of the float 
 ing city. A two hours row from this point would 
 land him upon the piazetta of San Marco. 
 
TITIAN AND HIS TIMES. 23 
 
 It was about the year 1490. Venice had indeed 
 passed the zenith of her commercial power and rank. 
 The conquest of Byzantium by the Turks had cut 
 off much of her Eastern trade notably all that 
 through the Black Sea and countries beyond. But 
 still there was no richer State no prouder one. 
 No city so full of luxury and of all delights was to be 
 found in Europe. A king s palace in France or 
 England would not match the home of a Foscari in 
 Venice, in beautiful and luxurious appointments. A 
 king s wife in the West wore no robes richer than 
 those of a Venetian merchant s daughter. 
 
 There had been no wars in those water streets : 
 there were no battered towers, no machicolations, 
 no port-cullis. The green tides lapsing and swell 
 ing with scarce distinguishable rise or fall, were 
 their pride and their defence. 
 
 No church in Italy was so gorgeous, or had such 
 wealth of decoration as San Marco. No ambassa 
 dors to Western Courts were so instructed, so de 
 corous, so proud, so astute as the Venetian am 
 bassadors. It was a grand thing to be a Venetian 
 in those days : and the boy Titian was Venetian, and 
 his father before him, and Cadore was Venetian : 
 who will not believe that the boy s heart leaped with 
 an exultant bound as he first set foot upon the 
 Piazza of San Marco ? 
 
24 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 The Ducal palace was much what it is now save 
 that the tints of the marble walls, and the sculp 
 tures were fresher, and under the arcade one looked 
 in that time sheer through to the centre of the en 
 closed court. The great columns of the Piazetta 
 were in place and the tower (saving only the bel 
 fry and loggia which are of subsequent date). The 
 Church of San Marco was all itself brilliant with 
 its mosaics, and carrying the golden horses above 
 its portal, without suffering from such blaze of color. 
 The tower of the Horologe was not then built, but 
 through a cleft in the houses, at the same point, 
 stretched the Merceria gorgeous with all manner 
 of showy stuffs hanging from balconies hang 
 ing athwart doors ; there too were displayed saddle 
 housings, richest Cordova leather, mosaics, Venetian 
 glass of every hue, jewels, tresses of gold chains, 
 mirrors, rare bits of carving in wood, in ivory, 
 in marble a blaze of wealth and decorative art 
 of which our Young Visitor could never have 
 dreamed in the wilds of Cadore. He would have 
 seen too in comparative freshness those Byzantine 
 palaces encrusted with various marbles now wholly 
 crumbled and gone : he might see those others, too, 
 of stancher build, with great medallions of porphyry 
 and precious stones, with which Philippe de Comines 
 was so delighted and yet others, then in the first 
 
OF THH 
 
 NIVERSITY ] 
 TITIAN AND HlS ^^f^^^^^ 
 
 lovely glow of their freshness, glittering with fillets 
 of white marble running round pointed windows, 
 and wantoning in flamboyant whirls upon balcony 
 fronts of which the Foscari and Ca di Ferro are 
 types, visible to-day. 
 
 He would be struck too by the varied costumes 
 Greek, Turk, Armenian with furred robes from 
 the Baltic. And if he encountered a great dame 
 upon the narrow calle, she would very likely be fol 
 lowed by a Nubian slave in white cloth, while she 
 would show robe and cap of blue, with her yellow 
 hair bound up may be with a fillet of gold. 
 
 Now observe, that what would most challenge the 
 admiration of any visitor, in looking over the be 
 wildering and enchanting variety of the front of St. 
 Mark s the splendid maze of exhibits through the 
 Merceria the piquant costumes of the Levant and 
 of the North countries, and the lustrous splendor of 
 the walls abutting upon the Grand Canal (before yet 
 the great Renaissance palaces were built) would 
 be the Coloring rather than the Form. This was far 
 truer of Venice in that day than of any Western city. 
 
 If therefore the young Titian in his early dreams 
 of conquest in the domain of art thought first of 
 color as the weapon of conquest, who can wonder ? 
 
 The walls, the stuffs, the very waters and sky of 
 Venice taught him sharply this supreme lesson 
 
26 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 through every noon-day, and in every burst of morn 
 ing over the Adriatic. 
 
 But what was the influence of those who at that 
 time in Venice represented pictorial Art ? 
 
 For a long period Byzantine Art had held ground 
 there : Venice had in fact introduced Byzantine Art 
 to the West, having herself pierced the loop-hole 
 through which had poured those warming Levantine 
 rays, that had waked Western Europe into life. It 
 was natural that Venice should feel a tender regard 
 for Byzantine traditions : she could not forget the 
 golden birds that had warbled in the gardens by 
 the Sea of Marmora at a time when all the music 
 of Italy was only the scream of a falcon. 
 
 But however strong the Byzantine traditions (kept 
 alive during the closing years of the Eastern Empire, 
 by the presence of many cultured Greeks in the city 
 of Venice) strong, I say, as this may have been, 
 it was not in human nature that men should go on 
 forever setting up saints in pairs each with a 
 hand lifted equi-distant from the head, each with a 
 tiara of jewel work, and each set up in a compart 
 ment of its own. The school of Murano, with Gen 
 tile da Fabriano, and the Vivarini had made protest 
 against exceeding severities in their work a half 
 century before Titian : and when he came to Venice 
 the two brothers Bellini represented a far fuller 
 
TITIAN AND HIS TIMES. 27 
 
 measure of the ease and grace and life of the realism 
 which Giotto had taught. 
 
 I suspect Titian in his apprentice-days would 
 have looked no more admiringly upon any painting 
 in Venice than upon that Madonna, by Giovanni 
 Bellini, with its two little angels, and its four flanking 
 saints, which in Titian s time showed its tender grace 
 and loveliness in the Church of the Frari, and which 
 shows the same grace and loveliness there to-day. 
 
 We should have looked to see Titian at once asso 
 ciated with such men as the Bellini : but his father 
 may-be, was a Byzantine conservative : so Titian went 
 with Zuccato a worker in mosaics one of the Guild 
 of Art : and the guild included workers in leather, in 
 jewels, in carving. Painters did not then, or for a 
 long time afterward, look down grandly on decorators. 
 What Titian did with Zuccato we do not know : hard 
 work undoubtedly, and gained that comprehension 
 of lines, and their force, which he needed. Later he 
 is under Gentile Bellini, who must then have re 
 cently come back from Constantinople where he had 
 been at the instance of the Sultan, and where "it is 
 said " he had opportunity to study the shrinking of 
 the muscles, and the disgorgement of the veins from 
 a head cut off in his presence. 
 
 Gentile Bellini remonstrated with Titian for his 
 free touch, and bold, dashing way so no doubt 
 
28 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 did Giovanni Bellini, under whose direction the 
 young artist wrought, after Gentile s death. Indeed 
 Titian encountered no one in those young days in 
 full sympathy with his bold, large manner, save the 
 young Giorgione just of his own age, but more 
 instructed ; and through whose influence he came to 
 have a part in frescoing the new walls of the Fonda- 
 cho dei Tedeschi, then recently risen at the end of 
 the Kialto bridge. What Giorgione did there, was 
 said to be grand : what Titian did, was said to be 
 grander : and hence a jealousy and coolness to 
 which artists (be it said in parenthesis) seem fore 
 ordained. Forty years ago a few remnants of the 
 colored friezes were still upon those walls : all the 
 rest washed out by four hundred years of storms. 
 
 Giorgione was of a make to rival Titian if he had 
 lived : with a fine face and figure, and full of muscu 
 lar energy, he yet loved lute-playing, and all that 
 lute-playing carried with it in those days. We hear 
 of him as going from time to time to the pretty 
 court which the exiled Queen Cornaro (of Cyprus ) 
 had set up in the Paduan country at Asolo a de 
 lightful place for sonneteers and lute-players ! He 
 knew too all the orgies of free-living, and of free- 
 loving at Venice ; and with the heat and the smoke 
 of that sort of life, poor Giorgione was stifled, and 
 died at thirty-two. 
 
TITIAN AND HIS TIMES. 29 
 
 We do not learn that Titian went out to Asolo, or 
 that he ever painted the Queen of Cyprus from the 
 life : paintings of her, he did make, long after her 
 death probably from medals, or sketches which 
 have been copied over and over ; one of such doubt 
 less having given suggestions to Makart for his splen 
 did, scenic canvas shown at Philadelphia in 1876. 
 
 Titian went country-ward more for work than for 
 fetes (save occasional visits to his old home at Ca- 
 dore). Thus we hear of him at Padua in 1511 
 doing the St. Anthony frescos still to be seen ; so 
 he must have encountered there another Cornaro 
 (though not of near kin to the Queen), Luigi Cornaro, 
 who had a grand house in Padua, and the finest 
 collection of paintings and brie a brae who had 
 lived a wild life till forty-five then reformed, and at 
 eighty-one told the story of his reform, and of those 
 methods of abstinence by which he survived till past 
 a hundred, and which made him competent to write 
 comedies at eighty-five. His extreme limit in eat 
 ing was, he says, twelve ounces of food and fourteen 
 ounces of wine per diem. Perhaps Titian gained 
 hints from him that contributed to his hale old age. 
 
 Another city he visited in those days but only 
 after repeated solicitations, which his growing fame 
 made necessary was Ferrara. The name calls up 
 now a grim, great castle reeking with damp odors 
 
30 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 and with grass-grown streets straggling under its 
 murky shadows. Then it was the site of a brilliant 
 court. Alfonso I. (a remote ancestor of Victoria of 
 England) held it held it hardly out of the chances 
 of war : He loved art and letters : he gave a home 
 to Ariosto : he solicited the favors of Eaphael, and 
 Titian : yet more, to show his resolution he 
 was the fifth husband of that much-married and 
 beautiful woman Lucrezia Borgia. I do not know if 
 the latest historic authorities count her a wiiolly vir 
 tuous creature, or a woman disposed to slight irregu 
 larities : but I do know that it is a great pity that we 
 have no undoubted picture of her by Titian to throw 
 in as a make-weight in settling the question of her 
 guilt or her innocence. Her lip as he would have 
 colored and turned it, and the eye as he would 
 have set his flash of light upon it would have 
 helped, seems to me, largely in determining if she 
 connived with her bad brother Cesare and more 
 wicked father, or set them at defiance. 
 
 To Titian s visitiugs at this court are due, with 
 other good work the famous Bacchus and Ariadne 
 now of the National Gallery, London ; a head of 
 Ariosto a noble head of Alfonso, and most of all, 
 a rarer picture long time set as a panel in the 
 palace walls and known wherever art is known 
 I mean "The Tribute Money." 
 
TITIAN AND HIS TIMES. 31 
 
 It is a small picture scarce three feet by two : 
 little more than two heads and two hands of the 
 Christ and Pharisee, and a bit of drapery. It is not 
 in Titian s usual manner before or afterward : lines 
 are clearly denned : the finish most elaborate. Al 
 bert Diirer had been lately in Venice. Albert Diirer 
 and Giovanni Bellini hob-nobbed together : Each 
 admired the other. Did they possibly stimulate 
 Titian, by criticisms upon his gloss of color ? Vasari 
 says it is miraculous stupendous. The ringlets 
 that fall from the head of Christ are distinct even 
 to the dividing of one hair from another : the very 
 web and woof of the red tunic and the blue mantle 
 of Venetian dye (for painters of that age were not 
 archaeologists) can be traced to a thread. Yet 
 with this nicety of detail there is none of the stolid 
 ity of Denner : It will bear close look : it will bear 
 distance. Through lesser merits, the broad bold 
 seizure of the subject tells grandly : The calm, mar 
 ble-like front of the Christ, with clear cut features 
 benignant look an awful dignity makes the 
 shrewd, keen cunning of the low, swart Pharisee 
 more ignoble : and the hands below repeat the con 
 trast, and emphasize the answer, in every tint and 
 line "Kender unto Caesar the things that are 
 Cesar s." 
 
 The painting is now hanging in the gallery at 
 
32 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 Dresden. Titian did not follow up this style of 
 treatment : indeed he is averred to have undervalued 
 and spoken slightingly of its method : Not the 
 only time that a young artist in a whirl of enthusi 
 asm, or of caprice, has accomplished work which 
 has scored with the noblest efforts of his maturer 
 years. 
 
 It is of record that on these early visits to Fer- 
 rara, he with two attendants were furnished rations 
 weekly, after this schedule : "Salad, salt-meat, oil, 
 chestnuts, oranges, tallow-candles, cheese, and five 
 measures of \vine." 
 
 His correspondence too with the Duke is of 
 record from which I quote : "I am entirely at 
 command, should the drawings be considered un 
 satisfactory, and am ready to furnish others ; be 
 cause having given myself body and soul to your 
 Excellence ; there is no pleasure I esteem so great as 
 to be worthy of serving when and where Your Ex 
 cellence may think me fitted to do so." For myself, 
 I do not like the tone of this : and there is much 
 that is even more abject in letters to other princes : 
 The truth is, he was a born courtier, cunningly seek 
 ing favor and patronage. He had a quick eye for 
 gain, and all the avenues of gain full of Venetian 
 sharpness in his bargains, yet making great gifts to 
 princes who were sure to repay him roundly. He 
 
TITIAN AND HIS TIMES. 33 
 
 had manoeuvred so as to possess himself of a sort of 
 brokerage at the Fondacho dei Tedeschi very like 
 one of our custom-house appointments with a 
 snug salary attaching, and little to do : He had also 
 put in claim in these times for work upon the Ducal 
 Palace thereby making soreness of feeling be 
 tween himself and Bellini, who for a long period 
 had governed matters as he chose upon the Piazza 
 of San Marco. 
 
 He is invited too, by his old acquaintance Pietro 
 Bembo, who now holds high position under Leo X. 
 to come to Rome and plant himself there. What if 
 he had : and measured forces with Eaphael and 
 Michel Angelo ? But he did not : Navagero an 
 other friend, who with Aldus Manutius had founded 
 the Aldine Academy advised Titian to remain : 
 Bellini was getting old, and place would soon open 
 for him. Only Pordenone and Palma Vecchio could 
 be called rivals : the first chiefly in fresco, and 
 Palma in the tender and winning delicacy he put 
 into the faces and hands of his saints. 
 
 Titian was now forty : unmarried still ; living 
 at a house midway between the Rialto and St. Mark s 
 working hard notably in this time upon that 
 great canvas of the Assumption of the Virgin for 
 the church of the Frari. 
 
 Every one knows it from gazing on it at the 
 
34 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 Belle Arti, where it now hangs, or from the en 
 graving of Schiavone. 
 
 The twelve stalwart apostles filling all the fore 
 ground above them the great rift of intensely 
 blue sky then the billows of cloud held up by 
 angels on which the Virgin stands with light feet, 
 lifting her hands and rapt face to the opening 
 heavens where the Holy Father is girt about with 
 disporting cherubs. 
 
 The Frati for whom it was painted were dis 
 appointed at first would have declined it perhaps, 
 except that the ambassador of the newly elevated 
 Charles V. then upon the spot, offered to take it 
 off their hands. Perhaps the friars missed in it that 
 effluence of sanctity which would quicken slumber 
 ing devotion to the Holy Virgin. Indeed Titian did 
 not paint divine faces even at his best : He is human 
 through and through. His saints and angels are 
 magnificent creatures; but we feel that the same 
 blood is flowing through them as through us. 
 There is no trick of attenuation, or dimness, or 
 phantasmal splendor to cheat the mind, and make 
 mystery. He does not make strong appeal to those 
 qualities out of which religious sentiment is evolved : 
 his saints, however well-looking, do not breed faith 
 in saintship. He is as incredulous of the super 
 natural as the Agnostics of our day. He cannot 
 
TITIAN AND HIS TIMES. 35 
 
 bring it within the limits of his conception. He 
 has always his intention well in hand : he dominates 
 it thoroughly : he grasps its every side a com 
 plete, undoubted, intellectual mastery into which 
 any vague beatific range of sentiment has not en 
 tered. Holy Virgins as many as you like : blood 
 and tissue and veins all perfect : but the secret of 
 their charms under his brush must lie in their hu 
 manity, and not in an intangible somewhat (which 
 some great painters have seemed to reach) a 
 somewhat, subtler and finer and diviner. Titian s 
 brain worked on the honest level of his eyes, and 
 not above them : but those great eyes saw miracles 
 of light and life and color, where you and I would 
 have seen only a neighbor s face ! 
 
 When, or why, or where, Titian married I cannot 
 surely find : but at forty-five or thereabout, he was 
 living with a wife Cecilia, who became the mother of 
 that renegade son Pomponio for whom the father 
 secured ecclesiastical preferment, and who went 
 through h fe dishonoring his father s name, and In s 
 priest-robe, with his deviltries. Orazio was another 
 and better son who worked with the father, and died 
 shortly after him : there was a daughter Lavinia too, 
 known by many pictures of her which the father 
 loved to paint a good example being that of the 
 Berlin Museum a buxom lass in brocade dress, 
 
36 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 holding up a dish of fruit and flowers, her head hall 
 turned backward, and her face full of innocence, and 
 archness, and bloom. 
 
 But Titian was not eminently domestic at least 
 not in our sense of the term. He loved beautiful 
 things outside his own doors sometimes, it is to 
 be feared, to the neglect of those within them. 
 Venice invited outsidedness. Lanterns lighted up 
 the Piazetta and the arches of the newly built palace 
 of the Procuratori (which flanks St. Mark s Square to 
 the south) and the Merceria, long before such luxury 
 was known in the barbarian cities of Paris and Lon 
 don. The gondolas were always inviting : so was 
 the beautiful house and garden of Navagero upon 
 the island of Murano : the little Aldine Club made 
 up of Navagero, and Trifone Gabriele, and Ramusio 
 the scholar and traveller may have drawn him at 
 times to its sessions : for he was a noted talker 
 parlatore bellissimo says Mutinelli, and was a friend 
 of these learned ones, who, in company with Aldus, 
 h^d given that great reputation for accuracy to the 
 editions of the Aldine classics. 
 
 But Titian was in no sense literary : he never 
 grew into intimacy with Bembo who was nothing, 
 if not a man of letters. He loved good talk but 
 not Latin, nor Greek. At Ferrara, he had never 
 taken to Ariosto : nor had Ariosto taken to him. 
 
TITIAN AND HIS TIMES. 37 
 
 Yet there was one literary friendship which Titian 
 formed, that was so extraordinary for its object so 
 extraordinary too for its constancy and its duration 
 that I shall take a few moments to describe to you 
 this man who became twin-fellow of Titian for some 
 thirty-five of the best years of the great Artist s life. 
 This was Pietro Aretino, or as he called himself 
 upon the medals which he himself caused to be 
 struck the Divine Aretino. His humor was very 
 great, his cleverness remarkable, his learning most 
 moderate, his impudence amazing, his conscience 
 nowhere. 
 
 He came to Venice in 1527 came there because 
 it was unsafe for him to stay in Home ; unsafe too, 
 to stay in almost any other considerable city of Italy. 
 In some quarters he had made himself obnoxious by 
 his obscenities in others by his blasphemies, in 
 others by his fierce lampoons. He was eminently 
 presentable a master of all the outside courtesies 
 of life. He wrote satires so witty and ingenious that 
 all clever people wanted to read them ; and so ribald, 
 and scathing, that all the victims wanted to kill 
 him. It sheds a lurid light upon the smaller courts 
 of Italy in that day to find that such a man had 
 the intimacy of nearly all its princes. He wormed 
 himself deftly to the bottom of their little state 
 secrets, and made merchandise of them. Personal 
 
38 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 weaknesses, or vices lie detected with the quick in 
 stincts of a beast of prey, and played with them in 
 his dainty piquant verses, as a cat plays with a 
 mouse. I have sometimes fancied a likeness be 
 tween this polite ruffian, and the newspaper inter 
 viewer of our own day. 
 
 But withal, he had some humane qualities : he 
 was generous with his ill-gotten, but abundant 
 means. He really loved some people and be 
 friended them to the last, though poor, and incapa 
 ble of the slightest return. Many a poor damsel was 
 dotted with his moneys ; many a poor lad fed freely 
 at his house. He loved luxury, and his home was 
 luxurious : he had a keen eye for good work in 
 Art, and his walls shone with gems of this sort. 
 Many a prince was indebted to him for a clever thing 
 by Palma, or Giorgione, or Bellini. He brought to 
 Venice strong letters to the Doge Gritti, and was 
 well received. The Venetian historians rather plume 
 themselves upon the fact that the Lion of St. Mark 
 gave protection to such men : it is to be feared that 
 his nudities of literature were not offensive there : 
 it is certain that the Doge made use of him in press 
 ing investigations regarding the political status of 
 the different Courts of Italy. He could write charm 
 ing wheedling letters : it is supposed he wrote many 
 which bear Titian s name : He was more apt than 
 
TITIAN AND HIS TIMES. 39 
 
 even the Artist at flattery. He wrote letters to 
 Titian s boys (in after days) which might have been 
 by a New England deacon. Indeed, he sometimes 
 crazily thought himself good, and crazily thought 
 others shared the belief. When Titian went by or 
 der to visit Charles V. at Augsburg, twenty-five 
 years later, he took a letter from the Divine Aretino, 
 recommending himself (Aretino) as candidate for 
 place of Cardinal, and begging that his august 
 Majesty would use his influence in his behalf with 
 the Pope. I suspect his Majesty when he read the 
 letter, let fall his great nether lip with a droop of 
 wonderment. 
 
 Of course Titian painted Aretino perhaps many 
 times : We know one, which gives him a fine face 
 aquiline nose large, open eye round forehead, 
 fringed with thick, curly hair. In point of fact this 
 fine face was seamed with sword cuts, and bore 
 scars from bludgeons, before Aretino reached full 
 ness of age. How came about this strange friend 
 ship? 
 
 Titian may well have been drawn toward one who 
 had such appreciation of his work : Aretino again 
 was in the way of finding new patrons, and stimu 
 lating the admiration of old ones : the open-handed 
 living of the poet would have had its fascination 
 for Titian so would his graces of speech and man- 
 
40 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 ner : and I suspect, his looseness of conduct, and or 
 gies, did not greatly disturb the shrewd, calculating 
 man of the world which Titian was. He painted 
 many subjects at this time of coarse intention for 
 which doubtless Aretino found eager purchasers 
 among his old acquaintances at Home. 
 
 But the master was doing far better things too : 
 I need only mention that group of the Pesaro fam 
 ily at the Church of the Frari (still there, and which 
 every traveller makes it a duty to visit, and where it 
 is a delight to linger). 
 
 To this period belongs also the famous Peter 
 Martyr of San Giovanni, in which if it be true of any 
 one picture his power found culmination. He com 
 peted for this work with Pordenone and Palma, and 
 distanced both. It was not in the usual manner of 
 an altar picture. As you approached it, three or four 
 great trees with sparse boughs shaking in the wind 
 caught the eye : then one of Titian s own skies, 
 with scuds of cloud drifting over it : a dim distant 
 landscape in the lower left corner perhaps the 
 loved peaks of Cadore : in the boughs of the trees 
 were two cherubs with palms ; on the ground below, 
 the prostrate martyr with eyes and hand uplifted 
 the murderer gathering his forces for the last fell 
 stroke : and the attendant in a craven panic making 
 off with his robes dashed about by the wind. 
 
TITIAN AND HIS TIMES. 41 
 
 There was not much sanctity in it, but a strange 
 power : the cherubs did not cheat one into a wish 
 for martyrdom, but there was a blending of the 
 pomp and splendor of nature with the awful possi 
 bilities and passion of human life that made one 
 pause. Thousands have been spell- bound by this 
 painting, who have no conception of its technical 
 merits. 
 
 The picture burned, with the church in 18G7 
 was finished in 1530 : in 1529 Michel Angelo had 
 been in Venice, flying from Florence where he had 
 been taking part in the last, sad, vain fight, for the 
 liberties of that city. Doubtless he met Titian : 
 and there are touches upon the torso of the mur 
 derer of Peter Martyr, and in the swarthy muscles 
 of his arms, that look like Michel Angelo. As Ti 
 tian had signalized the visit of Albert Dlirer by the 
 painstaking nicety of the " Tribute Money," did he 
 not possibly wish now to show his power to do things 
 as Michel Angelo had done them ? 
 
 Those two great artists could have hardly grown 
 into sympathy, and did not now or later on at 
 Rome. Titian was essentially a courtier and a man of 
 the world, ennobled by his great passion for painting. 
 Michel Angelo disdained the pomps and pride of life, 
 finding compensation in his ecstatic devotion to all 
 forms of Art. Titian, at a hint from Aretino might 
 
42 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 very possibly be painting a loud bit of Heathen 
 ism for some lascivious-thoughted Cardinal, while 
 Michel Angelo was whetting his sword for a thwack 
 at the last of the tyrant Medicis in Florence : Titian s 
 ear would tingle delightedly at sound of the jewelled 
 spurs with which Charles V. and his great array of 
 Spanish grandees came clinking into Italy in 1530 ; 
 while Michel Angelo would have ground his heel 
 in the dust, and scowled defiance. Titian could 
 easily forget if he had ever cared therefor that 
 under the rush of the squadrons, of this great mon 
 arch whose power was felt from the Netherlands 
 to Naples, and from Poland to Gibraltar the last 
 flickering blaze of independence for the little states 
 of Italy had gone out : he could forget that the 
 princes of Italy patricians of Venice among them 
 
 swarmed ingloriously about his court when he 
 came to Bologna to be crowned. But Michel Angelo 
 could not forget these things, nor fail in his work 
 of speech, or poem, or marble, to show signs of 
 a bitterness, by reason of them, that was sublimed 
 by genius. 
 
 Titian first painted Charles V. at Bologna in 1532 
 
 after that monarch s return from Vienna. Titian 
 had indeed gone to Bologna through the devices 
 of Aretino on the monarch s previous visit, but it 
 was to paint a fine woman of Bologna who had en- 
 
TITIAN AND HIS TIMES. 43 
 
 slaved one of the chief officials of Charles Court : It 
 was thought by Aretino, by Gonzaga of Mantua, 
 and I dare say by the Seigneury of Venice that it 
 would be a clever thing to conciliate this high offi 
 cer of Charles Court by a portrait from the hand of 
 Titian of the Italian darne who had enslaved him. 
 
 Yet it is due to Titian to say that he did not 
 come into Charles favor by such an uncourtier-like 
 procedure. Charles loved painting almost as much 
 as he loved power ; he had seen Titian s work at 
 Mantua and had expressed a wish for a portrait from 
 his hand. 
 
 That painting is now in Madrid : He is repre 
 sented in a gorgeous costume a black cap with a 
 white plume a silken dress a white mantle of 
 stiff brocade sleeves of striped stuff hose slashed 
 and striped : the right hand plays with a dagger, 
 the left is fondling the head of a gigantic Spanish 
 hound. The eyes are blue and steely : the beard 
 and moustache red, and the protruding lip is there 
 which still marks the inheritors of his blood. 
 
 The monarch was charmed by Titian not less 
 by the splendor of his work than by his grave, 
 courtly obsequience. Titian understood this nice 
 sort of flattery. 
 
 He received imperial payment which the Artist 
 shrewdly invested in lands about Treviso ; honors 
 
44 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 were showered on him, and he returned to Venice 
 Count Palatine his children ranking as nobles, 
 and he as Knight of the Empire entitled to wear the 
 golden spur and the sword and the chain of the 
 rank. 
 
 Of course Aretino would prepare a fete for him 
 on his return, in which also Sansovino the architect 
 another great friend of the two would have 
 joined : perhaps also the learned Ramusio, now be 
 come an ambassador, and Sanuto the historian. It 
 was a grand thing to be signalled for distinction by 
 the monarch of whom even the Seigneury of Venice 
 stood in awe. But the home of Titian was not what 
 it had been : his wife was dad : he had gone from 
 San Samuele to the north shore where now stretch 
 the fondamente nuove but where in that day the 
 waves of the Lagoon plashed upon open beach and 
 shore. A great garden stretched from his house to 
 the water s edge ; and from his balcony he could look 
 across his garden parterres, upon Murano belching 
 fires from its glass-works, and upon the towers of 
 Torcello, and to the left see the blue hills of Cenedo 
 piling in the distance, behind which lay his old 
 home of Cadore. There he passes the remaining 
 forty odd years of his life save some few journeys of 
 which we shall take note ; always at work always 
 calm always triumphing. Lavinia his daughter is 
 
TITIAN AND HIS TIMES. 4$ 
 
 growing up under his eye, and the boy Orazio is 
 learning from the master the handling of the mas 
 ter s brush. Pomponio, the priest son, is drifting 
 always sure to turn up when great payments have 
 come in. Aretino berates him for squandering his 
 father s money. 
 
 Titian laments to his physician that he has 
 humors of invincible idleness : but the working fac 
 ulty on his good days must have been prodigious : 
 more than a thousand pictures throughout Europe 
 are now catalogued as Titian s, while hundreds 
 have probably been lost. The continued patronage 
 of Charles V. put an enormous value upon his pic 
 tures : only those with princely purses could com 
 pete with such a monarch ; and Titian like a good 
 Venetian never worked below the market price. To 
 be painted by him was to be put upon the roll of 
 distinction. 
 
 His method of painting did not change materially 
 with years save that his touch grew bolder and 
 freer, and his colors less varied : and this not 
 from the haste or indifference which are apt to at 
 tend years, and established reputation so much as 
 from the wide knowledge, and conscious power, 
 which had come with his vast experience. 
 
 Aretino boasts in a letter to Paul Manutius that 
 Titian could throw off a likeness as quickly as 
 
46 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 another could scratch the ornament on a chest. 
 This facility and the enormous prices he com 
 manded from individual patrons, led to the neglect 
 of larger pictures which had been commanded by 
 the Seigneury. In 1537 the Council of Ten made 
 order, that whereas Titian had been given a broker s 
 patent in 1516 yielding one hundred and twenty 
 ducats a year, on condition that he should paint a 
 canvas of a land-fight on the side of the Hall of 
 the Great Council, looking upon the Grand Canal, 
 and since that time had drawn his salary without 
 performing his promise that such state of things 
 should cease, and all the salary received be re 
 funded. 
 
 This brought Titian to task ; and the famous bat 
 tle of Cadore was painted which with all others 
 in the Council Chamber was consumed in 1577. 
 Vasari, who visited Venice shortly after, and who was 
 the guest of Titian as well as of Aretino (through 
 whose agency indeed he came,) declares it to have 
 been the finest picture ever shown upon the walls of 
 the Ducal palace. The Council of Ten at the same 
 period assigned to Pordenone, (the only conspicuous 
 rival of Titian at this date) the decoration of other 
 apartments in the Ducal palace, work which would 
 naturally have fallen to the great painter, had he 
 kept fairly by his engagements. A feud grew out 
 
TITIAN AND HIS TIMES. 47 
 
 of this between the two rivals which came near to 
 blood-letting ; nor can any one doubt that the stern 
 Council of Ten took a pride in thus demonstrating 
 that they were not over-awed by the world-wide 
 reputation of the great Artist. 
 
 But Titian was not beholden to them for task 
 work. Charles V. endeavored to entice him to 
 Spain : Urbino would have given him range of a 
 palace : he was offered the place under the Papal 
 government which had been filled by a brother 
 Venetian, Sebastiano del Piombo. 
 
 All these he declined : but we find him journeying 
 to Rome in 1545, his first and only visit. He took 
 Urbino in his way, and the Duke equipped him with 
 a magnificent convoy, so that he journeyed like a 
 prince. His son Orazio is with him, and both are 
 received cordially by the Pope, Paul HI., and by 
 Titian s old acquaintance Bembo now a cardinal. 
 Bembo says Titian is full of wonder at the antiques : 
 and he himself says in a letter to Aretino, I wish I 
 had come to Rome twenty years ago : and yet, with 
 those antiques earlier in his eye, is it not possible 
 that he would have withdrawn, in favor of line work, 
 much of that power which was lavished upon color? 
 
 He meets Michel Angelo again : but we hear of 
 no warmth in the meeting. He paints industri 
 ously while in Rome, leaving with other work that 
 
48 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 wonderful picture of the Pope, his grandson Otta- 
 vio, and the Cardinal Farnese now in the Museum 
 at Naples. 
 
 Keturning to Venice, and to the suppers with Are- 
 tino and Sansovino, he had hardly settled in his old 
 avocations before he is summoned by the Emperor 
 Charles V. to Augsburg : and he sets off, an old 
 man of seventy, to traverse the mountains of the 
 Frioul in the depth of winter : but the Emperor 
 with lavish hand has provided money and attend 
 ants: he is received with the old honors, and 
 paints there the great picture of Charles in armor, 
 and mounted, as he rode into the field at Muhlbach. 
 
 He has hardly returned to the honors and greet 
 ings that once more awaited him at Venice, when he 
 is summoned anew to Augsburg this time to meet 
 Philip, who has come from Spain to ingratiate him 
 self with the German people (a vain task) and whom 
 Titian paints in such flattering way notwithstand 
 ing his narrow chest, his spare legs, his eyelids 
 like rolls of flesh, and his projecting under jaw, as 
 to captivate Mary Tudor, our Bloody Mary of Eng 
 land, who was his betrothed bride. She was enam 
 ored of the portrait more enamored than either 
 she, or any other, was ever enamored of the man. 
 
 But Titian found his account in the flattery. 
 Melancthon, who happened in Augsburg at about 
 
TITIAN AND HIS TIMES. 49 
 
 that date, speaks perhaps with a touch of jealousy 
 of the distinguished attentions shown to a great 
 artist of Venice. Wonderful old man whom 
 neither the court ceremonies, nor the great canvases 
 on which he wrought, nor the fatigues of mountain 
 travel in winter can break down ! The next August 
 he is again at his easel in his garden home twenty 
 odd more years of distinguished work before him 
 which we cannot trace : twenty more years of sharp 
 outlook for neglected pensions, and royal moneys 
 which are due, but not paid : his courtliest letters all 
 having some little touch of the trader grown not 
 less shrewd with age : now it is a misunderstanding 
 as to the price their "Excellencies" have made 
 again it is a draft on which he has heavy discount 
 to pay, and begs their Excellencies kindly to remit, 
 etc. 
 
 All the while the charming suppers. "I found 
 Aretino there," says a visitor, " who repeated son 
 nets for our delectation, and Nardi the historian : 
 and viands and wines were of the finest: the dis 
 course gay, and at midnight we looked out upon 
 the water, where were floating hundreds of gondolas 
 adorned with beautiful women, and the air full of 
 charming music." 
 
 But Aretino s hold on life was not so strong as 
 
 the painter s : he died as he had lived at a supper 
 4 
 
So BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 which held over until three of the morning, and the 
 immediate occasion was over-laughter at some un 
 seemly joke. Titian lamented him more than the 
 world has : yet under all his bestialities, and his fop 
 peries, there did lie a small a very small core of 
 goodness which the artist found and felt. 
 
 Vasari visits Titian again, and finds him indefa 
 tigable at his work surrounded by beautiful ob 
 jects in his beautiful home his old friend Sanso- 
 vino by him both past the nineties, and the 
 architect struggling to appear as young as the 
 painter. Three years after, Sansovino dropped 
 away, and a new sense of want must have fallen 
 upon the heart of Titian. 
 
 But the beloved Venice over which his affections 
 have brooded for three-quarters of a century is 
 around him in all its beauty. Whatever falling off 
 there may have been in the rank of Venice as a state 
 politically or commercially the splendor of the 
 city was undimmed. If the older exterior frescos 
 were fading, and the marble incrustations chipping 
 away from the elder Byzantine palaces the new Ke- 
 naissance structures of Sansovino and Lombardi were 
 in the glitter of their first freshness. If Famagosta 
 had fallen and Cyprus slipped into the keeping of the 
 Turk, the three great gonfalons were still streaming 
 as proudly as ever over the Square of St. Mark s. 
 
TITIAN AND HIS TIMES. 51 
 
 In no mart of Europe could the traveller find such 
 rare, and costly, and accurate editions of Hebrew 
 books, or of the classics : no where such gorgeous 
 stuffs such wealth of inlaid armor such show of 
 delicate gold work, such curious and tastefully 
 carven furniture. 
 
 In no great city was such quietude, such munici 
 pal order, such sense and evidence of full security to 
 person or property. Palace doors were flung wide 
 open to the water : the stranger could look through 
 their delicately carven portals, sheer across the mar 
 ble halls into gardens where Oleanders bloomed, and 
 from which came at noon-tide the drowsy hum of 
 the locust. 
 
 More than ever the grip of the Oligarchy was knit 
 firmly upon power. Into the hands of the twelve 
 hundred patricians who every Sunday at three (by 
 the tower of the Orologio), met in the Council 
 Chamber, all rights of the people had passed long 
 ago, as steadily, as tranquilly, and as surely as 
 day passes into night. 
 
 There seems to have been something in the very 
 quietude of this stately company of patricians which 
 captivated the imagination of the sailors of the 
 streets. It was never boisterous, wordy, asserting 
 itself. Noise of angry debate rarely came through 
 the great windows of the Council Chamber. The 
 
52 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 gondoliers and Stradiote soldiers lounging upon the 
 quay under the Palace, might hear the click of the 
 balls which the noble voters dropped into the urns ; 
 but rarely, voices. Its most terrible edicts came in 
 whispers. Its arrests were the quietest imaginable : 
 a billet countersigned an armed attendant to show 
 the way. It was a subdued and elegant company 
 never forgetting itself to haste courtly, impenetra 
 ble, jealous of kings doubly jealous of the Pope, 
 yielding nothing to either except on direst compul 
 sion. 
 
 In Titian s great painting of the Presentation in 
 the Temple, there is a group of long-robed figures 
 looking with kindly condescension upon the Virgin 
 as she goes up the Temple steps which admirably 
 represents the dignity, the cool courtesy, the con 
 scious power of the Venetian Patrician. 
 
 On fete days and under cover of the mask, these 
 men may have had their unbendings. Those were 
 days in which Venetian jollity ran riot. There were 
 comedies enacted in the courts of palaces (no theatres 
 as yet) ; there were Bergamesque singers trolling out 
 quaint rhymes at street corners, charlatans, learned 
 monkeys, Egyptian jugglers, and great ladies with 
 faces blinded in point lace picking their way through 
 the throngs. Padua and Treviso sent hordes of their 
 well-to-do idlers to these fetes : and travellers from 
 
TITIAN AND HIS TIMES. 53 
 
 the lampless narrow streets of Paris, and from sooty, 
 foggy London, contrived their journeys so as to be 
 present at the great festivals of this floating city. It 
 was a distinction in those far-off places to tell of 
 having passed the season of a carnival in Venice : a 
 still grander distinction if the traveller could boast 
 of having exchanged compliments with the distin 
 guished Veronica a poetess of that day (whose 
 poems were printed at the Aldine Press) beautiful 
 who had been the guest of princes, who gave 
 charming entertainments- the most brilliant type 
 of a class of Aspasia-like women of that time who 
 were not unread in the classics, specially Catullus 
 and Ovid, and who fed upon the sonnets of Aretino. 
 
 But I think if you and I had been at such a fete, 
 in such a time, we would have looked out more 
 eagerly for the passing of the old man Titian per 
 haps attended by his daughter Lavinia : we should 
 have known him, I am sure, by the respectful way 
 with which the crowd would have opened for his 
 passage and by his tall figure and dignified pres 
 ence, and long, white, snowy beard, and tunic 
 trimmed with fur, and black velvet cap, and great, 
 keen eyes flashing from their sunken orbits. 
 
 Upon the visits of great princes to Venice, there 
 were, of course, fetes of exceptional importance. All 
 the arts of the city were represented sometimes 
 
54 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 upon the Square, sometimes upon a great range of 
 galleys which passed along the Grand Canal the 
 Murano galley all mirrors and crystals ; the masts 
 and decks of that belonging to the Jewellers Com 
 pany flashing with emeralds and pearls ; and the ar 
 morer s ship, covered with every imaginable weapon, 
 polished till they shone like silver. 
 
 These royal fetes indeed of that commercial re 
 public prefigured our present World s Fairs : it was 
 a blazon not made only for show, but with a shrewd 
 eye to the development of trade. 
 
 The last of these in which Titian could have par 
 ticipated was that given in honor of Henry HL of 
 France, who stopped at Venice on his way from 
 Poland to his new kingdom, in 1574. 
 
 The beautiful Foscari Palace (for himself) and three 
 or four adjoining palaces for his attendants were put 
 at his command. The Bucintoro the great barge 
 of State bore him to his quarters, and transported 
 him to the great banquet in his honor at the Ducal 
 Palace. The Venetian chroniclers roll down page on 
 page of pretty superlatives in describing the splendor 
 of the show, with which they sought to impress him 
 with the wealth, and taste, and skill of the Republic. 
 
 Of all this we note only that the young king 
 paid a personal visit to the home of Titian. And we 
 can imagine how the courtly old gentleman would 
 
TITIAN AND HIS TIMES. 55 
 
 have rallied his last powers to give fitting reception 
 to the young monarch of the fourth generation in 
 descent from that Louis XI., who in Titian s boyhood 
 was living at Plessis, and hanging upon the trees of 
 his park those who provoked his anger. 
 
 The next year the plague came to Venice not 
 raging fiercely, but making coy approaches. Per 
 haps this, perhaps his ninety-eight years suggested 
 to Titian the provision of some burial-place. So 
 he bargains with the Franciscans of the Church of 
 the Frari to paint a picture for them a Pieta 
 to go against cost of burial in one of their chapels. 
 And the old man of ninety-eight enters upon his task. 
 Sansovino is not there to cheer, to suggest, nor Are- 
 tino to criticise, to admire. It is a virgin, with the 
 limp, dead figure of Christ in her arms. We may 
 suppose that a vision of Lavinia long gone out of 
 Lis household of Cecilia, still longer gone of 
 Violante, a memory of his young days may have 
 flitted on his mind as he traced the last womanly 
 face he was to paint. 
 
 He finishes the picture : but true to his old trad 
 ing instinct makes trouble about terms, and the can 
 vas does not pass to the Frari at all. 
 
 The next year brings the plague more grievously. 
 But what should he fear in the plague, who has out 
 lived a century of battles, who has seen fourteen 
 
56 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 doges slip from their places and die who has seen 
 other seasons of pestilence when the dead lay rot 
 ting on the banks of the Eio. 
 
 At last, however, it does overtake him alone 
 in that fine house of his looking out toward Murano. 
 Many of his choicest pictures are around him rare 
 sketches by his friends books of sonnets by Are- 
 tino bits of sculpture ; models given by his old 
 friend Sansovino, Byzantine trinkets charming 
 Murano wine-flasks the chain and the golden spur 
 of his knightship. But the pains give him grip 
 then come the swellings under the armpits the 
 constriction of the heart, and the end. 
 
 There are chroniclers who say his house was 
 plundered before Titian died : but it is not to be be 
 lieved. Most victims of the plague, by State order, 
 were hurried to the Lido shores for burial : but in 
 the great artist s case exception is made, and with 
 pompous official ceremonial the body is borne to 
 the Frari, where he wished to lie. 
 
 It is a huge ungainly church in its exterior 
 flanked by a great mass of conventual buildings. It 
 does not He on the Grand Canal, but is only ap 
 proachable by the little Rio of the Frari, or by tor 
 tuous paths leading from the Eialto. An irregular 
 open square, upon which tall houses notch at various 
 angles is about it. Its walls dingy, weather-stained, 
 
TITIAN AND HIS TIMES, 57 
 
 and showing no trace of art save in the delicate 
 sculpture about the frieze, and around windows and 
 portals, and the little turrets at its angles. 
 
 Within, it is cavernous, gloomy, massive. There, 
 is the pyramid tomb of Canova, with its guardian 
 angels ; there is the famous monument to the Doge 
 Pesaro held up by four gigantic Moorish slaves in 
 black and white stone; there too, near by, is the 
 well-known Pesaro picture by Titian and in the 
 sacristy, that canvas of Bellini s to which I have al 
 luded as being the one which would have most 
 charmed Titian, of all that were in Venice when 
 he came there eighty-five years before. But the 
 stranger will look with most eagerness in the cavern 
 ous recesses of that damp old church of the Frari, 
 for that glittering pile of fresh marble (erected by 
 the Austrian Government) under which rests the 
 body of Titian the greatest master of color whom 
 the world has known. 
 
 NOTE. The elaborate work of Crowe and Cavalcaselle 
 supplies all material facts respecting the life and work of 
 Titian, while the local coloring in the foregoing paper, is 
 derived largely from Mutinelli (Annali Urbani) from San- 
 wvino (Gittd Nobttmima) and GaOiecaotU (Memorie Venete). 
 
III. 
 
 PROCESSION OF THE MONTHS. 
 
PROCESSION OF THE MONTHS. 
 
 Among the Snows. 
 
 rPHE book of all other books which makes us 
 -*- count our time, and change our dates, and 
 reckon the seasons, I mean the Almanac, gives 
 us flight into the country. Who cares when the 
 moon quarters in the city, or when the sun rises, or 
 when the tide falls ? We want open fields to get 
 good sight of an eclipse ; a comet is but half a 
 comet seen from a city sidewalk. The reading of 
 court calendars, and prices current, and election 
 records, carries us straightway into the atmosphere 
 of towns, and calls up the close smells of conventions 
 and of exchanges ; but a record of the seasons, and a 
 calendar of the months, measured, as they are, by the 
 uprising and the down-setting of the sun and of the 
 moon, somehow makes us yearn country-ward. Such 
 
62 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 record demands an horizon ; and what horizon is 
 possible to a man pitted under the slanting roofs 
 of a city ? The sound of the marching of the years 
 is heard never so distinctly as when we have an ear 
 upon the turf. It is hardly possible to call the roll 
 of the months, without calling the roll of the fruits 
 and of the roses. The old almanac-makers did well 
 in wedding their pages with ruralities, flinging an 
 arabesque of flowers over the tale of the spring and 
 of the summer, and bordering their winter calendar 
 with the wonderful snowy cornices which the winds 
 fashion along the edges of the hills. 
 
 All the pretty legends of soft winters in the 
 tropics, and of oranges in January, however true 
 they may be on the warm bights of the Florida 
 shores, or by Pontchartrain, will never make us 
 forego that old association of snow and rime and 
 icicles with winter. Even the English ruralists, 
 whose practical knowledge of snow-storms is limited 
 to the feathery wonders of a day, cannot abjure the 
 grand sights which roofs laden with snow will throw 
 into their pictures of winter. The Mistletoe and the 
 Holly of the holiday poets are never so green, and 
 never so glowing with crimson, as when they shine 
 against a background of wintry white. I suppose 
 that Thomson (of " The Seasons "), being a Scotch 
 man, may have seen a good many sharp flurries of 
 
AMONG THE SNOWS. 63 
 
 snow, and possibly may have assisted at the digging 
 out of buried flocks on a winter s morning, after a 
 great night of storm, under some lee of the Cheviot 
 hills ; but it is certain that the story of such work is 
 to most English readers of the poet only a snowy 
 legend. 
 
 Still more apocryphal, apparently, is the frosty 
 selvage with which Horace, again and again, edges 
 his songs or odes ; but though we think of Italy as 
 a land of summer and sunshine, these descriptive 
 dashes of the poet who rusticated amid the Sabine 
 hills, are true to the occasional wintry phenomena of 
 that region to-day. The Albanian hills have their 
 exceptional cloakings of white, and Soracte does 
 sometimes lift over the horizon "like a snow-heap." 
 
 Farther to the northward, but still under Italian 
 skies, experiences are often more Arctic. I can re 
 call vividly a day some thirty years gone, when 
 the deep snows over all the flat lands which lie 
 about Padua so encumbered the roads that no dili 
 gence would venture out. What a dull January day 
 it was, to be sure ! The peasants slumping in 
 through the freezing slough ; the long-horned cattle 
 treading with curious reluctance through the strange 
 white mire ; the thinly clad street people rubbing 
 their hands with true Italian significance, and de 
 claring it "a miracle, sicuro!" The weak blaze 
 
64 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 in the yawning fireplace, whipping out great clouds 
 of smoke ; the great roof of the great hall of Padua 
 streaming with the unaccustomed drip ; the marble 
 palace of the Cafe Pedrocchi all a-steam with soaked 
 feet, I would have given the best book in my 
 luggage for a fresh reading about Shylock and Por 
 tia that day ; but there was no Shakespeare in the 
 market. 
 
 Amid all the discomfort, however, of such January 
 weather, the peasants wore pleased and hopeful faces, 
 and quoted their proverb, Multa neve, multapane, 
 " Much snow, much bread." If the benefit arising 
 from the infrequent and fleeting snows of Italy can 
 have given rise to this proverb of the South, how 
 much more reason have we of Northern latitudes to 
 bless such a tender protection of the grain roots. 
 Nor is it protection of the grain only ; many a May 
 day we rejoice in some extraordinary luxuriance of 
 lawn grass or of pasturage, attributing it all to a sea 
 son of abundant rains, when I think more than half of 
 the overplus might be safely credited to that persis 
 tent covering of snow which through the preceding 
 winter kept the grass roots warm, and gave an ac 
 cumulated vigor to support the growth of the sum 
 mer. The chemists tell us, moreover, (if I do not 
 mistake,) that snow-water carries with it a larger 
 proportion of ammonia than an equal weight of rain, 
 
AMONG THE SNOWS. 65 
 
 by which it would seem that these feathery white 
 clouds of snow sweep down from the atmosphere a 
 great amount of available nitrogen which would else 
 be lost ; and it is certain that what gifts they do 
 bring in this way they keep nestling close to the little 
 rootlets which so crave it, and so riot under supply. 
 
 Let no man then sneer at the snow. It kills only 
 where rash adventurers intrude upon its storehouses, 
 as on the slopes of the Swiss mountains, or the 
 heights of Colorado. It warms and cherishes and 
 fertilizes (in its quiet way) we know not how many 
 acres of grain land and sward land. Its crystals are 
 all jewels, so rare that the handling wastes them ; 
 its bulk so vast as to make the sources of rivers ; its 
 tint so pure that the artists despair of it ; its fall so 
 gentle that the grass bends not, and yet is buried. 
 Let me commend as a topic for a country clergyman 
 in winter, that text from Job, " Hast thou entered into 
 the treasures of the snow f " 
 
 There is an old artistic tradition which puts the 
 month of January in the guise of a young babe (typ 
 ical of the New Year), making a bold front of it, 
 and not like Shakespeare s babe 
 
 " Mewing, and " 
 
 disporting, to the great discomfort of the nurse. 
 For my own part I can never think of January as a 
 
66 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 babe, whether methodical in its habits, or the con 
 trary ; but rather as a fine old gentleman with frosted 
 beard, who has seen his best days, and is content to 
 take his ease by his own chimney-corner. And if I 
 were to symbolize February, it should be as a de 
 corous, white-haired, venerable lady, something, 
 shorter than January, who is not over-clamorous 
 for rights, but yet has her storms, and who, like 
 many another venerable lady is most effective when 
 most serene ; as for March, she should be some 
 shrew of a maid, following up the old people with a 
 tremendous clatter of brooms and great clouds of 
 dust. 
 
 Everybody supposes that these three opening 
 months of the year are hard ones to struggle with in 
 the country (where the almanacs, as I have said, al 
 ways invite us). But let us test the matter in the 
 most prosaic way in the world, by actual summing 
 up of their chills and cares and opportunities. 
 
 Paterfamilias, bestirring himself at sunrise, 
 scratches a hole through the frost-work upon the 
 window, and looks out. There is a world of snow 
 upon the lawn, and upon the fir-boughs, and upon 
 the rooflets of every gateway and arbor ; even the 
 twigs of the maples carry their narrow burden, and 
 the rosy light of the new-risen sun puts the whole 
 scene a-glow. No thought obtrudes of delayed and 
 
AMONG THE SNOWS. 67 
 
 over-crowded horse-cars, of weary tramp over neg 
 lected sidewalks. Already the pet Alderney has 
 broken her path to the spring in the meadow, and 
 the twin calves are snuffing and pawing at the strange 
 spectacle of the snow. The doves are alight upon 
 the stones at the edge of the fountain, and are coo 
 ing and billing in the low-slanted sunlight, as if the 
 whole white covering of ground and tree were only 
 a bridal decoration. Upon some bit of snow-high 
 road, gleaming through under the loaded trees, there 
 is a long trail of oxen, coiling down the hills ; a half- 
 dozen stalwart neighbors, each with his team and his 
 goad, are breaking the path and breaking the silence 
 with a muffled murmur of speech and laughter. 
 Pat, too, near by, is shovelling briskly at the foot 
 ways, and a lorn sparrow or two, catching sight of 
 the welcome gravel, come twittering to their old 
 forage ground. 
 
 There isja gay clamor of young voices, and a half- 
 distinguishable odor of steaming dishes, as if break 
 fast were nigh ; not a strong odor, but just enough 
 to carry a little flavor of hospitality in it, and a 
 quickening of the morning appetite. This latter is 
 sharpened too, very likely, by the slightest possible 
 chillness of the chamber atmosphere. I could never 
 fancy those country houses where the temperature 
 above and below is kept up to full city figures, so 
 
68 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 that a hot sameness is round the occupant, into 
 whatever room he may wander. A little smack of 
 frostiness in the air, that puts a healthy tingle in a 
 man s nose and cheeks before toilet is done, seems 
 to me a very capital appetizer, and a great prepara 
 tive for enjoyment of the keen blaze that shall pres 
 ently greet the master, flashing out over hearth and 
 rug and faces. 
 
 I love to think of our country gentleman march 
 ing up to his fireside of a winter s morning, and 
 chafing his hands almost in the blaze, as if it were 
 a Heaven s blessing. I can t think of his entertain 
 ing any such gratitude for a patent steam-heater, 
 that has kept his blood in a sort of tropical leth 
 argy all the night and all the morning. Of course 
 such labor-saving, underground contrivances will be 
 adopted ; but why work them up to the city scale 
 of the seventies and the eighties ? Why not keep 
 them to the honest, healthful range of a good May 
 day morning, in such sort that the children may 
 carry roses in their cheeks, and the blaze of a break 
 fast fire be counted a god-send ? 
 
 A practical word I want to drop here, in regard to 
 those wood fires ; you think they must be of sea 
 soned hickory, or that all counts for nothing. It is 
 a grand mistake. If your wood be of oak, or bass- 
 wood, or soft maple, or of apple-tree (for old orchards 
 
AMONG THE SNOWS. 69 
 
 are coming down in these days), by all means have 
 it well seasoned. But if of hickory, or black-birch, 
 or white-ash, or rock-maple, you may get as cheery 
 a flame out of the green wood as out of the dry, and 
 will besides enjoy something of the aroma of its 
 freshness. I speak of the fire, of course, after it is 
 fairly ablaze. The kindling process must have prop 
 er kindling material. 
 
 The winter s breakfast in the country being done, 
 what then ? I naturally suppose there may be another 
 fire sputtering and flashing on some library hearth, 
 whereat a quiet pipe is not absolutely tabooed ; and 
 I am certain that the blaze and the broad-mouthed 
 chimney will together whisk away the wreaths of 
 smoke as fast as they are formed. 
 
 The morning paper is necessarily a thing fore 
 gone ; it may be eleven, under the snowy time of 
 the year, before the day s budget of news shall be 
 opened ; but what shall we say to a page or two out 
 of some convenient and manageable and dainty 
 volume of Pickwick, bringing to the hearth the 
 hospitalities of Dingley Dell, and the tender human 
 ities of the stout man in gaiters ? Or what if it be 
 some one among the many " Friends in Council ;" 
 or a bit of the dainty gossip of "Elia?" Will 
 not these possibly be as good aids to digestion 
 whether of breakfast, or of any moral purpose suf- 
 
70 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 fering entertainment, as any morning paper of them 
 all? 
 
 Then what good, square, quiet working-hours 
 affront one in the country, with breakfast (and pipe) 
 done, and the sun streaming into the south windows, 
 and the fire leaping on the hearth ! Or if no hard work 
 is in hand, t is only a longer "Grace before Meat" 
 with Chas. Lamb ; a little lingering at the round 
 table of Sir Arthur Helps ; a fingering of the freshly- 
 cut magazines, and tender conversation with the 
 flowers that are blossoming in the window. The 
 bulbs must have their water changed ; the mosses a 
 fresh sprinkling ; and some radiant purple Cyclamen 
 must have its dead bloom plucked away. 
 
 Or, there is some pet Alderney to be visited, who 
 is near her time ; or some bevy of Southdowns ; or, a 
 tramp in high water-proof boots to some corner of 
 the wood-land, where a clearing is to be made, and 
 where a half-hour s swing of a cleverly hung axe 
 will set all the blood astir, and more than equal a 
 draught of the best bitters upon the market. 
 
 A little later, Jack, a stout cob, is harnessed to 
 the " cutter," and one may whisk away to town 
 not one of the metropolitan centers, maybe ; but in 
 the days of telegraphing who cares for centers? 
 The budget of letters and of papers, with which the 
 dinner-table is presently overspread, makes home 
 
AMONG THE SNOWS. 71 
 
 the center. All the news comes without its jos 
 tling and its uproar. Even the worst stories, by 
 reason of intervening space and time, will be win 
 nowed of their harshness and foulness ; the master 
 may read of political schemings with the same trust 
 fulness with which better-informed men would read 
 of schemes of benevolence. 
 
 If there be letters, there is abundant time for re 
 ply ; two hours or more for work, in door or out, if 
 hard work is in hand ; abundant time too, before 
 candle-lighting, for a new drive to the town, in which 
 certain little ones their school-hours being over 
 can put new roses in their cheeks, and laugh away 
 the frostiness of the winter s twilight. Between fire 
 light and lamp-light, the country twilight vanishes, 
 and the winter night begins. 
 
 "Long?" 
 
 Yes, long ; three, four, five hours, with (maybe) no 
 visitor from without. 
 
 "Dull?" 
 
 As you count dulness ; but with a good book and 
 a good blaze at one s side, it would seem easy to 
 keep dulness under ; even if there be dulness in the 
 book in hand, the fire-light makes one a kindly critic. 
 The slightest touches of humor grow broad, and 
 dimple out into great pools of mirthfulness, if the 
 reader can but keep his feet warm at a good blaze. 
 
72 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 Then there are books which seem to belong to the 
 season of evening firesides in winter ; which take 
 their best coloring under such a glow, and the big- 
 hearted men and women of their pages step with 
 old-time courtesies out of their wordy enthralment, 
 and sit with us in the fire-light. 
 
 Shall I name these, and turn my screed into a 
 catalogue ? 
 
 It is better that each reader should find them for 
 himself, the books that make him the kindlier, 
 that give image and fulness to his humanities of 
 speech or action ; old books, many of them, of 
 which he first stole the reading under cover of the 
 lid of his school-room desk ; books he hid under 
 his pillow at night ; books whose story twined with 
 his dreams. 
 
 The Holidays too hardly gone past have left be 
 hind them their sweet old flavors of nursery legend : 
 some new and tenderly touched picturing of it. has 
 brought out once more the plaintive old ballad of 
 the Babes in the Wood ; or Cinderella has come in 
 golden state, why should she not, who by patient 
 and uncomplaining toil has commanded friends and 
 power? Doesn t Little Red-riding Hood, bring 
 back every winter-time, in her ruddy cheeks, and un 
 der her scarlet mantle, a good wholesome odor of 
 the English booklets, which in our young days came 
 
AMONG THE SNOWS. 73 
 
 from St. Paul s Church-yard (Mr. Newberry s, on 
 the corner) ? And has not the Wolf if we can only 
 keep him outside the door a piquant holiday air ? 
 Shall we pack dear old Mother Goose into limbo, be 
 cause she gives utterance to an idle, jingling fanfaro 
 nade once a year ? Do we not listen gravely, week 
 after week, to others of her tribe in editors chairs 
 and elsewhere who cannot bring the rhythmical 
 resonance of the nursery to aid their preachments? 
 
 And here is old Kobin Hood again and his merry 
 men all lithe and brisk and debonair as ever, in 
 the wondrous fine pictures which Mr. Pyle has made 
 of them, and which make the little people of our 
 parish wish that "Ivanhoe" should be pulled from 
 its place upon the shelf, and the story of the Clerk 
 of Copmanhurst and his buffeting match with 
 Richard the Lion-hearted, be read over again. And 
 what shall be said, pray, of " Eton Montem " or of 
 " Lazy Lawrence ? " 
 
 Or, maybe, the mechanic of the little crew is plot 
 ting a new hutch for the rabbits, which are reported 
 to be outgrowing utterly the old quarters. To 
 morrow there will be a plan for another dove-cote, 
 where a new couplet of the fantails is under report, 
 since yesterday. 
 
 What if small jokelets run round the board (it 
 is a generous table where our young folks are 
 
74 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 grouped) : Who has given away that first-blooming 
 primrose in the window, and to whom ? Who lost 
 their locket at that last sleigh-drive, and who found 
 it ? Up to a certain point the little creatures, Mag 
 and Jim and Harry, will take the jokelets kindly, 
 with a just perceptible tinge of red (not from the 
 fire-light) running over their fair faces ; but if the 
 matter be pressed uncannily or stoutly, there comes 
 a crimson shadow, and a shiver, and likely enough, 
 a great fresh burst of tears. 
 
 Well, well, t is to be hoped no more grievous tears 
 will ever come, only a May shower, that May 
 flowers will be sure to follow. 
 
 Possibly though staid neighbors might shake 
 their heads there is a little side-table drawn out, 
 and four oldish ones, grouping themselves thereat by 
 a kind of free-masonry, set their wits to a good old- 
 fashioned rubber of whist, not so sharply played 
 as "good Mrs. Sarah Battle (now with God) " might 
 have urged ; but with a decent silence and quietude. 
 
 Not so dull after all ; and a half-moon, shining 
 
 full upon the snow, cannot decoy to a drive to town. 
 Nine ten eleven by the clock ; the little ones all 
 drifted away ; the last rubber ended ; the hearth all 
 white and red ; the moon still shining on the snow ; 
 to-morrow, the bulbs which have been making roots 
 in the dark must be potted, and the Beurre d Anjou 
 
AMONG THE SNOWS. 75 
 
 grafts looked after, and Daisy s calf. A half-hour 
 before midnight, and the frost we brushed away 
 from the window-pane in the morning is all alive 
 again, shot and reshot in marvellous white crystals. 
 My lady s lace in the city is not prettier ; my lady s 
 lace in the city is not purer ! 
 
 There are storms in February, fierce, mad, 
 driving storms ; let them patter and beat and roar ; 
 the fresh-cleft hickory or birch, all aflame, will roar 
 them back again. I think a man never feels his 
 proprietorship of house or home more bravely or 
 more boastfully than when, with a good fire leaping 
 on his hearth, he looks out upon roads all turned to 
 rivers, and the sky covered with a maze of dripping 
 and pouring gray. 
 
 But St. Swithin (whatever may be his dim his 
 tory) yields at last to St. Valentine, most rollicksome 
 and piquant of saints. Have we watched the station 
 ery latterly to see what wonderful arabesque borders 
 have grown upon the note-paper ? Have any pair 
 of little fingers been practising upon doves a-cooing ? 
 
 Of course it is all very absurd, as Miss Propriety 
 will tell us with the greatest earnestness ; but then, 
 you know, Miss Propriety has no such wealth of 
 golden curls no such young, fresh blood, which 
 will have its little bounds and spring-tides and ebb- 
 ings. The doves will coo, though all the proper 
 
76 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 buzzards in the world were to go flapping over. 
 "We do not, of course, mean to say that a madrigal 
 is better than a sermon, or that a Valentine should 
 come once a week ; or that, amid the great shower 
 of white missives that go packed in the burdened 
 mail-bags at this season, many saucy and wanton 
 things may not be said ; but saucy and wanton 
 things are said every day by those brutally inclined. 
 The ravenous kites are always swimming in the air 
 for a dash at the sparrows ; but none the less the 
 sparrows twitter in pairs. 
 
 Shall we count it very great harm if some gener 
 ous lad, not yet out of his " roundabout," puts a 
 bright conceit of his own into words of tender ad 
 miration, and with a pressed flower, or border of 
 Cupid s artillery, and ribbons to match, consigns all 
 coyly to the Mail he counting the hours with ner 
 vous apprehension, until the carrier shall have de 
 livered the missive to some fair Viola ? Any harm 
 if she, on her part, welcomes the tender tribute 
 with a pit-pat of her little heart, and guards it sa 
 credly for a whole week which is about the aver 
 age life- time of Valentine sentiment ? 
 
 It is, after all, only a little advance spray and fly 
 ing jet of the great storm of sentiment which will, 
 later and once for all, overtake them both. Vapor 
 ous now, and not very harmful, and consigned with- 
 
AMONG THE SNOWS. 77 
 
 out a pang to the humdrum postman. But when, 
 in the years that are approaching, our lad becomes 
 on such errand his own letter-bearer, and carries his 
 name and heart in his hand, let him invoke St. Val 
 entine for a choice of one worthy and good and true 
 and womanly, so that neither a week nor a month 
 shall end the sentiment, but his hearth and home 
 evermore be brightened, as if the years were all one 
 great Valentine Day. 
 
 So we cannot find it in our hearts to abuse St. 
 Valentine ; a weak saint, no doubt, but kindly dis 
 posed, and with a smack of mirth in his saintship. 
 We lift our hat to him, and turn to our cucumber pits. 
 
 Whoever wishes good cucumbers in the early 
 spring must see to their planting in February. The 
 Early Frame or Kussian, I should say, for variety ; 
 and let no one be misled by the books into trusting 
 to the heat of an exhausted salad pit. I have yet to 
 learn of a crop, whether of field or forcing house, 
 which will do its best in the trail of another crop, 
 without fresh treatment and appliances. Least of 
 ah 1 is a good crisp cucumber an exception. 
 
 The ordinary salads for Easter day should be 
 coming forward now, chiefest among them that 
 rare one, the French Bomaine a congener of the 
 Coss lettuces which we know by the British cata 
 logues ; but more delicate and varied than they. 
 
78 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 The Parisian gardeners (without the Banlieue) count 
 some fifteen varieties ; and well grown and well 
 bleached, an adroit person can break the leaves of 
 either by a tap of the finger. It is a pleasure to fa 
 tigue such a salad in March ; its crispness is a last 
 reminder of the icicles. 
 
 Before we know it, the bees are out, languid in 
 the sunny weather, such sunny weather as the 
 harridan March vouchsafes, about the clustering 
 purple blossoms of the Mezereon, the first floral 
 venturer of the year. It is a pretty shrub, and cher 
 ished by reason of its earliness ; but its poisonous 
 berries must be plucked away betimes, lest they 
 tempt the little ones by their brilliant color. 
 
 Following fast upon the purple of the Mezereon, 
 if not actually in advance of it, come the woolly 
 tufts of the wild swamp-willow r , whose downy bud 
 is more graceful and winning than its blossom. 
 And then six soft sunny days only intervening 
 there is a rush over the door-step, and a hurried 
 tale that a blushing Hepatica has some to light in 
 the corner of the wood. Even before the remnant of 
 the snows is wholly gone, this little tender messenger 
 of the flower world peeps from the woodland. It is 
 greeted with a loud and ringing huzza, and the 
 huzza is a signal to pull down the flag of Winter, and 
 run up to the mast-head the little pennant of Spring. 
 
Spring-tide. 
 
 T F March be likened to a shrewish and vixenish 
 -- maid-of-all-work, with hair flying and dusty 
 gown, I think we may call April an uneasy young 
 fellow, of fitful humors, who has traditionally a far 
 better reputation than he deserves. He cannot be 
 depended on in any Northern latitudes ; if he smiles 
 to-day, he will be sulky to-morrow, and storm the 
 day after. Yet of such weight is a good reputa 
 tion his coming is always looked forward to with 
 eagerness, and he is greeted with a heartier wel 
 come than his fitfulness should warrant. 
 
 I say nothing against him as he first sets foot 
 upon our Southern capes, treading with flower- 
 mufned step through the woods, and painting green 
 lines over all the cultivated lands. Even the dreary 
 apologies for lawns which our Southern neighbors 
 of the Gulf boast of, wear a verdant look at his com 
 ing, and it is only when he saunters northward, 
 changing his coronet of gay blossoms for a scant 
 
So BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 bouquet, that he turns gay deceiver, and belies his 
 sunniest promises with snow and rain. We would 
 not give him so much as complimentary mention, 
 save that he always leads in that pretty coquettish 
 sister of his, May, and that far lovelier cousin, Miss 
 June. 
 
 May has her frowns indeed, as every coquette 
 should ; but with what tenderness she shakes them 
 off! Beguiling, bewitching, promising roses (but 
 scarce ever giving them), most lovable until the 
 riper June comes, and with a glory of green, and 
 blushes of real roses, makes herself mistress of our 
 hearts and of the season. 
 
 We ring down the curtain (after the manner of 
 the stage tactician) upon this grouping of a triad of 
 months, and, stepping before the foot-lights, will 
 deliver our little talk, something wayward, yet 
 something practical, about these three fore-run 
 ners of the summer. 
 
 April sometimes sulks as I have said ; and 
 whatever dappling sunshine may play about his 
 days, his evenings are chilly, and the old fires of 
 winter must be lighted again. Indeed those fires 
 of April nights seem always to me to carry a more 
 rollicking cheer in them than the steadier blazes 
 of midwinter. With their coronal of flame they 
 crown the long battle with the cold ; even so, the 
 
SPRING-TIDE. 8 1 
 
 good swordsman, after vanquishing his foe, will give 
 a last exultant twirl to his blade before he slips it in 
 the scabbard. 
 
 But that round of April weeks in which " fires at 
 night " are still joyous and needful, is broken upon 
 from time to time by days of serene and pro 
 phetic mildness when robins suddenly appear 
 when blue-birds explore their last year nesting- 
 places, and when, from the pond at the foot of the 
 lawn, there rises in the soft, lengthening twilight 
 the koax ! koax ! of a batrachian choir, into which 
 some veteran frog squat upon his haunches in a 
 shallow of the pool, pours, with portentous gravity, 
 his raucous and thundering bass. Yet withal there 
 is no denying that to one used to the civilization of 
 cities, there are many disagreeables about the coun 
 try in spring-time. 
 
 First of all, the pavements are limited, or should 
 be ; and there is a sloppiness about that inevitable 
 season between frost and thaw which does not invite 
 to out-of-door walking. The gravel paths, however 
 judiciously made, will carry somewhat of the gen 
 eral ooze and flux that belong to the refining pro 
 cesses of an April sun ; the garden parterres are 
 worse ; and our lady friend, wandering thither to 
 look upon the budding hyacinths and crocuses, may 
 very possibly sink slipper dee^p in unctuous mud. 
 
82 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 The lawn and tennis-ground, besides being soberly 
 brown of hue, and streaked in sheltered places with 
 muddy-looking remnants of old snows, are spongy 
 and poachy and springy, unlike as possible to a 
 summer s turf or to a city pavement. If the pedes 
 trian take to the country high-road, he is no better 
 off ; nay, so grossly mismanaged are these thorough 
 fares in most country towns, that he will be in dan 
 ger between frost and thaw of fairly bogging 
 himself hi the April mire. A clean boot is not indeed 
 a great desideratum in the country ; but a good 
 firm foothold upon Mother Earth is ; and I know of 
 few walking-bouts so elaborately fatiguing as those 
 which compel a tedious lifting of the feet, one by 
 one, out of a sucking vortex of spring mud. Suffer 
 ers in this way ought, at once and everywhere, to 
 make themselves the missionaries and teachers of 
 more civilized processes in respect to country road- 
 making, by which the low parts should have com 
 plete drainage, and all have coating of coarse gravel. 
 The underlaying, too, of private paths with coarse 
 rubbish and cobble-stones without which security 
 against spring upheaval and dampness, no perma 
 nent paths should ever be made would contribute 
 vastly to the comfort of the walking cousins from 
 town, as well as to the neat air of a country-place. 
 It must be remembered, moreover, in the interests 
 
SPRING- TIDE. 83 
 
 of economy, that the more thoroughly a path is un 
 derlaid with such rough draining material as I have 
 hinted at, the more secure will it be against the en 
 croachment of weeds. A soil made up of coarse 
 gravel, with only enough of clay to bind it well, and 
 lying above eighteen inches of brick-bats and cobble 
 stones, is not an inviting one for either weeds or 
 grass to fasten themselves strongly upon. 
 
 But however prudently and judiciously paths may 
 be planned and constructed, there must be a season, 
 longer or shorter, between frost and thaw, when 
 country walks will not have the enjoyableness of a 
 city pavement. There is enlivening occupation 
 enough, it is true, for an enthusiastic proprietor, 
 the unswathing of the bandaged roses, the lifting of 
 the raspberry canes, the combing of the strawberry 
 beds, the coaxing of the jonquils, the pretty cares of 
 the conservatory ; but I would advise no denizen of 
 the cities to affront spring-time in the country till 
 the ground is fairly settled, and he finds firm footing 
 on the lawn. 
 
 Again, Spring in the country makes no show of 
 that quiet repose which many outside people count 
 upon as giving greatest zest to life there. It is, on 
 the contrary, a bustling and stirring and labor-full 
 period ; we are getting the pulleys in order, and the 
 traps, and the scenic machinery, and there is a close 
 
84 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 smell of oil and lubricants of various sorts, and 
 much sweating* and pulling, and maybe, swearing ; 
 and some new assistants have come in, who must be 
 painfully taught and grumbled at and discharged ; 
 and in place of lovely green, there are great fields 
 of dirty brown, where seed and filth must lie swelter 
 ing together for months ; and trees are naked, and 
 gardens are at their worst, and biting storms with 
 snow-flakes spotting them, drive in upon fresh-dug 
 ground and chill the nodding jonquils ; and there 
 is no leisure for carrying out any little inviting 
 plan of a rustic seat here, or a new path there, 
 for the teams are busy, and the men are busy, and 
 care and every-day oversight tasked to their utter 
 most. Now all this can be enjoyable to none who 
 do not see the end from the beginning, and whose 
 hearts are not enlisted in country work, as well as in 
 country repose. Such know that the curtain will 
 be lifting inch by inch, that the trailing wood 
 plants, and the scattered streaks of green in sunny 
 places, and the yellow bells of the Forsythia, are 
 promises of the glory that shall presently be opened 
 over the whole scene. 
 
 Therefore I would say to all who do not love work 
 in the country, as well as idleness in the country, 
 Stay on the pavements until the gardens are planted, 
 and the fields green, and the apple-trees in bloom. It 
 
SPRING-TIDE. 85 
 
 is true that a good disciple of Father Tull, or Cob- 
 bett, or any earnest agriculturist, florist, or simple 
 ruralist you may name, would scorn such a staving 
 off of the real labors of the country ; and I think we 
 can pretty safely gauge a man s really earnest inten 
 tions, rurally, by the date at which he leaves city for 
 the fields. If not till later June, you may be quite 
 sure that he cares as little for grafting as for plant 
 ing, and that all his knowledge of fruit lies in a 
 good appetite for ripe specimens. Such a man s ad 
 vice, if he offers it upon a rural subject, is not worth 
 the catkin of a filbert-bush. 
 
 If your citizen turns his face field-ward in May, 
 before yet the pear-trees are in their bloom, there is 
 more hope of him ; he may come to the grafting of 
 an apple-tree, or the proper planting of his melons. 
 But if he confronts the mud of early April, and is in 
 at the planting of his Early Kose (the most profitable, 
 if not the most excellent, of all early potatoes), and 
 the overturn of his winter composts, and the sowing 
 of his Early Bassanos or Egyptian Beets, there is 
 hope that he has good weaning from the pap of city 
 luxuries. 
 
 But because a man shows this promptitude and 
 urgence, it is by no means certain that he will keep 
 up what is called a fine place. A fine place, as pop 
 ularly understood, grows out of system and precision 
 
86 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 and nicety and abundant funds, and can be arranged 
 by contract, and put on show at a great lift of the 
 roadside, like a lay figure in a haberdasher s win 
 dow. But the rural zeal that braves all the awk 
 wardnesses of earliest spring-time is not so much 
 enchained by thought of ad captandum results, as 
 by curious and loving study of processes. 
 
 A fine pear nay, a very fine pear can be 
 bought any day in the market ; but the amateur can 
 never buy in the market the pleasure with which he 
 watches the healing and re-incorporating process of 
 some grafted scion of a Beurre d Avjou; there is 
 no possible appraisement of the tender and enjoy 
 able pride with which he looks upon the first tokens 
 of a successful knitting of graft and stock, or with 
 which he sees the crimson cheeks coming at last 
 upon his closeted Bonnes de Jersey. 
 
 Yet there are abundant amateurs who having sat 
 isfied their special inquiry (by minute observation 
 of daily development) with respect to any particular 
 fruit, abandon or neglect the culture ; not from lack 
 of rural appetite, but only because their attention is 
 directed to some new inquiry. Having conquered 
 one fact, they leave it with the good people of rou 
 tine, and range about the field in search of new con 
 quests. Your gentleman of business method, on 
 the contrary, with no new horticultural scent to 
 
SPRING- TIDE. 87 
 
 divert him from the well-ordered trail of his gar 
 dener, is most exact in his labors and most nice in 
 his accomplishment. What may be the quality of 
 his secret gratification at the bestowal of some horti 
 cultural premium, it would hardly become us to 
 inquire. I think it will be found that the most 
 zealous ruralists are rarely the holders of show- 
 places ; they are too earnest in search of special 
 facts to give their mind to those harmonious com 
 binations which come within the province of the 
 gardener, and which command popular admiration. 
 The best and most zealous pharmaceutist is very 
 apt to show but a flimsy array of drugs, and his shop 
 is aptest of all to have the air of a laboratory, rather 
 than the attractive glitter which belongs to the es 
 tablishment of a popular apothecary. A good gar 
 dener, like a good apothecary s clerk, will keep the 
 property of his employer in most excellent order, 
 whether the master or proprietor be an enthusiast 
 in the matter or no. 
 
 I have hinted that spring-time in the country, 
 with those who are given over to rural duties, 
 brings bustle and haste and seeming confusion. It 
 is altogether the poorest time in the year to design 
 cautiously, or to carry out carefully any schemes of 
 improvement. Every open day, when once the 
 ground is fairly settled, must be given to the 
 
83 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 plough. The fences which winter storms have 
 slanted or flung awry must be made straight and 
 sound. The beleaguered water-courses, whether on 
 newly seeded fields or in old meadows, must be 
 cleared. The young clover must be rolled, and if 
 the land be light, a rolling will do no harm to the 
 winter grain and to the fresh-springing oats. But 
 amidst all the rolling, and the ploughing, and the 
 heavier and less-welcome preparatives for crops to 
 come, let no man who has a home in the country 
 forget or overlook the tree-planting of spring. 
 
 Why not in autumn ? Surely in autumn ; but if a 
 man does his best in that more leisurely season, 
 there will be always something left for spring ; it 
 will be all the better, indeed, if the pits have been 
 prepared over winter, and the old turfs with which 
 such holes should be dressed shall have been ripen 
 ing for plant food, under the snows and frosts. Of 
 all the composts in the world for giving leafy vigor 
 to a newly planted fruit-tree or shrub, I know noth 
 ing better than the thoroughly decomposed turf 
 from the borders of an old grass field. The ever 
 greens will take kindly to the same dressing ; and 
 except you secure immediate and lusty growth to a 
 young evergreen the season after planting, it will in 
 all likelihood have an up-hill time of it for years. 
 Later May is, above all others (in this latitude), the 
 
SPRING-TIDE. 89 
 
 season for evergreen planting. All of the fir and 
 pine family hang out too heavy a burden of leaves 
 for safe struggle against the winds of winter, and 
 only in the most protected situations can the 
 autumn planting of any of the evergreen family be 
 ventured upon with hope of successful results. Let 
 me further hint, that any man possessed of a coun 
 try place, though it be only of three or four acres of 
 ground, should have his nursery bed for young 
 evergreens, from which he may select at will, and 
 with an eye to form and habit of growth, such 
 specimens as may be thrown in upon corners, upon 
 knolls, upon the flank of a tangled bit of shrubbery, 
 and by one bold dash of dark green color give em 
 phasis to the tamest bit of foliage. 
 
 It may be observed, moreover, that with proper 
 precaution, the transfer of evergreens may be made 
 safely throughout the summer. In view of any such 
 necessity, it is well to keep a few specimens in the 
 nursery bed closely root-pruned, in order that they 
 may have a great stock of fibrous rootlets ; the pit 
 to which transfer is proposed should have abundant 
 stock of decayed turf, and this should be kept thor 
 oughly wet for two or three days preceding the 
 transfer ; next, a cloudy and still time should be 
 chosen (the wind is a great enemy to the healthful- 
 ness of exposed rootlets of any kind) ; last, mulching 
 
90 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 should be thorough, and a stake or two with bass 
 matting secure against a sudden flaw of wind. By 
 observing these conditions, it will be quite feasible 
 to dress up a knoll, burnt brown by the suns of 
 August, with a great bouquet of Norway or Austrian 
 green. I like these sudden instalments of color, by 
 which we may work out miracles of contrast as 
 deftly and easily as a painter scores it with his 
 brash. 
 
 More hazardous, but for that very reason more 
 captivating, are the startling changes which may be 
 wrought upon a small reach of landscape by dash 
 ing out (with the axe) some luxuriant and tossing 
 plume of a locust-tree, that you have tolerated for 
 its June odors and its magnificent wealth of green, 
 and exposing to view some previously hidden bor 
 der of summer flowers, or bit of rustic trellis with a 
 wild tangle of the Bitter-sweet (Celastrus Scandens) 
 capping it and overlaying it, and reaching out from 
 it its wavy, woody tendrils, with such abounding 
 affluence and such wild and winning negligence as 
 I think few climbing plants can match. 
 
 But we are running into summer, when we should 
 stay, for a few pages at least, amidst the bloom of 
 spring. Is there any bloom like it ? Not narrowed 
 to glass houses, like the winter bloom, not excep 
 tional like the summer s bloom, not hiding in se- 
 
SPRING-TIDE. 91 
 
 eluded wood-paths like autumn bloom, but riotous 
 and exultant, and filling the fields and covering the 
 woods. Is there anything more beautiful in nature, 
 in a flowery way, than an old apple-orchard, its rows 
 so broken by age, that all traces of art-arrangement 
 are gone, its tops so gnarled that you find in them 
 no reminder of the pruning-knife or the saw, its 
 gaunt limbs so mossy as to simulate the savagery of 
 a forest, and yet all canopied with tender bloom, 
 not white, but white blushing into pink, and pink 
 blushing into redness? The fruit will be poor, 
 very likely. We are not talking Pomology just now. 
 In fact, I think nature has shown a nice compensa 
 tion in this matter ; the wretched sour cider fruit 
 has I think a richer bloom than the Northern Spies 
 and the Gravensteins. The seedling peach that lifts 
 its delicate carmine from a chance hedge-row makes 
 a far prettier show of color than the fat Melocoton, 
 whose bloom is but a tawny reddish stain. I think, 
 too, that I have seen very showy colors upon streets 
 and in ball-rooms, which shrewd observers do not 
 seek after to transplant. 
 
 There is the white of the pear-orchards too, not 
 so fairy-like and wonderful as the apple-bloom in 
 deed, but singularly pure in color ; and when it in 
 vests the prim pyramids of a dwarf-garden that sen 
 tinel you, and flank you right and left with long 
 
92 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 rows of white soldiery, it charms (or should) as 
 much as any of the embroidered parterres of the 
 gardeners. I have no scorn for these last, to be 
 sure ; the pansies and the daisies (red and white), 
 and the jonquils, are full of regalement to the eyes 
 of those who have liberty of gardens ; but the pear 
 and the apple bloom, and flowery sheets upon the 
 meadows, bless the vision of the poorest. If even 
 the humble dandelion involved great appliances of 
 bottom heat, and glass fondling to bring out its 
 golden brand, I think we should give it a praise 
 that we now deny. Its eyelets, dropped like new- 
 coined eagles over an acre of greensward, are not 
 least among the floral wonders of the spring. 
 
 I hear that the newer gardeners are condemning 
 the old purple lilac as something vulgar; well, so 
 are green grass, and the apple-blossoms, and the 
 blue sky, and a thousand of Heaven s gifts of spring 
 time. When I live beyond a tender feeling for such 
 old-fashioned favorites as the Lily of the valley and 
 the Lilac and the Guelder rose and the Striped-grass 
 as accompaniments of a country home, I will take to 
 wax flowers, feeling that nature is not equal to 
 the supply. But a love for the common does not 
 forbid a love for the uncommon ; if I choose to 
 cherish tenderly the old white rose, the only 
 Northern rival of the Lamarque, though its period 
 
UNIVERSITY 
 
 SPRING- TIDE. 
 
 of bloom is so short, it no way unfits me for a hearty 
 welcome of the gorgeous red face of the General 
 Jacqueminot, or for a coquettish dalliance with the 
 pretty Madame Louise Carrique. 
 
 I cannot close the spring talk without some honor 
 able mention of the fruits and vegetables of spring. 
 
 You have them better in the cities? 
 
 Doubtful. First, that little crisp, scarlet, round- 
 bellied fellow, the Olive-shaped radish (the most 
 tender and delicate of all his tribe) ; he, at least, is 
 impatient of long journeys after he is plucked out of 
 the brown mould of the forcing-bed. His crispness 
 bleeds away fast by contact with the air ; and when 
 once the wilt of long exposure has come upon him, 
 the marketers can never build it up with sprinkling 
 or cold water douches. But pulled at sunrise, for a 
 breakfast at seven, on an April morning, with judi 
 ciously broiled chops, and feathery rolls to flank 
 them, and the little scarlet radishes are a very grate 
 ful reminder of the garden. 
 
 Still less will the salads proper permit of package 
 in barrels, and overturnings on market floors, and 
 the crude handling of raw market-boys ; a good 
 head of lettuce must carry all its delicate fibre un 
 impaired to the table, most of all that best of let 
 tuces, the White Coss (the French dub it Romaine 
 Blonde), which must be deftly tied up with basa 
 
94 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 matting five or six days before its true fitness comes ; 
 and then, by plucking away the outer and enwrap 
 ping leaflets, you shall reach such blanched and 
 clewy and cool vegetable fibre as crackles under the 
 tooth like thin plates of ice. Crown this bountifully 
 with Bordeaux oil, a pinch of salt, the merest soup- 
 eon of vinegar (in which the peeling of an onion has 
 had preliminary soak), and I think the bounties of a 
 spring garden can do nothing more for you. 
 
 In later May comes the Early Bassaho, with its 
 delightful flavor of the earth (they bear forcing as 
 well as cabbages, and well repay the trouble) ; at a 
 quick pace, after this first garden tenant of the 
 spring pot (I make no account of spinage and as 
 paragus, which are legacies from autumn), there 
 come the Dan O Rourkes, or the Tom Thumbs, 
 not much to choose between them, save that the 
 latter will involve none of the awkward labor of 
 "bushing." The snap-bean (the dwarf China is 
 best) tempts you awhile by the variety it affords, but 
 gives place presently to that glory of the cabbage- 
 tribe, and king of vegetables, the Cauliflower. He 
 is terribly impatient under the hot suns, even of 
 latter May, and must be humored at times with a 
 little artificial shade ; but no product of the garden 
 pays better for extraordinary care. 
 
 In way of garden fruits, I think none can be fairly 
 
SPRING-TIDE. 95 
 
 claimed as a spring visitor, except that prince of all, 
 the strawberry. It pains rne to think that there 
 are here and there, scattered about the world, indi 
 viduals who, by some inscrutable providence, are 
 unable to eat of this fruit without bodily detriment. 
 I regard them with the same kind of pity with 
 which I regard people who are bereft of their hear 
 ing. In latitude 40 or thereabout, the first gather 
 ing of garden strawberries dates from the 10th to 
 the 20th of June. In a record of fifteen consecutive 
 years, I find these the two extreme dates. Through 
 all of latter May, especially if the season be excep 
 tionally dry, I should advise the garden proprietor 
 to give to his man Patrick the diversion of watering 
 the strawberry bed two or three times a week, with 
 a weak wash of guano ; but let him see to it care 
 fully that no blossoms are injured ; I would further 
 counsel a coy bespreading of the whole surface, with 
 the young grass clipped from the garden terrace ; 
 and when the berries are fairly formed, I would ad 
 vise him to look about the neighborhood for a good 
 Alderney cow, in her first milk ; but let no butter 
 be made, whatever the mistress may claim, 
 while strawberries last. Following these advices, 
 and I think the most arrant citizen will find a dish, 
 morning, noon, and night, upon the country table 
 between berries that are fresh and cream that is real 
 
96 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 which denizens of the cities pray for, and pay for 
 in vain. 
 
 I shall not enter into a discussion of varieties. 
 The pomologists have come to such a pass in their 
 rivalries and jealousies, and mutual abuses, as to re 
 mind one of the virulence of the art writers, and 
 book critics. I can only say that if I were to enjoy a 
 good dish of old-fashioned Hovey s to my breakfast, 
 I think I should prefer the Triomphe de Gand for 
 dinner, and am quite sure that I should sup upon 
 Charles Downing or the Crescent and very likely 
 send my Wilsons to market ; (people who buy in 
 market should not be particular). Again, if it were 
 not a matter of dishes, but if, upon a garden stroll, 
 I had a lively desire for a bonne bouche, that should 
 be full of aroma, and require no condiment of sugar 
 or cream, I am sure that I should pluck a goodly 
 specimen of Lennig s White. For such wayward, 
 stolen tastes, I know no berry that is so inviting. 
 
 What sport is there of spring time in the country? 
 Tree planting, gardening, these smack too much 
 of positive labor perhaps. Tennis is for youngish 
 blood ; billiards belong to winter ; boating carries 
 one into August ; the gun is hanging idle on the 
 wall since last November. But athwart the gun 
 there is a landing let, and a rod and a creel, dedi 
 cated to the prince of all sports ; not angling in gen- 
 
SPRING-TIDE. 97 
 
 eral, but that chariningest of angling, whose prey and 
 glory is the little golden spotted swimmer, salmofario. 
 It should be a mild afternoon of June (April will 
 do, and so will May, and so will morning, if one can 
 be astir at sunrise), a mild afternoon with a gen 
 tle wind blowing up the meadow at your back, a 
 wind that scarce shakes the solemn tops of the hem 
 locks, and yet sets all the aspen-leaves astir; the 
 brook should be fairly full with yester-night s rain, 
 the sun to your left, Westering fast, and throw 
 ing dense shadows of maples and hemlocks and 
 cliff, across valley and stream; there should be 
 such solemn quiet as to make the chirp of a garru 
 lous and inquisitive Chickadee in the near bushes 
 painfully distinct ; and with creel half full, a most 
 delightful burden, we may safely leave our spring 
 sportsman picking his way through shaded glen, or 
 sauntering under the stately oaks that dot the 
 meadow, casting his brown hackle lightly on the 
 water over every lurking-place which he knows of 
 old, mindless of the lengthening shadows and of 
 the dews, cheated of all the village sounds that 
 betoken eventide, by that swift music of his reel, 
 till at the last, far down in some narrowed ravine, 
 the sunset and the blackness of the overhanging 
 hemlocks bring his June day to a close. 
 
 To-morrow the summer will have come. 
 
 7 
 
Old Fourth and Fruits. 
 
 T PICTURE July as a stout woman, with a liberty- 
 -*- cap (of 76) upon her head, and perspiring fear- 
 I fully. Yet she wears a cheery, honest face and if she 
 have none of the bridal freshness of June or May, 
 she wears the honors of maternity, and leads in a 
 great brood of flowers and fruits in her train. August 
 is a dark-eyed Senorita, languishing and sighing, and 
 with a sultry sulkiness that bursts out from time to 
 time into clanging and thunderous storms. Sep 
 tember is a calmer personage in the family of 
 months, golden-haired, I should say, with a 
 round-moon face, and more matronly even than her 
 sister of July with a sickle at her girdle, and 
 sheaves of grain for dower. 
 
 I am credibly informed that there are a large num 
 ber of people who annually pass the Fourth of July 
 in cities. They are proper subjects of commisera 
 tion for all good men. I remember, some years ago, 
 to have been waylaid in a metropolitan hotel upon 
 
OLD FOURTH AND FRUITS. 99 
 
 that festal day of the summer, and my regard for 
 country quietude and my love for country seclusion 
 have been, I think, intensified by that day s fearful 
 experience. A great annoyance of sound can be 
 borne ; but little ones are exasperating. A roar of 
 storm or of cannon has something pacifying in it ; 
 but the pestilent iteration of crackers and of pistols 
 at one s elbow is maddening. I can imagine no 
 better figure for a Tantalus than that of a pursy 
 man perspiring in the heats of July, with a din of 
 exploding crackers at every hand, and with no 
 power in him to stretch out an arm, and shake the 
 sin from the little urchins who keep up their tor 
 menting roulade. 
 
 That odious metropolitan July day is remembered 
 like a hobgoblin dream, full of whizzing sounds and 
 cinders. 
 
 There was another Fourth, equally well remem 
 bered, and more pleasantly, when four of us, sworn 
 comrades of travel, broke bread together, and 
 toasted the famous anniversary in bumpers of sour 
 Swiss wine upon the top of the Khigi Culm, with 
 Lake Zug lying like a mirror under the eye, and all 
 that wondrous panorama of mountain, field, and 
 flood simmering in a glorious sunshine. 
 
 I do not know what the habit of the boys schools 
 may be now-a-days : but in those old times when 
 
ioo BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 we wore roundabouts, and studied Adams Latin 
 Grammar, the Master (or "Principal," as we Scot- 
 tishly called him) used to give us a day s excursion 
 by omnibus or stage-coach on the Fourth. And we 
 piled into and all over such vehicles, by the dozen, 
 infesting the doors and windows and roof, hang 
 ing about the beloved stage-coach like bees on gone- 
 by fruit, making the hills resound with our jollity, 
 and waking every old farmer s barn by the wayside 
 with the echoes of our mad mirth. The old ladies, 
 standing akimbo in the doors, stared blank astonish 
 ment at us through their iron rimmed spectacles, 
 and shy girls caught admiring glimpses of our spick 
 and span new white drilling from behind the farm 
 house curtains. What a triumphal progress it was, 
 to be sure ! Dew on the grass, larks singing, late 
 roses blooming, cherries ripening, tall rye waving, 
 the old coach crick-cracking, Tom (our wit) chaffing 
 the driver, and the new-mown hay filling all the air 
 with its sweet perfume. Do lads of these times know 
 anything of such gay coaching-bouts, I wonder ? 
 
 Then we stopped toward high noon at some huge, 
 lumbering village tavern for dinner. A tavern din 
 ner ! my mouth waters even now to think what 
 ambrosian fare had been provided (by previous ar 
 rangement of the Principal) to cheer us boys who 
 had been depleted with three hard months of board- 
 
OLD FOURTH AND FRUITS. 101 
 
 ing school diet. A turkey positively a turkey (and 
 stufted too) at one end of the long table, and at 
 the other great heavens ! a dapper, crisp, 
 curled-tailed pig, with a sprig of parsley in his 
 mouth, and giblets and what-not, in a little paunch-y 
 tureen of gravy close by. 
 
 Tim Turner had never eaten roast pig ; how we 
 watched him as he slipped the tines of his fork into 
 the first crisp morsel, and put the toothsome dainty 
 to its crackling, final account. 
 
 " Eh, Tim, is n t it prime ? " 
 
 No wine for boys in those days. I think the old 
 master would have been mellowed by it ; and very 
 likely was, out of his private locker. But our ban 
 quet boasted a half-dozen of hop-beer, and there 
 was enchanting music in the pop of the corks, and 
 uproarious jollity when an over-ripe jug discharged 
 itself full in the face of the English master, and 
 bespattered his white waistcoat. 
 
 I wish I could hear jokes to laugh at now, as 
 heartily as we laughed at those which went cracking 
 up and down along that Fourth-of-July table. I 
 think there was not a kink in the roast pig s tail but 
 gave pleasant handle to some gibe that set the 
 whole boy company in a roar. lu short, we ad 
 mired each other as persistently and loudly as if we 
 had formed a bevy of brilliant literary men. Then 
 
102 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 we toasted the day at last, and went home through 
 the woodlands, carrying a flag and singing songs ; 
 and there was a secreted pistol (such weapons be 
 ing forbidden) which one adventurous boy loaded 
 (he had loaded hundreds, he said), and another ad 
 venturous boy, stealing into the corner behind the 
 wood-shed, fired it off in the shades of evening. 
 Never one of us saw who did the firing. 
 
 Another " Fourth " of the boy times I remem 
 ber being billeted upon some kind old relatives of 
 Tim Turner, grandparents, if my memory does 
 not misgive me, and there were two other boys 
 favored ones who shared the invitation. A queer, 
 cockloft old house, I recollect, and tall cherry-trees 
 in the garden, some of them almost reaching their 
 boughs to the chamber windows ; what a wealth, 
 too, of ox-hearts, and white-hearts, and black-hearts 
 (names smothered now under a cloud of pomologic 
 lore), and what havoc we made among them ! Tim 
 Turner suffering by his excess of zeal with a cruel 
 indigestion, and a stripping, and I know not what 
 other domestic infelicities, above stairs, at the hands 
 of the white-haired, stately grandmamma. But 
 cherries did n t make us sick, not us. Yet I have 
 even now crude recollections of a horrible night 
 mare, provoked on thought of being taken suddenly 
 sick in a strange house, and of being subjected to 
 
OLD FOURTH AND FRUITS. 103 
 
 the peremptory nursing orders of the stately old 
 lady in white hair and white bed-gown. 
 
 This mention of cherries reminds me that the 
 fruit is no longer what it was, a fruit associated 
 in the old days as intimately with the " Fourth " as 
 the fire-crackers themselves, I see nowhere in excel 
 lence, save on the exhibition tables. Such luscious 
 cherries used to hang temptingly over every door- 
 yard fence of New England ; but the trees now show 
 cancerous black tumors, or the bark gapes open, and 
 the life oozes away in great gummy clots. I hear of 
 no definite and effective remedy for these ailments. 
 And if these could be conquered, there remain the 
 canker-worms, which over wide belts of land entirely 
 defoliate the struggling trees ; and the curculio, 
 which, in fault of its old friend the plum, inflicts its 
 Turkish sting, and forbids development. 
 
 I think the time is soon coming if it be not al 
 ready come when we must look, at the East, for 
 the old beauty of this July fruit only upon dwarfed 
 trees which have nice garden treatment. It may be 
 even necessary to revive the protective method of 
 Sir Francis Carew, who, as far back as the latter 
 part of the sixteenth century, delayed the ripening 
 of his cherries in England, and secured a rich show 
 of fruit by extending a gauze screen over the whole 
 tree. 
 
104 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 There is no doubt of the fact that, in all the old- 
 settled portions of the country, we are meeting with 
 more difficulties, year by year, in the raising of su 
 perior fruits. We are conquering the difficulties, to 
 be sure, and keep the markets in fair trim ; but the 
 day when a man could stick in his sapling of a 
 cherry, or a plum, or an apple, in good garden 
 ground, leaving it thereafter to grow at its own will, 
 and be confident of a full harvest when bearing- 
 season came, is utterly gone. There must be nurs 
 ing and watchfulness and pruning, and a hand-to- 
 hand combat with a great brood of pestiferous in 
 sects. 
 
 Who that feels the gray shadows of middle age 
 thickening over his head (for my part, I confess to 
 it) does not remember the peach-orchard near to 
 every old homestead of New England, and the rich 
 burden of rareripes and free-stones and cling-stones 
 (before yet the magnificent Melocoton was known), 
 and how round-jacketed school-boys, with big pouches 
 of pockets, thought it no theft to abstract a few from 
 between the fence bars, and went their way rejoic 
 ing in spoils and perfume ? Nay, there were times 
 when we used to bring a spotted bandanna hand 
 kerchief, with the corners tied together, to the mass 
 ing of such stores of peaches and blue plumbs as an 
 old ninepence (as rare as the fruit is in our day) 
 
OLD FOURTH AND FRUITS 105 
 
 would buy. I think I could find my way in the 
 night-time, even now, to the locality of an old tree 
 that bore " June-eatings " (so the farmers called 
 them), upon the flank of the hill that lay westward 
 of a certain high-school ; but the tree is dead, and 
 the plunder plunderable no longer. 
 
 With the abundant and easy crops of those days, 
 I doubt if the small school-boy thefts were ever very 
 noticeable, economically considered. I suspect Dea 
 con McCrea would have given us all we asked, if we 
 had ventured the request ; but then what would 
 have become of all the romance of the rope ladder 
 which we let down coyly from the second-story win 
 dows, after the master was asleep, and the wonder 
 ful Sindbad adventures which we had to recount ? 
 
 Next after cherries, in the pleasant summer 
 weather, came raspberries ; not the modern berries, 
 which, under pomologic manipulation, have become 
 so dainty of stem and stalk that we must needs bury 
 them in the winter, or lash them in straw cloaks like 
 a remontant rose, but the sturdy old black and yellow 
 caps, that lifted their thimble-like cones along many 
 a country hedge-row. We strung them on stalks of 
 timothy grass ; I do not know if that is a child habit 
 to-day ; but three or four and thirty years ago it 
 was in great vogue. I have a vague recollection 
 that certain childish attentions to a blue-eyed angel 
 
io6 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 in short dresses and red morocco shoes found their 
 climacteric in the transfer of a half -score of black 
 caps from my spear of grass to her spear ; what 
 came of it cannot so well be recalled ; but when I 
 think of the berrying, and the July warmth, and the 
 callous men at their mowing (it being haytime) and 
 the red-morocco shoes, a golden mist steals over the 
 memory and obscures the scene. 
 / I like the good old sturdy black-cap berries, be- 
 /cause they take care of themselves. They want no 
 gardener s strawing and bundling. They are proof 
 against all the insects which beset the multitude of 
 fruits. They are rampant and vigorous and abound 
 ing. The red Antwerps and Philadelphias and 
 Brinckle s Orange (a rarely good berry, it must be 
 said) want petting and nursing ; and ten to one, dis 
 appoint you by dying some hard winter, in the mid 
 dle of their straw sheathing. But the honest black 
 cap is always itself, and can hold its own with the 
 willows and alders. Not very exquisite in flavor, 
 maybe, not soft and spongy, but almost suffering 
 an honest bite, yet having a wild, forest aroma of 
 its own, and a sure bearer. 
 
 Huckleberries come in August. I have been look 
 ing in these days of New Rochelle, and Kittatinny, 
 and of farmers clubs (which might as well be called 
 advertising clubs) for a Dumptabinny, or a New Bor- 
 
OLD FOURTH AND FRUITS. 107 
 
 deaux huckleberry. Why not? Is not the little, 
 old-fashioned shrub worth revision? Is there no 
 fruit innocence left that can rejoice itself with 
 huckleberries and milk ? Is it a corrupt taste that 
 covets that dish when first the summer evenings 
 smack of the coming coolness of autumn? I am 
 quite sure that the pomologists will have their hand 
 (and their handbills) upon this old berry before 
 many years are past ; and I dread to think what 
 they may make of it. Large, possibly, and juicy, 
 and tender no doubt ; but the old aroma of the wild 
 pasture-lands, will they guard that? Can it be 
 guarded under domestication? I have never yet 
 eaten a tamed partridge or prairie-hen ; and it ap 
 pears to me that a generation or two of cage life 
 would dissipate all the gaminess which gives now a 
 relish to these estimable birds. 
 
 Of summer wild fruits, there remain the blue-ber 
 ries, the bil-berries, the choke-berries, and a certain 
 unnoticed little fruit (at least unnoticed by the fruit 
 books) which in our boyish times was known by the 
 name of Shad-berry, the product of that earliest 
 flowering tree, which trails its white glory along the 
 banks of our rivers and inland lakes through middle 
 or latter May. If I put a botanical pin through this 
 old friend, it must be with the title of Amelanchier 
 Canadensis. The country people call it Shad-blow ; 
 
io8 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 and the name has so far vulgarized the shrub it 
 will come to be a goodly tree under fair treatment 
 that it is hardly allowable in well-ordered collections. 
 Yet its feathery trail of bloom coming before all 
 white tree-bloom of the year is a spring messen 
 ger of peace ; and if my recollections are not wrong 
 of certain bathing-bouts to Lake Snipsic, near to 
 Ellington, along whose borders this tree grew in 
 profusion, the fruit is by no means to be despised. 
 The wood of this tree has the singular peculiarity of 
 /Deing traversed by minute red veins ; whence it 
 came about that some of us philosophers of the jack- 
 knives entertained a theory that it must be the 
 Judas-tree, which thus carried all through its heart, 
 and evermore, the signet of the bloody betrayal. 
 
 Turning gardenward in September, we meet 
 the grapes. But there is a war about the grapes in 
 which we yearly annalists of the bounties of the 
 gardens cannot mingle. A word must be said in 
 praise of that vine which shows the first downy-blue 
 ^clusters of the season, the Hartford Prolific. Not 
 over-rich in either perfume or flavor, but honestly 
 doing its best year after year ; not taking a double 
 twelve-months rest to recuperate ; not prone to 
 mildew or other ailments ; not dropping its leaves 
 and showing bare bunches ; but a steady, homely, 
 certain bearer, neither resenting lack of attention, 
 
OLD FOURTH AND FRUITS. 109 
 
 nor caring for over-much pruning, but year by year 
 showing its modest purple clusters in early Sep 
 tember. 
 
 After this earlier vineyard show, comes first in or 
 der and in rank the little copper-colored Delaware. 
 But, if I am not mistaken, it has not as yet at the 
 East, an assured place in public favor. It shows a bad 
 trick of dropping its leaves in August, leading thence 
 forth a pinched and asthmatic life. The berries, too, 
 at their best and under highest culture, are not gen 
 erously large ; two or three together hardly make 
 an honest freight for the tongue ; then the flavor? 
 Rich enough, luscious enough ; but, after all, some 
 what tamely luscious, suggesting the word cloying ; 
 and lacking that brilliant piquancy which so em 
 phasizes the sweetness of a perfect fruit as to make 
 you forget its sweetness altogether. 
 
 The lona, which takes to blushing very shortly 
 after the Delaware, is to my notion a far better 
 fruit, with no smothered sweetness, but great brisk 
 ness and a noticeable character of its own. The 
 bunches, too, are broad-shouldered, ponderous, and 
 the berries are not wearisomely small, but as gener 
 ous in size as the clusters. Of course, I speak of it 
 at its best. At its worst, the vine grows haltingly, 
 invites the thrips, drops its leaves, and shows a 
 scant array of miniature bunches. 
 
no BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 It is not a grape to be recommended to careless 
 cultivators, not even to good second-rate cultivators. 
 It demands absolutely the highest culture and ex- 
 tremest care. With this, and in its own zone of 
 soil and climate (and I believe every grape has its 
 own), it will reward magnificently. Nothing less 
 than deep trenching and thorough drainage will 
 serve as a preparative ; if with these precautions, 
 and deep planting, the vines sicken and grow pale, 
 and show shrivelled leaves and weak clusters (say on 
 the third year), exposure or soil is unsuited, and no 
 redemption is possible. But do not make haste to 
 condemn too broad a zone of country, because your 
 own plants fail. 
 
 The old Concord is a steady grower, and holds 
 rank among all out-of-door grapes, like the Baldwin 
 among apples ; not of finest flavor never luscious, 
 but almost always sure in bearing, and hardy as the 
 hardiest. Westward of the Alleghanies, and on 
 vineyard slopes that look down kindly to the rivers, 
 this old fruit shows larger, and juicier clusters than 
 we can boast of at the East, and a more thorough 
 ripening to the core. 
 
 I have great respect for that old mother Concord 
 vine, which I am told still survives in the garden 
 just northward of Hawthorne s old "Wayside" 
 home (at Concord). Yet it has not come to great 
 
OLD FOURTH AND FRUITS. in 
 
 bulk there ; I have seen far larger growth, in vines 
 of half its age. 
 
 The Diana, shy and uncertain bearer as it is, and 
 showing the unwelcome habit of pressing its berries 
 into unevenness of shape and premature decay, will 
 always be a favorite for its rare keeping qualities 
 (when thoroughly ripened) and its piquant muski- 
 ness of flavor. A noticeable thing, moreover, about 
 this vine, is its impatience of close trimming ; it 
 does not take kindly to the " spur system ; " its best 
 crops so far as my observation goes come from 
 a long, vigorous, unpruned branch of the previous 
 year s growth ; and care should be taken with the 
 Diana, to secure these long reaches of new wood. 
 
 Then there is the veteran Catawba, about which 
 Eastern cultivators do not now concern themselves 
 over-much ; with an early September sun pouring 
 upon it all through October, it might make a royal 
 grape, but save under exceptional conditions of ex 
 posure it is too slow a ripener. A score more of 
 names might come into our list from the delicate 
 Lady Grape of our good friend Campbell, to the 
 last new Hybrid ; but when the last and truest 
 praise is spoken of the best of all, it is quite certain 
 that we have yet to look for a thoroughly good out- 
 of-door grape East of the Great Plains ; some 
 thing that shall over-ride the market, as the Golden 
 
H2 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 Chasselas tops the markets of France. The great 
 est drawback in quality seems to be an ugly core of 
 rawness and sourness, which our suns do not reach 
 or subdue. Is it possible that too fierce a heat in 
 our sunshine (as too fierce fire under the grill of a 
 chop-house works kindred ill effect) does somehow 
 bring the exterior to a premature ripeness, which 
 thereafter swathes harmfully the core of green sour 
 ness? 
 
 One word of affectionate commendation I must 
 give to that rampant and abounding grower, the 
 Clinton; hardly worth mentioning for its fruit, 
 though those who recall the boy-days of frost-grape 
 hunting will be cheated into pleasant reminiscences 
 by its tweak of acidity and big bundle of seeds ; but 
 as an ornamental vine I bespeak favor for it, so 
 abounding in tendrils, so glossy in its green, so 
 sure and firm in its foliage, so riotous in fruitage, 
 that it is the very thing to give its thronging em 
 braces to rustic columns, to bits of old slatternly 
 fences, to dead trees, to staring outbuildings, to 
 bald surfaces of wall, and to awnings of village 
 shops. 
 
 I said September should wear a full, round face, 
 like her harvest-moon. It should be calm, too ; she 
 represents a season of repose ; all profitable growth 
 is fairly over when her face beams its broadest, and 
 
OLD FOURTH AND FRUITS. 113 
 
 the sun nears " the line." The grain is ripe, the 
 roots are ripe, the fruits are ripe, the leaves are ripe, 
 and in all their axils the germs of another spring 
 struggle and growth are coiling into shape. No 
 wood growth or vine growth after September comes 
 in, is worth its cost ; t will not harden so as to bear 
 the blight of winter. Foolish old vines and ram 
 pant trees attempt it, and show sometimes lusty 
 green shoots or tendrils ; but it is a vain show. It 
 reminds me always of the wanton foppery of an 
 elderly man, whose years should make him sedate ; 
 or of the vain millinery which misguided woman 
 hood will sometimes affect, after fifty years have 
 placed their successive seals upon forehead and 
 figure. 
 
 The hurry of the grain-harvest is over ; the mow 
 ing even for aftermath is over ; the weed de 
 struction, for the year, is over ; but work is not 
 over, as old Tusser, may admonish us ; 
 
 "Thresh seed, and to fanning, September doth cry, 
 Get plow to the field, and be sowing of rye ; 
 Sow timely thy white wheat, sow rye in the dust, 
 Let seed have his longing, let soil have her lust." 
 
 And so, with the jingle of this old Suffolk rhymester 
 in our ear, and with the katykids a-chirp, and a 
 
 neighborly owl lifting its too-whoo in the edge of 
 
 8 
 
ii4 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 the wood, and the broad moon shining, this ripe 
 month goes out. 
 
 Seated under our bower of vine-leaves, we wave it 
 a kindly adieu ; waiting patiently and hopefully for 
 the fairy October, which to-morrow shall kindle a 
 new and a fiery glow over all the landscape. 
 
Playtime, Plays, and Planting. 
 
 /~\CTOBEK is regal, and walks the woods royally 
 ^^ with great show of purple and crimson, while 
 a veil of golden mist streams from the tiara of the 
 queenliest of the months. November is a humble 
 attendant, who wears dun-colored garments, but 
 sports a cast-off royal veil of the queenly mistress, 
 and walks in mists as golden as she. December has 
 masculine chill and harshness and frosted beard, not 
 deserving our praises save for the halo that shines 
 round his head year after year, lighted by the 
 wondrous Christmas star. 
 
 I believe that boys vacations, now-a-days, come 
 around in July, or thereabout ; but five-and-thirty 
 years ago, in those boys schools of which I had 
 painful experience, vacations happened somewhere 
 in October, possibly running a little into Novem 
 ber, so that the golden months, gilded by vaca 
 tion, were twice golden. 
 
 We fellows, in that time, must have left our 
 
ii6 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 hffmes in April, when as yet no leaves had shown 
 themselves, and but here and there a stray blossom, 
 when the elders were looking after a planting of 
 the peas and parsnips in fresh-dug ground, that 
 caught a little skimming of frost over-night ; but 
 when we came back in those bright October vaca 
 tions, lo ! the trees were all loaded with leaves, and 
 thick, welcome shadows slanted on paths where no 
 shadows lay in April. What a gorgeous thing it 
 was to take that first tramp after the return under 
 the maples just crimsoning, under the vine-arbor 
 all glowing with purple, through the melon-patch 
 where the yellow-faced Cantaloupes smiled at us ! 
 We knew well enough that the Cantaloupes would 
 not be gone ; we knew some " roasting ears" would 
 be left ; we knew the Pound-sweets would be just 
 at their best; we knew the Yirgalieus if not 
 cracked out of all shape would be in prime condi 
 tion. And the hazel-nuts, they would be a-ripen- 
 ing, and the Cheeseborough russets, and possibly, 
 if frost came early, shagbarks would be ready be 
 fore vacation was over. 
 
 I do not know how a month could have a better 
 naming for a boy than to be called vacation-time. 
 There are hints now and then in the education jour 
 nals and exceedingly staid newspapers about study 
 being a great pleasure, and about good little chil* 
 
PLAYTIME, PLAYS, AND PLANTING. 117 
 
 dren loving school so much that they are sorry to 
 hear the master or the mistress say that the term is 
 ended. 
 
 I distrust such statements very much ; I think 
 that a good, wholesome longing for vacation-time to 
 come is one of the best possible evidences that a boy 
 is kept up to the notch of a good daily gain. There 
 are a great many serious things which, in our pro 
 gressive days, are entertained as a joke and made 
 sport of, but I can t help thinking that syntax and 
 vulgar fractions and Quousque tandem want such a 
 knuckling down to them from a boy as will give him 
 capital relish for vacation, come when it may. 
 
 But while I say this, I want to enter solemn pro 
 test against the awful system of cramming which 
 seems coming into vogue, by which a boy shall be 
 set to half a dozen different studies at once, and his 
 examples in arithmetic (growing to be mere conun 
 drums in figures) shall be piled upon him twenty 
 deep. School-book makers seem to be striving one 
 against the other who shall put the keenest puz 
 zles to young brains ; and school-mistresses, by the 
 same law, assign most merit to the lad who can solve 
 the greatest number of them in a day. Piling up 
 numbers for the sake of numbers is a vain thing ; 
 it feeds the nervous, American unrest, which goes 
 to the worship of cumulation. Better by odds, that 
 
u8 BOUND TOGETHER, 
 
 a boy should go slower, with a fuller knowledge of 
 the qualities and meanings of practical problems, 
 than this weary floundering through the ever new 
 subtleties of pedagogic contrivance. But I must 
 not preach. 
 
 My impression is that we "fellows" began to 
 score off the weeks before term-time ended fully 
 two months in advance ; then we came to scoring 
 the days, and finally to a scoring of the lessons ; 
 and there was a certain oldish Adams Latin Gram 
 mar drifting about the Edgewood house, a few 
 years ago, which bore some of these score-marks 
 upon it ; and under Kule VH, or thereabout, there 
 was a special score and an October date written in 
 colors, with a halo of glory around it, not very artis 
 tic to be sure, but significant and impressive. 
 
 But October had another glory for the old boys 
 of thirty-five years ago, the school closed with 
 dramatic exhibitions, at which Captain Absolute 
 and Diggory (without Miss Hardcastle, it must be 
 said) were accustomed to figure. We studied our 
 parts in the pine-woods, we rehearsed them over 
 the wood-shed ; we borrowed wardrobe from the 
 hired man " and retired troopers ; we dressed the 
 hall with evergreens ; we learned comic poems for 
 declamation ; we struggled hard for a drop-curtain, 
 but the Principal decided against it, t was too 
 
PLAYTIME, PLAYS, AND PLANTING. 119 
 
 theatrical, so we turned a recitation-room into a 
 dressing-room, and subscribed for extra candles, 
 and made a night of it. What a strain and press 
 and throng upon the benches ; and what weak 
 knees and pale faces in the recitation-room ! But 
 we brought our courage up under the bright eyes 
 beaming on us, and the extra candles, and went 
 through the matter bravely. There was applause 
 though the Principal solemnly forbade it (quite 
 impossible to resist Nehemiah Wilkinson, who 
 played our head parts) ; there was laughter, up 
 roarious, undisguised ; somebody said that a young 
 woman on the back benches shed tears at one part. 
 Quite likely. I doubt if Mr. Abbey or Colonel Maple- 
 son, with all their paraphernalia, ever kindled such 
 relish of the dramatic art, as we, with a real pistol 
 (the Principal loaded it and put in a thundering 
 wad of Boston Recorder), and a militia-man s coat, 
 altered expressly for our Captain Absolute. 
 
 No female characters were allowed upon our stage ; 
 no boy was permitted to don crinoline, or what filled 
 the place of crinoline in those times, though we had 
 one or two boys who would have made capital girls. 
 So we played Sheridan without his heroine, and 
 Goldsmith, as I said, without the Hardcastle. In 
 fact, we had emasculated (excuse the word) edi^ 
 tions of the plays, with no womankind in them. 
 
120 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 But a play without a woman in it, when one thinks 
 of the matter, is but a dull affair ; virtue doesn t 
 get its reward in it, and vice has not full exhibit ; 
 and though we kept our courage up on these short 
 rations (dramatically speaking), there was a hanker 
 ing among some of us after the real thing. As 
 chance would have it, another schoolmaster not far 
 away had more progressive views, and at his exhi 
 bitions allowed one or two of the smaller boys to 
 personate heroines. 
 
 I remember finding my way on an October even 
 ing (I think it must have been clandestinely) to one 
 of these exhibitions, my first participation in the 
 real drama. With the master s injunctions on me, I 
 fear there was a little guilty shamefacedness at 
 crossing the threshold of iniquity (I mean the insti 
 tution of the neighboring schoolmaster, who was 
 really quite lamb-Eke in private life). But he had 
 a green drop-curtain, and something that passed 
 for foot-lights, and these things alone made me 
 quake. There was a great hum and buzz and a 
 flutter of excitement, possibly a fiddle or two, 
 but of this I cannot speak positively. I am quite 
 certain there were some quite innocent-looking 
 middle-aged ladies present ; one of them tapped me 
 with her fan and asked me to pass her " the bill." 
 The bill ! tho bill of a dramatic performance ! 
 
PLAYTIME, PLAYS, AND PLANTING. 121 
 
 At last the curtain rose, the fiddles giving a 
 graceful diminuendo to their performance and 
 then came silence. The curtain rose ; there was a 
 sofa, a real sofa, and a carpet too, for all the 
 world as if it had been a parlor. Then the men 
 came in, . two of Barnes s fellows (Mr. Barnes kept 
 the school). They talked splendidly, and they sat 
 down upon the sofa, just as any man not playing 
 might have done. If I had known how rare a 
 thing this was, I should have admired it a great 
 deal more than I did. 
 
 In our school-house on the Exhibition nights one 
 could see the back wall and the windows, and knew 
 very well that the windows opened on the ball- 
 ground and old McCrea s orchard : but at Barnes s 
 there was a hanging behind the stage with a false 
 door in it and a painted window, which anybody 
 could see was not a real window ; yet I kept waiting 
 to see the false door open. At last it did open, 
 at what stage of the play it is impossible to tell 
 now ; indeed, all earlier portions faded in presence 
 of the light of the beautiful Geraldine. Of course 
 it was one of the boys ; but I could not conceive of 
 her being a boy ; such a trim-fitting pea-green 
 silk, such jaunty little gaiter boots with pearl but 
 tons, such a sash, such cheeks, such a voice ! And 
 she went through with all kinds of perils ; and the 
 
122 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 rascal of the play would have run away with her, 
 and I could have jumped over the foot-lights to 
 kneel at her feet and declare myself a sworn lover 
 (though I was of tender age for such risks). In 
 short, the woe and pathos and pea-green silk and 
 foot-lights subdued me utterly. This, to be sure, 
 was real drama ! All the evening I was in a tem 
 pest of feeling, one moment assailed by jealousy, 
 when the lover of the piece passed his arm around 
 the w r aist of Geraldine, and again excited to rage 
 almost, when the villain of the play provoked the 
 poor, unprotected damsel to tears ; (at least she put 
 her face in her hands as if there were tears). I 
 hoped it might be so. I wanted it all to be true. If 
 it were only possible to console her ! 
 
 At last the curtain dropped on her loveliness, and 
 Binks (I found out his name), the odious lover, won 
 her. I went home, clandestinely again, think 
 ing of the foot-lights and Geraldine. O for a touch 
 of that sweet little gloved hand of Geraldine ! I 
 dreamed of Geraldine. Two days after, I loitered 
 about the Barnes brick building, eager to find some 
 memento of that brilliant illusion, of that fairy 
 scene, some ring, some locket, some curl, some 
 slate-pencil, if that were all, to recall the cruel 
 past. They said it was a boy-player ; but it could 
 have been no boy. Ah, Geraldine, Geraldine ! 
 
PLAYTIME, PLAYS, AND PLANTING. 123 
 
 Well, this was one of the old golden October ex 
 periences ; and, curiously enough, a year or two 
 since I happened to mention this old dramatic per 
 formance, and my infatuation with Geraldine, to a 
 friend who had been one of Barnes s scholars. He 
 listened kindly enough, but spoilt all by a great 
 roaring laugh, and said he would take me that after 
 noon to see Geraldine. And he did ; it was a boy. 
 He is now butchering in Hamden ; he is doing a 
 "fair trade;" he weighs, I should say, two hundred 
 and odd, and chews Mrs. Miller s "fine-cut." Ah, 
 Geraldine ! Geraldine ! Spem vanam sequi. 
 
 I credited the grapes to September, the while we 
 were dallying with that moon-faced lady, but a 
 richer show of grapes by far belongs to October ; 
 of course a little biting of the early frosts must be 
 looked for, but there is doubt if a twinge of cold 
 that stiffens all the clover-leaves will injure much 
 the flavor of a grape. The frost-grape we know is 
 rather benefited by it ; and it is by no means cer 
 tain that the Isabella, if fully ripe, would not suffer 
 a refining of flavor under a cold that ravaged the 
 Lima beans and the peppers. To tell truth, the Isa 
 bella needs refining to make it palatable. We have 
 sworn by it a great many years, and done sufficient 
 honor to the Mistress Isabella (of North Carolina, I 
 believe) to allow us now to tell the truth about it ; 
 
124 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 to wit, that the vine is a free bearer of a grape 
 that rarely ripens, and when ripe is only passable 
 for eating and thoroughly execrable for wine. It 
 makes indeed when fully ripe a wine full of 
 bouquet, but for that very reason only fit for giving 
 aroma to wines of better body which lack perfume. 
 I remember seeing thirty-five years ago in the 
 cellars of a Bordeaux merchant, three or four snug 
 casks of Isabella wine imported for the sole pur 
 pose of this diffusion of its flowery odor over a 
 vintage of the Graves country. And this large ex 
 portation of American wine to France (said to be 
 increasing year by year) is not as many swiftly 
 decide for a mere change of label and easy coun 
 terfeit ; but for service in limited amounts, for those 
 courses of manipulation and the blending of flavors, 
 and enlivening dull aromas, and mending color, and 
 qualifying weak bodies, which belong and have long 
 belonged to the judicious manufacture of clarets. 
 
 The fact that a grape is fragrant and grateful to 
 the taste (in its perfect state) is, I believe, no proper 
 evidence of its fitness for making a good wine. In 
 respect of cider I think the same analogy holds ; 
 the Newtown Pippin makes indeed very good cider, 
 but, if I am not greatly mistaken, the Crab makes a 
 far better cider. The grape from which the best 
 Medoc wine is made such as Chateau Margaux 
 
PLAYTIME, PLAYS, AND PLANTING. 125 
 
 and Lafitte has no great reputation as a dessert 
 fruit, and could never have in presence of the 
 Golden Chasselas, which is without special repute 
 for wine-making. 
 
 In this very month of October, where we linger 
 just now, I remember having passed through Medoc 
 in the vintage season, and recall distinctly the tame- 
 ness which belonged to the grapes of the Lafitte 
 vineyard, as compared with the luscious clusters I 
 had eaten at Fontainebleau. And I recal, very 
 gratefully, how the manager of the Lafitte estate 
 took us an old college friend being in company 
 into the private cellar of the Chateau, asking us to 
 make choice of wine for the day s dinner. And 
 there came up a dusty bottle dating as far back as 
 the end of the last century, of which only the bou 
 quet remained : It was literally ashes of roses. 
 But when we came to later cherished years, one of 
 them among the teens, and another between twenty 
 and thirty, there was not only delicious perfume, 
 but a rich sound body that inspirited and cheered. 
 If there be better wines made anywhere than on that 
 little vineyard of Lafitte, it has never been my good 
 fortune to taste them. The Mouton and the Latour 
 are close by, and the Chateau Margaux less than a 
 half -day s drive away ; but between them, singularly 
 enough, are sandwiched vineyards which bear only 
 
126 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 ordinary reputations, and command only half-prices. 
 We are slow in learning the lesson, in this country, 
 which must be learned, that the quality of a wine 
 depends upon especial exposure and soil far more 
 than upon the species of the grape ; and that a most 
 excellent wine grape under one exposure and in one 
 soil, may lose such excellence under other condi 
 tions though possibly gaining in reputation as a 
 table fruit. The taste for grape-eating is not only 
 vastly on the increase in this country, but in Europe 
 also. Many of the vineyards within easy reach of 
 Paris, from which only an ordinary wine has been 
 made (notedly those of Pouilly), are now converted 
 into grape-orchards. And Paris has a maw for all 
 the fruit that comes. 
 
 October and November are essentially the months 
 for pushing forward country improvements, of what 
 ever kind. The old race of selectmen understood 
 this matter, (it being among the few things which 
 came within the scope of their comprehension,) and 
 called out the dwellers along the highways to mend 
 the roads. And what a dreary mending it has been, 
 and still is ! Our railways stand fairly beside other 
 railways ; our machinery of all sorts is in the front 
 rank ; our inventive genius foremost ; our civiliza 
 tion in most aspects even with that of olden nations. 
 But in the matter of road-making, we are barba/ 
 
PLAYTIME, PLAYS, AND PLANTING. 127 
 
 rians. You shall go away from a village shop where 
 you can purchase the papeterie of Paris, and drive 
 along a highway that would not have been tolerated 
 by the road-masters in the time of Tiberius. We 
 have the fastest trotters, and the lightest carriages, 
 and the firmest skeleton wagons that were ever 
 heard of ; and we have for their service and display 
 the most abominable country roads that are to be 
 found in any Christian land. 
 
 We go on shovelling the old debris of the ditch- 
 ways upon the middle of a carriage track, fondly 
 thinking that decayed leaves and old turf will make 
 good metal for the beat of a horse s foot. There 
 are large and thriving towns I could name, with their 
 thirty to fifty thousand inhabitants, with road 
 metal all made to their hands amidst the debris of 
 adjoining basaltic cliffs, which show all through 
 spring, and every season of wet, such sloughs of 
 streets as are a disgrace to our century and our 
 civilization. 
 
 I see a reason for our great slackness in this 
 matter, in the fact that railways overtook us before 
 any good system of road-making could be matured. 
 If we could swim over fifty miles by steam in a 
 couple of hours, we undervalued the difficulties that 
 might lie upon a three-mile beat of road. The con 
 sequence is, that, in any journey before us, we think 
 
128 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 little of the hundred or two hundred miles of steam- 
 travel, but keep a wholesome horror of the fragment 
 of roadway which joins our railway terminus with 
 the point of destination. The establishment of 
 horse railways, whose managers are careful for little 
 but their dividends, leaves the whole problem of 
 sub-urban road-making in a still more unsettled 
 condition. 
 
 Not only in the matter of road-making, but in all 
 rural improvements which depend upon treatment, 
 or upheaval of land, October and November are the 
 golden months of the year. No earnest ruralist will 
 let them pass unimproved. Whether grading, or 
 clearing, or seeding, or trenching, or planting, or 
 walling be in hand, no pair of months are equal to 
 them in the whole calendar. The teams are in full 
 vigor, the men are stimulated by the cool breath of 
 autumn ; there is no panting under August heat ; 
 the low marshes are in their best stage for ditching ; 
 the ground is friable and gives the best perfume to 
 the ploughman ; the nursery saplings have finished 
 their growth, and wait for transfer ; the turf has 
 shown its most rampant growth, and will keep a 
 Velvet sleekness till snow r comes. 
 
 If we come to landscape decoration, whither we 
 must tend if we bring our civilization to its ripest 
 form, autumn is still the time both to plot and to 
 
PLAYTIME, PLAYS, AND PLANTING. 129 
 
 execute. The waning hues of the summer foliage 
 give the best studies of color ; and the dropping leaf 
 lets, as they leave bare great open spaces in the 
 woods, open the vistas by which we may measure 
 our plans and direct our clearings. 
 
 No better timber and no better wood is cut for 
 whatever purpose than that which is felled just as 
 the leaves are prepared to drop away from the axils 
 of the newly -formed buds of the year to come. No 
 hickory will crackle in the fire so merrily, and with 
 such outgiving of its nutty aroma, as that which falls 
 under the axe with the great tumulus of its ripened 
 leaves sweeping the air in its fall. No cedar, or 
 locust, or aromatic sassafras for rustic decoration 
 will hold its bark so surely and firmly, and give 
 such enduring satisfaction, as that which falls under 
 the axe of later October. 
 
 In the work of tree-planting it is a mistake to 
 suppose that we must needs wait until the leaves 
 have absolutely fallen. It is better by far to antici 
 pate this, and, when once full ripeness of the leafy 
 canopy is assured, make the transfer. We thus give 
 a fortnight or more, for good settlement of the earth 
 about the rootlets, before freezing-time shall have 
 come. I except, of course, in this connection, the 
 evergreens all, whose transplanting season does not 
 fairly come till spring. If the planting of deciduous 
 9 
 
130 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 trees must be deferred, the holes may very properly 
 be prepared in autumn, and the turf strewn about 
 the pits, to take the benefits of the winter s frosts. 
 Still another item since I am running strongly 
 toward practicalities here must be named for the 
 benefit of those who have much tree-planting to do, 
 and large transfer of trees within their own lands, 
 to wit, an efficient root-pruning, six months (or 
 what is better, a full year) previous to the transfer ; 
 this will work wonders in developing the little fibrous 
 rootlets, which most of all contribute to the support 
 and vigor of a transplanted tree. 
 
 I had occasion to mention Shagbarks and the 
 search for them, among boyish reminiscences ; this 
 has not yet lost its credit as a good old-fashioned 
 American fruit, and I hope it never may. I mention 
 it again for the sake of remarking that, by careful 
 root-pruning six months or a year in advance, (more 
 especially excision of its long tap-root,) it may be 
 safely removed ; and, if we may credit French ex 
 periences upon the walnut of France (very like Eng 
 lish walnut, and a source of great revenue to many 
 communes by reason of the nut-oil), it may be suc 
 cessfully grafted with the best scions of thin-shelled 
 fruit, by choosing a young and thrifty stock of two 
 years old, and grafting near the root, by the old 
 cleft method, using good bass bandaging and 
 
PLAYTIME, PLAYS, AND PLANTING. 131 
 
 plenty of protecting wax. The introduction of for 
 eign shell-fruit trees into this country, has so far as 
 I know, not resulted in good practical results. The 
 Spanish chestnut, and the English walnut and filbert 
 have all been tried faithfully ; and though the trees 
 in many instances make vigorous growth, and show 
 no apparent injury from our fierce suns or killing 
 frosts, the fruitage is not (in any instance I have 
 known) very promising. I have upon my own 
 grounds a filbert bush hardy and healthy appar 
 ently, as if growing on English soil, and maintaining 
 good renewal of growth (by stooling) for thirty years 
 now, yet its fruitage counts for nothing. 
 
 I look forward however to the time when a good 
 American dinner will not be complete without its 
 after-cloth dish of thin-shelled shagbarks, from a tree 
 that has grown from a graft of the most approved 
 variety. 
 
 Even into December the work of country improve 
 ments may go safely forward ; the clearing of new 
 land, the thinning of overcrowded forest growth, 
 the planting of walls, the construction of walks and 
 roads, for these, severally or together, no better 
 time can be found than that which immediately 
 precedes the locking frosts of winter. And when 
 the dead-lock is fairly established, so far as treat 
 ment of the land goes, the open, sunny weather of 
 
132 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 December still invites us, many a day, out of doors. 
 If we have rocks to move, they glide easily over a 
 frosted and stiffened turf ; the brambles and waste 
 growth of outlying pastures cut easiest when the 
 earth is locked unyieldingly about their stems ; the 
 woods, despoiled of their leaves, give free insight 
 and outsight to their most sequestered nooks. 
 
 At last the white pall comes, which is the usher 
 to the ceremonials that belong to the dying year. 
 The snows may force a lock-up at home ; but for us 
 who live in the country such prospect is no way 
 appalling ; the fruit-bins are full, the wood-shed is 
 full, and the fire-light plays regal ingly over the 
 book-shelves from dusk till within an hour of mid 
 night. 
 
 And what new, strange gardening is this I 
 
 see, even when the snows are piling higher against 
 the walls, and higher along the roofs ? A great green 
 vine such as the botanists tell us nothing about 
 begins to coil along all the ledges of the dining, 
 room, and droops in wanton festoons, now over a 
 picture of some darling face, now making leap 
 across the old-time beaufet in the corner, that is all 
 besprent with little childish gewgaws, and now 
 again doubling itself into a great looplet over the 
 doorway, and encircling some wonderful assemblage 
 of red-alder berries, that are as brilliant saving the 
 
PLAYTIME, PLAYS, AND PLANTING, 133 
 
 lack of contrasting leaflets as any holly in her 
 Majesty s dominions. In the window, too, within 
 finger-long reach of the fairy crystals that are shot 
 every morning over the panes, a tray of nodding ferns 
 has suddenly appeared, springing from a rich mat of 
 wood-mosses, where scarlet partridge-berries are 
 glowing like fire ; most wonderful of all, a big tree 
 has sprung up from the floor, and almost touches 
 the ceiling with its topmost branches, all overhung 
 it is, too, with a strange medley of queer-shaped 
 fruit, which a corps of admiring young folks declare 
 to be the best fruit they ever saw or even heard of. 
 I am sure, too, that they think the gardening to be 
 ever so much finer than any out-of-door gardening 
 of the spring. And when the noon sun, pouring in, 
 gilds all the green things, and warms the canary in 
 his cage into a little transport of Christmas song, it 
 makes us all forget the snows and the winds of 
 winter. 
 
 Through all the holidays our winter garden keeps 
 its greenness, but the fruited bonbons melt away 
 astonishingly ; and the unreasonable little gardeners 
 have the audacity to talk of a possible fresh crop 
 against New- Year s day. My present record, how 
 ever, does not extend to that date, near as it may 
 seem. 
 
 All that remains for me now is to close my port- 
 
134 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 folio, to blow out the candles on the Christmas 
 tree, and to wish all my readers, wherever in the 
 Calendar of the Months my message may find them 
 a happy Twelve-month to come. 
 
IV. 
 
 BEGINNINGS OF AN OLD 
 TOWN. 
 
 Norwich, 1659-1859. 
 
BEGINNINGS OF AN OLD TOWN. 
 
 Norwich, 1659-1859. 
 
 TN the year 1859, two hundred years after the first 
 -*- settlement of the town of Norwich (Conn.), 
 there came about a celebration of the event. Daniel 
 C. Oilman, Esq., since better known for his saga 
 cious and wise Presidency over the Johns Hopkins 
 University was appointed to deliver the historical 
 address usual on such occasions; Bishop Lee, of 
 Delaware, another native of the town much hon 
 ored then and more honored in these latter years 
 was also invited to give an hour to commemorative 
 discourse ; and the Hon. John A. Rockwell who 
 not many years before had with high approval repre 
 sented the people of that region, in Washington, 
 was commissioned to speak about the heroism of a 
 great captain who had illustrated the early annals 
 
138 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 of the town, by his zeal and courage ; in addition to 
 all these, the present writer was asked in virtue of 
 his Norwich nativity to gather up what shreds of 
 topic he could after such distinguished foragers 
 in the Centennial field, and to take upon himself a 
 share of the speech-makings which go to swell the 
 usual impedimenta of those festive occasions. 
 
 The opening for discourse, under the circum 
 stances, did not seem large or promising ; but the 
 autumn weather was fine ; long streams of jubilant 
 people filled all the greens and high-ways of the 
 little town ; the brisk breezes of the mornings, 
 lapsed into that sunny noon-tide stillness which put 
 all the world into easy receptive humor ; and under 
 the huge tent all besprent with streaming pen 
 nants was gathered a great festive crowd, who by 
 their cheeriness, and kindly listening repeated the 
 outside sunniness of the air. And as I read over 
 the periods of the Centennial speech to-day, they 
 seem, somehow, to be so brightened and lighted 
 up with the aureole of that time of jubilee, as to ex 
 cuse this entertainment of the memories of that old 
 town again, and this record of what I found occa 
 sion to say. 
 
Centennial Address. 
 
 T SHALL not detain you long : indeed, after the 
 -- absorption of all the salient topics of the day by 
 the gentlemen who have already so ably addressed 
 you, I should be at a loss to fill up even the half hour 
 which is allotted me, did I not feel that the Occasion 
 itself is the real speaker, and we only the interpret 
 ers ; every successive oration or poem, being only 
 the passing of a new set of fingers over the keys of 
 the great Centennial organ whose music is swelling 
 and surging on our ears to-day. 
 
 And what is the occasion that has drawn together 
 such a vast crowd of young and old, of citizens and 
 strangers, as Norwich never welcomed before ? Only 
 a birth-day ; or rather let me say, a great golden 
 wedding. Two hundred years ago this month, and 
 the masculine energy and vigor of the Puritan was 
 married, under God, to that little mountain bride, 
 which from the beginning lay waiting here, between 
 the rivers and the plains. Yet what is there in the 
 
140 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 beginning of a town that should warrant such fes 
 tivities? Do not all towns have their beginnings, 
 either near by, or remote ? Is it wonderful that a 
 company of sturdy settlers, having bargained for 
 lands hereabouts, some two centuries since, should 
 have defended their own, and dug, and planted, and 
 built, and worshipped, and left a posterity to dig, 
 and plant, and build, and worship after them ? Is 
 not the story now repeating itself all over the world? 
 Long before the days of Mason, or of Fitch, the 
 Mohegans or the Pequots delved, and planted, and 
 worshipped in their way, and after them other Pe 
 quots, or other Mohegans : to-day one shape of 
 shadow which the drifting clouds of centuries cast 
 upon the hills, and to-morrow another shape of 
 shadow. 
 
 The mere fact of settlement is nothing ; there 
 is no distinction in being born ; the question is, 
 what growth, what development, what fulfilment of 
 promise ? And all anniversaries have their force 
 and their joy in this that they are the registers of 
 growth, and not the registers of decay. The seed 
 you throw into the ground must germinate by a law 
 of nature, and must stretch up a little bundle of 
 leaves to the light and air ; no thanks to you for 
 this. But if you feed and nourish and protect, so 
 that it comes to a great wealth of leaf and stem, 
 
BEGINNINGS OF AN OLD TOWN. 141 
 
 and finally from a fully compacted maturity throws 
 down showers of golden fruitage, then your pride 
 and your joy have cause. So to-day we rejoice in 
 the beginning of white homes on these plains 
 and river banks, because energy and toil, and faith 
 and courage, have assured constant and teeming 
 growth ; and the tree whose rootlets are in the dim 
 and shadowy past lo, on all your hills the golden 
 fruitage ! 
 
 I say that we have cause for this festive rejoicing 
 of ours, in our growth ; and yet if you do not feel 
 to-day, looking on this sea of glad faces, or walking 
 these streets filled with almost princely houses, that 
 the town of Norwich has made growth enough, and 
 set up trophies enough, and nurtured rare children 
 enough, to make her birthday a festival, why, I shall 
 not try to prove it to you. If you can stand in the 
 full rays of the sun and yet deny their warmth, I am 
 not prepared to prove that there is any warmth in 
 them. I address myself rather to those who are 
 hearty believers in the propriety and justice of this 
 commemorative fete, and shall ask them to go back 
 with me for a few moments to that old rallying date 
 of 1659 appearing to many, I dare say, a kind of 
 mythical epoch toward which on such commemor 
 ative days we strain back our imaginations, and seem 
 to see, as it were in some mental kaleidoscope, the 
 
142 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 swart faces of savages, steel head-pieces, black coats 
 of Puritans, tomahawks, beads, black-letter Bibles, 
 hard work, and faith in God. But I shall not at 
 tempt to clear up this delicious confusion by any 
 speciality of detail ; I hope only to fasten on your 
 minds, by one or two broad historic marks, the 
 actual limitations and relations of that old date of 
 1659. 
 
 We weigh dates by the great facts that belong to 
 them ; and what was the rest of the world doing at 
 the time our sturdy settlers paddled up the Mohegan 
 river, and planted Norwich ? 
 
 In the old country, of which at that time the col 
 onists were all loving children, the truculent Oliver 
 Cromwell had just closed his great career ; Richard, 
 the son, was too feeble to wear the mantle of such a 
 father, and had given over the attempt. The shrewd 
 general Monk commanded the British army, and 
 the army held the fate of the country in its hands. 
 There were plottings and counter plottings ; Alger 
 non Sidney and John Milton working vainly for a 
 republic are thrust aside ; the line of kings is re 
 stored ; and perhaps at the very time that the Nor 
 wich settlers are marking out their home fields, 
 crowding through alder bushes and swamps, the 
 vain, irresolute, amiable, good-for-nothing Charles 
 II. is journeying from Dover to London, amid all 
 
BEGINNINGS OF AN OLD TOWN. 143 
 
 manner of rejoicing guns and drums, and the 
 waving of banners. In France the weak Louis XIII. , 
 who ruled by the brain of Richelieu, has gone by, 
 and the great Louis Quatorze has just come upon 
 the stage ; still under the tutelage of Cardinal 
 Mazarin, but yet he has fairly inaugurated that 
 great reign, which is to carry France to the highest 
 splendor, through the extremest lusts of civilization. 
 But in justice to France it must not be forgotten 
 that while our Puritan settlers were building their 
 first meeting-house upon the green, men of French 
 birth and lineage, such as Le Moyne and Mesnard, 
 were toiling through the silent forests of the West, 
 far as the shores of Michigan, carrying knowledge of 
 the Christian faith, and exploring and mapping out 
 the resources of the continent. Poor Spain, which 
 in times past had sent over the ocean a Columbus 
 and PizaiTO and Ponce de Leon, and which had 
 illustrated our colonial annals the century before 
 by that barbaric and daring march of De Soto 
 through the everglades of Florida, far as the Missis 
 sippi the golden crosses and the iron spear-heads 
 clashing together in the cane-brakes which had 
 founded the oldest town on our Atlantic border, St. 
 Augustine was now being disabused of her golden 
 dreams ; she was wearied by long wars with France 
 and England, in the course of which she had lost her 
 
144 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 island of Jamaica, and was feeling the approaches of 
 that insidious decay which is feeding upon her still. 
 The little Netherlands, near to Dover and to the 
 French coast, had grown bravely from that begin 
 ning of independence wrought out by William the 
 Silent, a century before, and was now almost a match 
 for England on the sea. It was the day of the 
 Tromps, and the Ruyters, and the De Witts ; and 
 the Dutch flag was flying on Batavia and Java in the 
 East, and from the heights of Good Hope, and from 
 that little promontory of land which we now call 
 the Battery of New York ; indeed, there were Dutch 
 houses at this time in New Amsterdam, built by 
 Dutch artisans and defended by Dutch valor, which 
 would rival the best houses of the Massachusetts 
 Colony. As for the two states, with which, as colo 
 nists, we were to be brought more immediately in 
 contact, (I speak of France and England,) I do not 
 know how I can better epitomize and illustrate their 
 respective stages of civilization at the date of 1659, 
 than by saying that just at the time when the first 
 psalms of thanksgiving were rising in the first Nor 
 wich church, the great dramatist of France, Molicre, 
 was wandering through the Provinces, playing his 
 own comedies to crowded and delighted houses. 
 And across the channel, the great British poet, 
 John Milton quite another style of man was 
 
BEGINNINGS OF AN OLD TOWN. 145 
 
 living in a back street of London, and sitting in his 
 doorway, clad in a sober suit of gray the very 
 type and image of puritan simplicity, and of puri 
 tan faith was turning his sightless eyes to Hea 
 ven, and revolving, in the recesses of his mind, 
 those solemn thoughts and that splendid imagery, 
 which in due course of time were to be embroidered 
 as it were by angel fingers upon that no 
 blest of Christian poems, the immortal epic, Para 
 dise Lost. 
 
 Meantime there is growing up between the Yantic 
 and Shetucket, the material for a homelier epic. 
 Sixty, seventy, and eighty days only bring news of 
 what is happening across the water ; and it matters 
 little to our sturdy colonists if Charles II. or if 
 Richard Cromwell is wearing the purple, if only 
 goodman Elderkin has built, his mill according to 
 contract, and the town surveyors keep the cart path 
 in good order, from the Cove below, along the plain 
 to the meeting-house above, and to the store. The 
 clergyman is giving good, honest doctrine ; Uncas, 
 below upon the river, is a good friend, and keeps a 
 sharp look out for intruders. The swamps are yield 
 ing gradually to cultivation. The worshipful Mr. 
 Winthrop has secured a charter from the king, which 
 gives all needed independence, and with slip-shod 
 
 indulgence, extends the boundaries of the Connec- 
 10 
 
146 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 ticut colony from the Narragansett river to the 
 shores of the Pacific rather too liberal to be last 
 ing, but forming the basis of that claim which in 
 after years secured to the State its admirable school 
 fund. And the same worshipful Mr. Winthrop, be 
 ing Governor, is occasionally waited upon by the ac 
 tive men of our little township Deacon Simon 
 Huntington, or Lieutenant Thomas Leffingwell, or 
 perhaps the grand Major Mason, who report prog 
 ress to the Governor, and listen to his after-dinner 
 discourses about my Lord Clarendon, or Sir Isaac 
 Newton, or John Milton, or the Hon. Robert Boyle, 
 all of whom he has personally known, and with 
 some of whom he still corresponds. 
 
 The quieter men at home, who do not dine with 
 the Governor, are laying out new highways, or 
 pushing a little trade down the river and along the 
 coasts. There are no savage onslaughts ; the worst 
 enemies the town knows, for a long succession of 
 years, are a short crop, or an occasional wolf, or a 
 rattlesnake, or some drunken friend of an Indian, or 
 some new clergyman who does not hold precisely 
 the right views in regard to the Saybrook plat 
 form. Bating these little diversions, life seems al 
 most Arcadian here, as we look back upon it. The 
 cattle are feeding and lowing in the new pasture 
 grounds ; the red blush of the English fruit trees is 
 
BEGINNINGS OF AN OLD TOWN. 147 
 
 beginning to show itself in all the gardens ; the vir 
 gin meadows along the Yantic are filled with flowers 
 that perfume the air ; the brooks, fuller and more 
 numerous before the forests are cut off, frolic down 
 all the hill sides ; and of a Sabbath morning, while 
 the dew is still sparkling on the grass and on the 
 tree tops, the church bell from the rocky height yon 
 der tone after tone tone after tone spends its 
 musical gushes of sound over the roof of the farthest 
 settler. 
 
 Thus a hundred years or more pass on ; the king 
 Philip battles, and the long stretch of the old French 
 and Indian war, bring their train of mourners ; but 
 Haverhill, and Deerfield, and Fort Edward are very 
 far away from the homes of Norwich ; as far on the 
 score of news as Pike s Peak or the California trail 
 are now. The growth of the town is not seriously 
 interrupted. The original settlers have multiplied ; 
 new people have come in from year to year by vote. 
 Death has, indeed, drawn a little array of recruits 
 to one side, but courage and faith and work and 
 hope are still the masters of the situation. And in 
 this hundred years or more there have been changes 
 in England. Sidney and Milton (whom we saw sit 
 ting on his door-step) have both gone long ago to 
 their reward. Charles II, and Clarendon, and Buck 
 ingham, and Nell Gwynne and the rest are sleeping 
 
148 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 a long sleep in the pages of the biographical diction 
 aries. It is the time of the Georges and of the elder 
 Pitt, and of that dogmatic Dr. Johnson, who thought 
 the king could screw down the colonies by as many 
 taxes as he chose, and of a greater man than Dr. 
 Johnson I mean Edmund Burke who thought 
 the king could not screw down the colonies just as he 
 chose. Over in France, the reign of Louis XTV. is 
 ended, and the king that the courtiers fancied too 
 grand to die, is as dead as any pauper in a Norwich 
 grave. There has come after him a weaker and a 
 worse king, Louis XV., who is ruling jointly with the 
 madame Pompadour, while Voltaire, with his sar 
 donic smile and his witty flings at Providence and 
 simple faith, is not only a writer, but a power in 
 France ; and he is leading on very swiftly with the 
 rhythmical cadence of his artful and sonorous pe 
 riods toward the bloody gulf of revolution. In the 
 scientific coteries of Paris there is just now an 
 American name well known that of Benjamin 
 Franklin. And there are other names well known 
 at home, such as Israel Putnam, and Patrick Henry ; 
 and this latter has made a speech before the bur 
 gesses of Virginia which has found echo in every 
 valley of New England. There is living, too, some 
 where in his neighborhood a tall, quiet, sedate 
 country gentleman, looking after his estates just 
 
BEGINNINGS OF AN OLD TOWN. 149 
 
 now, whose name is colonel George Washington, and 
 who, not very well known as yet to Norwich people, 
 will presently make himself known and make him 
 self felt all through the country, like a great rain in 
 time of drought. And there is a certain boy born 
 in Norwich a little before this, (I have a sad story 
 to tell here) whose father had come from Ehode 
 Island, and who was of a somewhat doubtful charac 
 ter, falling eventually into dissolute habits and pov 
 erty ; but he had married a worthy woman ; and the 
 boy, as such things will happen, had inherited all of 
 the mother s energy and none of her goodness, and 
 all of the father s deviltry with none of his weak 
 ness ; the boy s name was Benedict Arnold. I dis 
 like to name it ; but truth is truth, and history is 
 history. He cannot stay in the drug store of the 
 Messrs. Lathrop, where he has been placed too 
 bad for that. He runs away and enlists for the 
 French war. Ah ! if some friendly bullet had slain 
 him there ! But no ; he is to gain manhood for 
 a warning to all men everywhere, that courage and 
 ambition and energy are nothing, and worse than 
 nothing, except they be governed by an honest pur 
 pose, and tempered by a sterling humanity. 
 
 More honor to-day from us who are gathered here, 
 to Goodman John Elderkin, who built his mill ac 
 cording to contract, and faithfully ground his grist, 
 
ISO BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 than to the great major-general Arnold, in British 
 short clothes, and crowned with infamy. These 
 memorial days are not the glorifiers only, they are 
 also the avengers. If Norwich, in an awkward mo 
 ment, has given birth to a villain, let us not be silent 
 in this the day of her rejoicing, but let the world 
 know that we are second to none in giving him our 
 scorn. 
 
 Shall we take a glance at the town in those times 
 anywhere from 1750 to 1770 ? 
 
 The little sloop Defiance is making her trips with 
 credit and dispatch. There is a thriving ship trade 
 at the Landing occasionally a fleet of twenty or 
 thirty sail ; or a stout packet Ebenezer Fitch, 
 commander is up for London. There is a nour 
 ishing business with the West Indies ; long teams 
 come in from the adjoining towns, blocking up the 
 roads in the neighborhood of the town Green, bar 
 tering their produce for West India molasses, or 
 possibly some tight little jug of West India rum. 
 Houses are scattered up and down, from the Land 
 ing to the up town Plain. The generous old fire 
 places are not all gone by, and sitting in some corner 
 of one of these, on a winter s night, it may happen 
 that some traveller or sailor-man just arrived by 
 London packet, entertains an earnest, curious com 
 pany, with a story of a trip to Paris, and of the 
 
BEGINNINGS OF AN OLD TOWN. 151 
 
 shady avenues of Versailles, and the carriages of the 
 great king covered with gold, and fountains that 
 throw water a hundred feet in the air ! I say the 
 fire-places are not all gone, though a certain Dr. 
 Franklin has latterly contrived stoves, which are 
 said to secure a wonderful economy of heat. And 
 the same gentleman, it is whispered, in well read 
 circles, has learned to catch the lightning and to 
 bottle it. 
 
 Some adventurous young fellow, disposed to make 
 a dash, is fined heavily for riding to church in a gig, 
 and disturbing the sobriety of the congregation. 
 The women go to church in plain homespun good, 
 innocent creatures, never having thought of making 
 a personal exhibition of themselves. Ah, if good old 
 Dr. Lord, who was preaching in that day, though he 
 was past seventy if good old Dr. Lord, I say, could 
 have seen some fine woman of our time, sailing up 
 the centre aisle, swaying along under a great breadth 
 of silken canvas, I think he would have urged with 
 new unction, " strait is the gate and narrow is the 
 way," that the good people follow. 1 
 
 1 The fashion of that day compelled use of stupendous 
 hoops, or of some equivalent device for making " spread ; " 
 the allusion as such things will created its little breeze of 
 applause. I particularly remember the approval of a cer 
 tain quiet, bald-headed gentleman among the auditors, who 
 
152 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 But Dr. Lord s is not the only church in these 
 times ; there has grown up below the hill a thriv 
 ing little village, called Chelsea, which has its own 
 meeting-house, and church members, not very 
 harmonious as yet, a certain Mr. Whitaker be 
 ing the bone of a rather sharp theological conten 
 tion ; but who knows but the little parish may 
 come in time to rival the mother church upon the 
 Green ? 
 
 And on the heights of Franklin, which was then 
 but a corner of the "Nine miles square," there is an 
 other orthodox place of worship, whose quaint ar 
 chitecture withstood the bleak northwesters down to 
 our own time ; and I can well remember, though 
 my memory does not run so far back as that of a 
 good many I see about me I can well remember, I 
 say, treading very awe-stricken over the broad stone 
 boulder which formed the stepping-stone, and peer 
 ing through the bobbin balustrade that ran round 
 the tops of the square pews, at the huge sounding- 
 board, with its wonderful carving, and the gray vel 
 vet cushions of the desk ; and listening to the 
 quavering falsetto tones of the little white-haired 
 
 had been perspiring between two enormous heaps of silk 
 which permitted only his waistcoat and head to appear and 
 who applauded this utterance with a relish that was almost 
 frantic. 
 
BEGINNINGS OF AN OLD TOWN. 153 
 
 old gentleman, in black knee-breeches, who main 
 tained, there upon his mountain altar, to the 
 very last, all the fire and energy of the puritan 
 spirit. 
 
 There were two good taverns in those days upon 
 the town green ; and there was a paper mill in the 
 valley of the Yantic, with Christopher Leffingwell, 
 Esq., for proprietor ; there was a stage coach running 
 to Providence ; there was a bridge built after long 
 altercation over the foot of the Cove. And though 
 it sounds like an Arabian story, I must relate to the 
 young people of Norwich that before this period a 
 wide expanse of water, over which an occasional 
 ferry-boat plied, lay between John Breed s corner 
 and the station of the New London railway. Good 
 revolutionary feeling prevailed ; the ladies giving 
 last and sternest proof of it in abandoning their tea 
 drinking ; and the stamp act was anathematized in 
 good set terms in open town meeting. Old Gov 
 ernor Trumbull used to come down, in a square- 
 topped gig, perhaps to see his son Joseph, who lived 
 hereabout, and to look out for his West Indian busi 
 ness ; or, as times grew threatening, to collect am 
 munition, or beef or mutton for the army, all the 
 while writing his messages regularly, giving good 
 advice to his son regularly, paying his debts regular 
 ly, collecting his bills regularly, attending church 
 
154 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 regularly ; in short, a most capital type of the 
 shrewdness, and energy, and piety of the old Con 
 necticut character. A little later he entertains there 
 upon the Lebanon green the gay Duke of Lauzun, l 
 who has come over, with a generosity that is more 
 chivalric than earnest, to help us fight out the great 
 fight of the century. 
 
 And what a contrast it is, this gay nobleman, 
 carved out, as it were, from the dissolute age of 
 Louis XV., who had sauntered under the colon 
 nades of the Trianon, and had kissed the hand of the 
 Pompadour, now strutting among the staid dames 
 of Norwich and of Lebanon ! How they must have 
 looked at him and his fine troopers, from under 
 their knitted hoods ! You know, I suppose, his after 
 history ; how he went back to Paris, and among the 
 wits there, was wont to mimic the way in w r hich the 
 stiff old Connecticut Governor had said grace at his 
 table. Ah, he did not know that in Governor Trum- 
 bull, and all such men, is the material to found an 
 enduring State ; and in himself, and all such men, 
 only the inflammable material to burn one down. 
 
 1 Armand-Louis Gontaut, due de Biron but known in 
 all his earlier days, and by the Memoires (Paris, 1822) as Due 
 de Lauzun. He was condemned to death by the French re 
 volutionary tribunal in 1793. 
 
BEGINNINGS OF AN OLD TOWN. 155 
 
 There is a life written of Governor Trumbull, and 
 there is a life written of the Due de Lauzun. The 
 first is full of deeds of quiet heroism, ending with a 
 tranquil and triumphant death ; the other is full of 
 rankest gallantries, and ends with a little spurt of 
 blood under the knife of the guillotine upon the gay 
 Place de la Concorde. 
 
 I shall not linger upon the revolutionary period, 
 nor seek to prove that our fathers were good patriots, 
 and, therefore, good revolutionists. I think we feel 
 that truth sufficiently in the tingling blood which 
 they have bequeathed to us. I go on, therefore, to 
 glance for a moment at times which white-haired 
 men here and I see many remember : when 
 trade had revived after the war ; when turnpike 
 roads were laid out with wonderful engineering skill 
 straight over the tallest hills ; when wagons with 
 elliptic springs had been contrived to carry four 
 persons with ease ; when the weekly newspaper 
 gave startling intelligence from New York not more 
 than three days old ; when the slow sailing Defiance 
 has given place to a rakish looking, two masted 
 craft ; and when in well informed, though somewhat 
 speculative circles, there is talk of eventually put 
 ting upon the route a vessel that should go by steam. 
 Of course, there were prodigious shakings of the 
 head at this, just as we shake our heads now at the 
 
156 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 talk of Mr. La Mountain or of Mr. Wise (of course 
 I speak of the Wise who puts his gas in balloons). 
 But the steamboats come in their time ; and I am 
 sure that I address a large crowd of sympathizing 
 auditors, now that I come to speak of the magni 
 ficent old " Fanny," spluttering and paddling, and 
 splurging up to the little wharf under the lea of 
 Pepper s Hill, where the pine wood lay piled in fab 
 ulous quantities. It was a rare treat in those days 
 to drive down in a gig to Swallowall or Chelsea, and 
 look over at the marine monster, with her smoke 
 pipe, and her balustrade of netted ropes, and her 
 engine of twenty-horse power more or less, and capa 
 ble of driving through the United States mail in 
 twenty-four hours. Ah, those wonders, and lifts, 
 and joys of boyhood ! There are those here, I am 
 sure, who will pardon me the expression of them ; 
 for there are those here who have kindred memories 
 joys that are past; houses they knew, that are 
 demolished ; trees that sheltered them, cut down ; 
 brooks, whose murmur they loved, filled in, banked 
 over, lost. Graves, too, which you and I remember, 
 fresh rounded, that are sunken now ; and voices low 
 
 1 Messrs. La Mountain and Wise were the famous aeronauts 
 of that day : and just at that time too, Hon. Henry A. Wise 
 of Virginia was exasperating the public mind by inflamma 
 tory political harangues full of wind and flame. 
 
BEGINNINGS OF 
 
 and tender, and loving voices which, for these many 
 a weary year, have been silent silent ! I do not 
 envy the man who has not such memories to-day ; 
 they make hearts touch each other as nothing else 
 could do ; and we, who come here under the cold 
 tie of township, find suddenly breaking into life and 
 power that nobler bond of brotherhood. 
 
 But this is a festal day ; we are crowning the 
 good year 59 with rejoicing ; and in this time, is 
 our town of Norwich doing nothing ? Are the good 
 things, and the brave things, all past things ? Is it 
 nothing, the hum of a myriad spindles along all 
 your water-courses, singing of industry and enter 
 prise ? Is it nothing to inaugurate the century with 
 such temples of learning 1 as stand yonder, the 
 monument of your private munificence ? Is it noth 
 ing to show such phalanx of men as I see about 
 me, all of whom by nativity, or citizenship, or near 
 ties of blood, give honor to your town, and take 
 honor ? 2 Is it nothing to have given a half score of 
 the best, and worthiest, and weightiest names to the 
 commercial exchange of our metropolis ? Is it noth- 
 
 1 The allusion was to the Norwich Free School. 
 
 2 Among those upon the platform, and in the immediate 
 neighborhood of the speaker, were Governor Buckingham, 
 Senator Lafayette Foster, Ex-president Fillmore, Chancellor 
 Walworth, and the Hon. Erastus Corning of New York. 
 
158 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 ing to have furnished the Empire state a presiding 
 head for her great central thoroughfare ; nothing to 
 have provided them in the person of our venerable 
 friend, with a man who honored their high office of 
 Chancellor? Is it nothing to be represented in our 
 national senate by a man whom you delight to honor 
 at home ? Is it nothing to have given to the world 
 a songstress, whose melody charms, and whose vir 
 tues allure and instruct the growing mind of the 
 whole country ? Is it nothing to have loaned our 
 little commonwealth of Connecticut what is so 
 rare in politics a thoroughly upright man for 
 Governor ? 
 
 But while we boast and glorify ourselves to-day, 
 let us remember that Nine-miles-square do not 
 bound the world, and never did. Year by year, the 
 iron roads, and the journals, and the leashes of elec 
 tric wire are binding us in the bond of a common 
 humanity. Year by year, and century by century, 
 special titles and special states, and special privileges, 
 and special nationalities, are going down under the 
 horizon, as \ve rise to the level of a higher, a nobler, 
 and juster civilization. Year by year, the good, and 
 the strong, and the true, and the hopeful, are form 
 ing more and more one great parish, whose high 
 priest is the God of Love. Not an oppressor can 
 lift his arm to strike, the wide world over, but the 
 
BEGINNINGS OF AN OLD TOWN. 159 
 
 knowledge and the shame of it, riding upon the 
 wing of lightning, shall kindle indignation in honest 
 hearts everywhere. Only yesterday, how onr bosom 
 thrilled with the struggles, and toils, and broken 
 hopes of those poor children of Italy, not farther 
 from us than the victims of Frontignac from our 
 fathers. 
 
 And now, one last word to you who live in Nor 
 wich : You have a great trust to fill ; and we, who are 
 natives or descendants, commit it this day solemnly 
 to your charge. There are memories here that are 
 ours as well as yours ; cherish them faithfully. 
 There are graves here that are ours more than they 
 are yours ; I pray you guard them tenderly ! We 
 have hopes here, too ; build them up build them 
 up bravely. We have a pride here. See to it, men 
 of Norwich, that our pride and your pride just 
 pride have no fall, until the rocks, and the rivers, 
 and the plains, which are spread out here for your 
 abode and for your delight, shall pass away. 
 
V. 
 
 TWO COLLEGE TALKS, 
 
 1857-1882. 
 
TWO COLLEGE TALKS. 
 
 FIRST TALK. 
 (In Church of the Divine Unity, 1857.) 
 
 mWENTY-FIVE years ago, when the outer eddies 
 -*- of this metropolis had hardly circled to the 
 spot where we are assembled to-night, there met to 
 gether in a village of Central New York, within sight 
 of the valley of the Mohawk, and of the blue hills of 
 Trenton, a little company of the students of Ham 
 ilton College, who counselled together how they 
 might help themselves forward in literary and so 
 cial culture, outside of the academic discipline. It 
 seemed to them that some new graft might be set 
 upon the native stock of the College ; it seemed to 
 them that such new graft might bear somewhat finer 
 and juicier fruit than belonged to the parent stem. 
 It would appear that the end justified their antici- 
 
164 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 pations ; and scions from this new growth, with true 
 American enterprise, were speedily set in half the 
 colleges of the country, where they shot up pres 
 ently into permanent institutions, whose delegates 
 have come here to-night, to celebrate an anniversary 
 which marks the first quarter of a century. 
 
 We recognize in this society (of A A 3>) a type 
 of the American want, and of the democratic de 
 mand, for Association. A few congenial spirits come 
 together ; a moderator is appointed ; they discuss 
 their needs ; they establish a constitution to meet 
 those needs ; they club their funds ; secretaries 
 correspond ; chapters are formed ; conventions are 
 called ; we respect the authority and obey the sum 
 mons all the more readily because it is so true an 
 expression of the national tendency. We love asso 
 ciative action ; it is the primordial law of our devel 
 opment ; we crystallize normally in that shape. You 
 cannot go so far away but you shall be enrolled in 
 some Society for printing campaign documents 
 for horticulture for repairing churches for 
 building railways. It is the source of our executive 
 energy. It makes the grand lifts along our republi 
 can level ; isolated, we are but pebbles on the shore ; 
 but band us together by affinities we love and cher 
 ish, and there is a great sea-wall, over which the 
 waters cannot come. 
 
TWO COLLEGE TALKS. 165 
 
 Our Fraternity is, I say, a type of this associative 
 energy ; and the more remarkable, perhaps, as hav 
 ing grown up under the wing of one of the few des 
 potic regimes which are left to us I mean the 
 necessarily despotic regime of the College. The 
 club stands related to the University, as an expres 
 sion of young Republicanism in contrast with the 
 rigidity of old forms : As if the American instinct 
 for associative action for ballotings for holding 
 meetings were too strong to be snuffed out utterly 
 by the hand of discipline, and must show itself, and 
 speak, and grow. I do not mean to imply that there 
 is any necessary antagonism, further than the natural 
 and healthful antagonism always existing between 
 the fastness of young blood, and the inertia of old 
 brains. 
 
 I suppose I may say, without infringing upon the 
 time-honored mystery of your cabalistic Greek, that 
 the general object of this Association, as now con 
 stituted, is a cultivation of those refinements of 
 letters or of social feeling, which are to a certain ex 
 tent ignored by the administration of the college. 
 
 Under its regimen, a somewhat larger range is 
 given to a man s individuality of character ; his 
 special intellectual impulses are not strained to the 
 measure of a common standard, but his tastes are 
 granted their particular divergences. Those club- 
 
166 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 rooms were quiet alcoves, where we used to try on 
 the harness which our masters, with their Davies, 
 and Playfair, and Plato, were fitting to our limbs. 
 If too loose, they were taken in there ; if too tight, 
 (which often happened,) they were loosened. 
 
 I hope I shall give no offence to the younger 
 members of the Fraternity, when I relate with what 
 pride those College encounters with the Gog and 
 Magog, that go about desolating human society, were 
 regarded by us. For myself, my blood glows even 
 now, at the thought of some chivalrous assault in 
 those days, with the borrowed sword of Juvenal, up 
 on some arrant usurper in the literary world. How 
 we mowed down whole ranks of people with a couplet 
 of Horace ! And how surprisingly all these people 
 recovered afterward : and what very nice people we 
 thought them when we came to live among them, 
 and to ask favors of them ! You will find there are 
 a great many such bloodless victories outside of 
 Colleges : a great many dismal giants who thwack 
 terribly but always in private. 
 
 It involves a certain degree of hardihood to advo 
 cate, now-a-days, the refinements of letters; the 
 practical so overshadows and awes us. You and I 
 value things very much for their palpable and mani 
 fest profit ; not considering enough perhaps, what 
 other, remoter, and larger profit may grow out of 
 
TWO COLLEGE TALKS. 167 
 
 those meditations or studies, whose germinating 
 power is slower, more delicate, and less easily trace 
 able. 
 
 Even in Science, we rank abstract and elemental 
 ideas below positive and practical development. 
 The man who maps the tides or the winds so as to 
 shorten voyages this year or next, is more estimated 
 than the individual who spends years in determin 
 ing the position of certain new stars, in establish 
 ing the niceties of longitudinal difference, or dis 
 covering some new metallic base of an old earthy 
 matter. And yet it is possible that the star-finder 
 may be opening an investigation which shall sim 
 plify the whole subject of navigation ; or the delver 
 in the earth whose product is now only a new 
 chemical fact to announce may live to see that 
 particular fact revolutionize a whole branch of in 
 dustry. The truth that simmered for fifty years 
 under the Voltaic pile, in all that time serving only 
 to give a shock to nervous people, or to fuse a bit of 
 metal, blazed out at last : And now, it plays upon an 
 iron web from city to city, over the world ; frail as 
 the gossamer things we see on a summer s morning, 
 pendant from grass-tip to grass-tip swaying in 
 every breath of air and yet, the bridges of thou 
 sands of airy messengers who carry their errands, 
 and die. 
 
168 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 So too, I think there is something in a refined 
 intellectual cultivation, and its processes, which, 
 though it seems to lack practical relation, will blaze 
 out some day in subtle flame, from many a man s 
 mind and heart refining character and action, 
 and justifying itself by various and rich accom 
 plishment. 
 
 Seeing, therefore, that certain special literary cul 
 ture is one of the chiefest ends of your Fraternity, 
 let us consider some of the aspects of literary en 
 deavor at the present day ; what changes have come 
 over it during those twenty-five years which end to 
 night ; what new tastes we have to deal with, and 
 how these concern us, or we them. 
 
 First, we remark the antagonism which is grow 
 ing up between the merely classical aspects of Edu 
 cation and its present demands ; between the re 
 formers and the dilettanti. The living languages 
 are urged in place of the dead ; and the natural 
 sciences in place of pure mathematics. M. Guizot 
 and DeTocqueville are more eagerly read, than 
 Cicero de Onions ; their authority is counted greater 
 than that of any of the old statists. Mr. Grote is 
 steeping us in Greek color and Greek sympathy, 
 (with his earnest humanitarian and Christian phi 
 losophy superadded,) as Thucydides and Herodotus 
 have lost the power to do ; and Niebuhr has plucked 
 
TWO COLLEGE TALKS. 169 
 
 all the marrow from Livy s hard, dry, glittering 
 anatomy of Home. 
 
 It is more than suspected that the pretty Greek 
 sepulchres, like sepulchres everywhere, contain a 
 vast deal of deadness and of rottenness ; the classi 
 cists indeed argue for that eclectism of taste which 
 finds suggestive material wherever there is force and 
 beauty ; and Milton assures us that a good man, 
 like Athanasius, could out of the slime of Aristo 
 phanes dredge the matter for a rousing sermon. 
 But Athanasius was no undergraduate ; who, it is 
 thought, would be much safer with the nebulse of 
 Herschel than with those of Strepsiade and Chere- 
 phon. 
 
 There is no fear, however, that past good things 
 will be lost, although they may be supplanted in 
 educational systems by the more lively new things. 
 Good things and beautiful things do not die easily. 
 They belong so far to the spirit and complexion of 
 succeeding literature, that the curious, and all lov 
 ing scholars will be constantly upon their track. If 
 the student s thought is diverted to observation, 
 measurement, and classification of those new geo 
 metric figures which belong to mineral crystalliza 
 tion, we still regard the charming clearness of 
 Euclid s demonstrations as so many outline draw 
 ings, which the mind dwells upon with a certain 
 
i;o BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 artistic pleasure : and if we quote Homer no more, 
 we hang his Frog-piece upon our walls, as a dainty 
 cabinet picture, and harmonious bit of ancient color 
 ing. 
 
 Growing out of this antagonism, or at the least 
 coincident with it, we note the every-day practical 
 tone, which has latterly come to pervade literature 
 generally. 
 
 Twenty-five years ago, and poor Sir Walter Scott 
 was touching with his palsied, but beloved hand, 
 the last gleams of that feudal splendor that shone 
 from the corselet of Count Kobert of Paris. Sharon 
 Turner had, at about the same time, closed the old 
 series of English Histories with his cumbrous quar 
 tos, which I believe everybody speaks well of, and 
 nobody reads. Since that date, I think you can rare 
 ly fail to have observed a more intimate alliance of 
 all literary endeavor growing every hour closer and 
 closer with the wants of our every-day life, and its 
 thorough incorporation with live things. The scholar, 
 the romancist, the scientific man, are no longer 
 a company apart. Their aims and records are of 
 what we know and feel, and live by ; or they are 
 shelved as curious specimens of vain work Chinese 
 carving, showing infinite detail of labor perhaps, 
 but wanting the perspective and foreshortening 
 which make them true, and which body forth life. 
 
TWO COLLEGE TALKS. 171 
 
 Mere metaphysics is dead. Cliivalric tales, with 
 however much of rhetorical spice in them, do not 
 flame in our hearts, and kindle love there, and joy 
 and wonder. Science must buckle itself to cloth- 
 weaving or printing, or its story does not reach. 
 Searchers after lost asteroids give way to the man, 
 who with his magnetic battery, touches our fire- 
 bells with curious, invisible stroke. The Doctors 
 have, I think, given over the formulas of an old- 
 time theology, for a preaching that swoops down on 
 the bad things we do ; and not upon the possible 
 bad things we might think, if we thought as some 
 body long ago is supposed to have thought. 
 
 Dickens slays your niggardness and mine, with 
 his cheery Christmas legends. There is no Jack 
 the Giant-Killer no bean stalk and castles ; but, 
 the Circumlocution office, Foggy Chancery, and the 
 man we all know so well imposing Mr. Grad- 
 grind. 
 
 What hope indeed to be read or listened to, if we 
 do not point our thought where the world s thought 
 is pointing ? We may sing a sweet song : but will 
 people stay to listen? A few very sweet a Maud, 
 a Hiawatha may cheat us into a wayside delay , 
 but these are exceptional. A rude campaign rhyme 
 ringing with the jingle and clatter of to-day s march, 
 may go even wider. Novels are writ full of some 
 
172 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 moral drawn from yesterday s news ; the imaginative 
 man or woman must yoke themselves to the great 
 processional advance, or their fine fancies and they 
 are trampled down and forgotten. 
 
 Compare Household Words with the Spectator, 
 and you will see at a glance the difference I would 
 bring to your notice. We do not absolutely give up 
 our old friends, Will Honeycomb, Sir Eoger, and 
 the rest; we cherish their memories warmly ; but 
 they are thoroughly dead friends. If you try to 
 make them live again, they will be ghosts only ; the 
 world will laugh at your pets and their short clothes ; 
 a single paragraph in a morning paper will blow 
 them into limbo. 
 
 So Dr. Primrose, that charming old gentleman 
 whom we love, as we love a good family portrait 
 even Dr. Primrose is growing seedy. I doubt if our 
 followers upon negro minstrelsy could be brought 
 to laugh at Jenkins, or Moses, and his gross of 
 spectacles. We have lived up to that level, and 
 passed it by. The new excisemen take no cognizance 
 of the gooseberry wine ; it is drawn too mild. The 
 Vicar of Wakefield is not a tract any longer ; it is 
 only history. 
 
 The great literary caravan has trailed away from 
 that pleasant country where the woods were soft 
 and low ; where meadows lay green around homely 
 
TWO COLLEGE TALKS. 173 
 
 places ; where morning larks soared from the dewy 
 herbage, in serenest light and bubbled songs ; where 
 gray hamlets lay scattered on the earth s bosom like 
 children sleeping, and the parish bells woke from 
 the hills holy lullabys. All this is left ; and the 
 processional advance is under hot suns, with a harsh 
 level around us; where there is din and crash 
 swords of adventurers, rew harems by the Salt Lake 
 tawny slave faces stealthy murders, and mur 
 derers who sneer at, and balk us. They who are 
 joined to that march under the intense atmosphere 
 of to-day, cannot dally and snuff at flowers. 
 
 The five millions of readers and thinkers in 
 America, feeling citizen rights eager to establish 
 families in comfort, if not in opulence all of them 
 heated by the fever of activity, want to give time 
 and attention only to what concerns them nearly 
 their relations to each other and the State ; some 
 thing present, practical, and vital. They have no 
 leisure for the vague, the insubstantial, the apocry 
 phal. A literature to reach them, and inoculate 
 their thoughts, must be directed toward those grand 
 topics, or seasoned with that large humanity which 
 concerns all ; there must be something which is 
 aired with life as they breathe it, and with freedom 
 as they feel it. Your book your treatise on popular 
 astronomy, your poem, if you please your views 
 
174 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 on the judiciary your discussion of music your 
 tale, has not found final judgment with respect to 
 its fitness as an American document, till it has gone 
 far out three thousand miles west of the sea, to the 
 lands of new settlers, who lay your argument or 
 your fancies, like a plummet, to the stature of their 
 mental need ; who test it by that much of hope, of 
 fulness, of joy, it adds to their inner life. 
 
 And now, seeing that literature and its aims have 
 been drawing nearer to our every-day habit of 
 thought, during these past twenty-five years ; see 
 ing that the atmosphere of books is less remote than 
 it was, and extreme classicism withdrawn to a more 
 frigid distance than ever before, it may be worth 
 our while to enquire how we (who, as members of a 
 literary fraternity, may be supposed to have some 
 sort of literary labor in prospect) stand affected by 
 the change ? 
 
 Is cultivation like classicism, out-marched ? Is 
 the standard lowered ? Or is it, that the horizon is 
 only extended, since readers and thinking men all, 
 have come up to a higher level of observation ? 
 
 I think you will readily agree with me that there 
 was never a time, when there was need for more 
 thorough and various cultivation than now. It may 
 not indeed be the same sort of cultivation which 
 once obtained. It may matter little to you to dis- 
 
TWO COLLEGE TALKS. 175 
 
 tinguish between the Ionic and Doric forms of 
 speech ; matter little if you know whether Cicero 
 plead for, or against the poet Archias ; matter little 
 how much of Horace is in Sapphic how much in 
 Iambic measure ; but it may matter greatly to you to 
 know, when Horace if you read him came near 
 to that truth about men, and men s lives and pas 
 sions, which never dies. It may matter nothing to 
 know if J5neas or Turnus be the proper hero of 
 Virgil s Epic ; but it may matter greatly to know, 
 when and by what illustrations he may have drawn 
 a real hero defending real rights, full of a real 
 humanity ; or only a mock hero, who dies with the 
 clang which an honest blow will ring, and ring again 
 upon the shield of every pretender : we want that 
 sort of cultivation which will enable its possessor to 
 distinguish between sham and substance between 
 the true and the false the things which help us 
 really, and the things which brilliantly seem to. 
 
 The literary man differs from others only in this : 
 he puts in words what others put in action. Hia 
 cultivation must apply itself to what is near to us 
 near our wants near to our hope. The oaks stand 
 by their own vigor, fed from their falling leaves ; 
 the grain that shot up last spring-time wants your 
 care. You may find implements in classic stock, in 
 old armories, where the glitter and order attract 
 
176 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 you ; but you have more to deal with than the 
 blotches of rust, at which the classic conservators 
 weary themselves, with file and acid. 
 
 Your labor, if it is to tell, must tell other-wheres 
 your blows fall outside, on living wrongs wrongs 
 that scream at the touch. 
 
 Again, there must be habit of close and unremit 
 ting observation, wide wakefulness a finger always 
 upon the world s pulse. And to this end it is quite 
 essential to a literary worker who is thoroughly in 
 earnest, that he keep his station near to the heart of 
 things. He must think much in cities. He must 
 imbibe the movement where movement is strongest. 
 That concentration which is effected amidst the 
 turmoil of the world, strikes straight and sharp to 
 its aim ; but the concentration which comes of 
 quietude, belongs to a pleasantly rarefied medium, 
 and never gains the focal energy which bums things 
 to their core. 
 
 The outside observer may appreciate and enjoy 
 all the more strongly because there is a constant 
 calm about him. But he cannot from his outpost 
 reach the centres effectively with either pen or 
 tongue. He lives too slowly. People scent his 
 rusticity a long way off. Quick as he may get the 
 current of history, by steam or telegraph, in the 
 very moment when it turns from him back toward 
 
TWO COLLEGE TALKS. 177 
 
 the centre, the arterial briskness is lost : it is heavy, 
 sluggish, venous. It needs airing ; it must come to 
 the great lungs of cities and seaports. 
 
 But while the practical literary tendency of the 
 day is, in a certain sense, antagonistic to an old and 
 elegant classicism, I would not imply that it is 
 utterly vagrant ; indeed, it was never subordinated 
 to a more thorough and searching criticism than 
 now. It may not be tried by the antique standards. 
 The drama we act is not judged by any effete law of 
 the unities, but by its present Power. 
 
 Are the men, men ? Are the w r omen, women ? 
 These are the questions we ask of whatever represen 
 tations of life our artists, preachers, authors set be 
 fore us. Do the things they accomplish lie within 
 our reach? Next, do they lie in the path of our 
 duty ? This is the basis, I think, of most of modern 
 criticism ; indeed, it is the natural result of that 
 practical drift of the intellectism of our day, to 
 which I have called your attention. We are going 
 back nearer and nearer to the elemental principles 
 of art. We are flinging off allegiance to conven 
 tional standards ; we are less attracted by the glitter 
 of any feudal harness, and want to see the muscle, 
 and nerve, and heart of the man who wears it. Hor 
 ace Walpole, with his dim Otranto, is less now than 
 Mr. Mayhew with his Poor of London. 
 
 12 
 
178 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 Some eighteen months ago, you listened from 
 these same benches to the great satirist of our time, 
 as he laid before you his gallery of historic pictures. 
 How intently you watched, as he sketched the 
 shadowy trifles, the every-day weaknesses, the talk, 
 the banter, the follies of a Eoyal household ! And 
 yet it was for no pomp of description that you gave 
 your minds to him ; but for the exceeding truth and 
 penetration with which he probed to the very mar 
 row of their manhood the royal subjects tore 
 away every kingly illusion, and set before you the 
 men. 
 
 But not only are our critical estimates broader and 
 deeper, but in the last twenty-five years we have 
 made great gains in all that pertains to aesthetic cul 
 ture. In art proper, we see the tendency toward 
 elemental bases of opinion, in the existence and 
 growth of the Pre-Raphaelite doctrine. This may 
 be an extravagance ; but it is an extravagance in the 
 right direction ; it is toward simplicity and truth. 
 
 I think the humors of such classic sticklers as Le 
 Brun, and even Poussin, have given way to a manner 
 and treatment that storm our sensibilities, with no 
 lance held in classic poise, no fanfaronade of gaunt- 
 lets and trumpets, but only quiet, truthful nature. 
 
 1 The allusion is to Thackeray and his lectures on the 
 "Four Georges." 
 
TWO COLLEGE TALKS. 179 
 
 I think that in our Academy Gallery we are having 
 every year less and less of impossible Strephons and 
 Clorindas ; less of Miss Languish, and more of the 
 material we look for in wives and daughters. I 
 think the scenic pastorals, with their twin cows, 
 orderly trees, and pretty water, are giving way to 
 the meadows we know and love to the mountains 
 that dwarf us, and kindle worship. 
 
 Of course there are platitudes still ; men who, 
 with rare appreciation, lack the summa manus, the 
 vis manutigii. But the intention of our art is be 
 coming far more earnest. It is running toward 
 those essentials, and directed by those maxims which 
 give it a universal character. 
 
 A book or a picture may have a conventional 
 charm, which will give it admirers, just now and 
 here ; but only real trees, real water, real men, real 
 passion, will please those who come in from without, 
 or who belong to a generation after us. 
 
 And here, in connection with our art-tendencies, I 
 cannot forbear to mention a name, which I am sure 
 you all know and respect ; I mean that of John Kus- 
 kin, who is thoroughly a man of our time, and a 
 bold type of that amalgamation of aesthetic aims with 
 our life and every-day endeavor, at which I have 
 hinted. 
 
 He has done more than any man to bring the 
 
i So BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 literature of art from its vagueness and shadowy 
 region, and to make out its determination by certain 
 fixed principles. And in so doing he has torn away 
 no grace from the artist-life, but rather sublimed it, 
 by the union which he has demonstrated between 
 its offices and our religion and faith, and all that 
 we reverence in truth and beauty everywhere. 
 
 There is another noticeable thing about Mr. Kus- 
 kin, which I feel sure has made his name a welcome 
 one to thoughtful Young America. He is always in 
 earnest. He glows everywhere : the track of him is 
 dyed deeply with his soul s life. Whether he flames 
 into grandiloquence, or stays you with his dogged 
 iteration, he is aboundingly and gushingly full of 
 the matter in hand. He has no half-feelings, or 
 half-thoughts; all are rounded with the swell of a 
 deep, devotional tide. 
 
 He winds into his subject, whether painting or 
 temple, like a serpent ; and though you may lose 
 his trail because you lack his enthusiasm, you may 
 be sure that he is winding his way up through 
 columns, through colors, through domes ; and you 
 shall see, by and by, in token of his progress, some 
 gorgeous pennant of his rhetoric streaming from the 
 top. 
 
 The progress of aesthetic culture is to be seen 
 moreover in other directions than in that of plastic 
 
TWO COLLEGE TALKS. 181 
 
 art. It is to be noted in our quickened perception 
 and appreciation of the beauties of music, in our 
 deeper and more enlightened understanding of its 
 principles : in our nicer distinction between those 
 sounds which play melodiously about the ear, and 
 those others, which with fulness and density of 
 meaning, gravitate to the soul, and make inner sym 
 phonies there. 
 
 In all our mechanic arts, we may observe a 
 shrewd trade-perception of harmony of parts, and 
 grace of form. Manufacturers find their profit in 
 employing artists to design their patterns ; and the 
 cheapest prints are nine-penny illustrations of Owen 
 Jones theory of color. 
 
 Typography has made vast strides ; not only is 
 there advance in the mere mechanism, but in the 
 general taste which presides over the art of book- 
 making. What would be thought now of those 
 pitiful annuals and souvenirs, with their lack-a- 
 daisical faces, and pretty, impossible park scenes, 
 which, twenty years ago, we gave to young Misses 
 in leg-of-mutton sleeves, as tokens of tender and 
 respectful affection? Does any body give them, 
 or print them now ? How poorly these would show 
 beside that story of Parley s Margaret, in which 
 the genius of the artist has startled a dead author 
 from his grave. 
 
1 82 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 How the whole art of wood-engraving has flashed 
 out into piquancy and grace, carrying fulness and 
 completeness of detail ! How we look out for things 
 we wondered about ; faces of men we hear of, and 
 seem to get at something real feeding our curi 
 osity and art-love together. 
 
 Again, those wonderful sun-light pictures, bring 
 ing the rarest bits of landscape, and the infinite 
 detail of Moorish or Venetian architecture to our 
 study tables ; what quickeners and cultivators of 
 our taste in this direction have these become ! A 
 portfolio now is as good as a year s travel 
 
 Our homes, again, whether we will or not, give 
 tokens of our artistic longings, in their graceful 
 adaptations for our comfort. Your very pottery 
 is taking on forms of the best Etruscan art, and 
 you pour your tea from some duplicate of the wine- 
 pot of Sallust. 
 
 And how widely, and how tenderly this sesthetic 
 spirit has breathed over those other homes, where 
 our ambitions, and rivalries, and earnestness all 
 end at last. There may be even here, sometimes, 
 tasteless blazon of marble ostentation clamoring 
 against the silence ; but we forgive it for the love 
 that shines in it ; and as for the trees, the flowers, 
 the sheltering vines, thank God ! these are never 
 tasteless. They bind up a holy and fragrant alii- 
 
TWO COLLEGE TALKS. 183 
 
 ance of all that is beautiful without, with all that 
 is hopeful within ; and to you, to me, to all whose 
 memories run ever to those silent places, the flow 
 ers, and vines, and trees, must bring with every 
 repeated season, a tenderly repeated promise, that 
 the dead will not be always dead. 
 
 
 We observe then, with respect to the literary 
 
 tendencies of the day, that they are characterized 
 by a vital earnestness ; that their aims are present 
 and active, not reflective and abstract. We observe, 
 that our past habit of American life has impressed 
 itself upon the whole tone of intellective action ; 
 and we can bridle its swiftness by no classic erudi 
 tion, by no mere educational dogmas. We cannot 
 bridle it at all. Guide it, however, w r e may, by 
 that wakeful and thorough cultivation, which, with 
 out ignoring popular extravagances, is no way 
 blinded by splendid falsities ; and which reckons 
 up the value of your poem or mine, your picture 
 or mine, your sermon or mine not by any laws 
 of old schools, not by any theologic dogmas, but 
 by the simple, earnest, hearty, helpful truth, that 
 may shine there. 
 
 I will not close without bringing to notice, that 
 other aim of your association, which looks to social 
 improvement. I think we are needy in that way 
 
1 84 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 most of all at an educational age. We want some 
 thing to defeat, or rather qualify that old, hard 
 bookishness which once belonged, and was thought 
 necessary to every scholarly man ; something to 
 make him supple ; something to give pliancy to 
 nerve and adroitness to strength. 
 
 I think I am not mistaken in supposing the Fra 
 ternity wakeful to that good which lies in a good 
 manner, uniting kindliness with ease. The man 
 of the cloister cannot meet the every-day want, 
 until he has taken on somewhat of the every-day 
 pliancy and aptitude. Without it he chafes at his 
 unfitness, perhaps consoles himself with the barren 
 thought of possessing weightier truth, fuller knowl 
 edge, deeper insight than the man of the world. 
 But that world-knowledge, which gives a tongue 
 to learning, which supplies the magnetism of look 
 and presence, and which ensures confidence in ac 
 tion, is no way inconsistent with large acquirement. 
 No man can be thoroughly practical up to the 
 level of American requirement who does not con 
 stantly and habitually bring his attainments, how 
 ever various they may be, to the test of outside 
 every-day familiar discussion and analysis. 
 
 And here I may take occasion to say, that there 
 is, or was a scholastic stiffness, which preserved it 
 self and fed itself, by sneering at the opinions or 
 
TWO COLLEGE TALKS. 185 
 
 the criticism of such society as is enlivened by the 
 graces of women. In our world of equal condi 
 tion, where the great social conservator is the re 
 spect we habitually show to the other sex, nothing 
 could be weaker or more ill-judged. You may 
 distrust at once the manly aptitude and thorough 
 cultivation of that individual, who whatever his 
 boasts or professions may be, sneers at the opinions 
 of intelligent women. 
 
 Nor do I think that your scholastic prig really 
 entertains the contempt he may affect. He finds 
 it hard to break down or to break through his 
 retirement and the reticence of his desk-life. He 
 feels an irritating sense of his inaptness to carry 
 his learning gracefully into the social arena, and 
 soothes his mortified vanity with the prettiness 
 of a sarcasm. This might do for the old-fashioned 
 schoolmasters; but it is too late now. Too many 
 princes of learning, too many veterans of science 
 are among us, familiarly, illustrating by manner, and 
 by talk, the fulness of their accomplishment, and 
 the modesty of real attainment. We cannot wor 
 ship any longer the scholarship which enthrones 
 itself in seclusion, and wears only the clumsy buck 
 ram of books. 
 
 Again, a friendliness and good-fellowship spring 
 out of the club-socialities of college, which we need 
 
1 86 BOUXD TOGETHER. 
 
 to keep and carry with us. We republicans are 
 prone to a harsh kind of social disintegration. We 
 associate for furtherance of scientific, political, relig 
 ious aims ; but we do not bring our affections to the 
 compact. Even kinship does not hold us together. 
 We need certain rallying channels wherein our 
 kindly feelings may group themselves, and recover 
 their electrical forces by attrition. 
 
 Older countries possess in their castes and clan 
 ships, in their ancestral attachments and common 
 pride, constant promoters of fellow-feeling, as be 
 tween those of the same classes. We lack all this : 
 we carry our independence as citizens into a kind 
 of cold, isolating indifference. W T e are constantly 
 forcing our equality into an impertinent assertion 
 of manner that outrages fellowship ; as if making 
 one s self disagreeable were upon the whole the best 
 possible way of saying, " I am as good as you ! " 
 
 I pray you, gentlemen, frown on this ! It is com 
 mon, and it is despicable. A great many ardent 
 boasters of our institutions are nervously anxious 
 under the social juxtaposition which belongs to 
 their development. They are sighing to make 
 themselves exceptional ; haunted with the phantom 
 of some social superiority, which shall be so marked 
 as to sting outsiders into acquiescence. That man 
 who is constantly fretting, lest he be not made 
 
TWO COLLEGE TALKS. 187 
 
 enough of, either intellectually or socially, had bet 
 ter set himself to find some surer position both 
 ways. 
 
 I am afraid we have made our most sorry figure 
 abroad, by this undue insistance on our status ; a 
 too quick scent for imagined affronts ; as if a man 
 could be any thing less than he really is, except he 
 himself give cause. A simple republican citizen ! 
 that any man should chafe at that, who has Ameri 
 can blood in his veins, or try to round it into some 
 thing over-decorous ; something whereby he may 
 astonish, and make the ignorant ones gape, and the 
 cultivated smile. Have we not a national sore of 
 this sort which needs caustic and excoriation ? 
 
 After all, what a world of impertinences, ill-man 
 ners, affectations, would pass away from us, if only 
 we would accept that oldest, simplest, best law of 
 good-fellowship, about being kind to others, as 
 we would have others kind to us ! Is there not 
 room under this for republican manhood to dilate 
 and take stature and dignity ? 
 
 There is a virtue in those little every-day courte 
 sies of man to man, of which we are nationally for 
 getful. They dignify each one s sense of his per 
 sonality ; they stimulate the moral health of the 
 nation ; they carry a cheery glow everywhere ; they 
 make a constant, unnoticed, teeming sunshine a 
 
1 88 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 stray gleam here, and a stray gleam there but in 
 the aggregate, making a great harvest swell. 
 
 We admire splendid and startling charities, but 
 ignore the lesser ones, which give a right social 
 animus to life. I think there are American names 
 associated with great simple acts of beneficence, 
 which I should need only to mention to call down 
 plaudits. We yield all the length and depth of our 
 sympathy in the applause, and think it a good deed 
 in us well over. We go out to forget our own 
 way-side, social charities of indulgence, forbear 
 ance, regard for others, a day-long and life-long 
 living up toward the level of our plaudit. 
 
 How our hearts yearned toward that fair English 
 woman, who crossed seas to give comfort amid the 
 Turkish war-scenes ! Had she come hither, I hardly 
 dare say what might have been the expression of 
 our admiration. I think we should have dragged 
 her carriage through our streets. I am afraid we 
 should have forgotten all in some municipal im 
 broglio. I fear we should not have funded our ad 
 miration in any great hospital endowment. They 
 have done this, you know, over seas. How august 
 and grand it seems to rise amid the fog and 
 smoke of London soaring in the eye of faith, 
 higher than any Victoria tower that monument oi 
 a tender beneficence, wherein children s voices, for 
 
TWO COLLEGE TALKS. 189 
 
 generations and generations, shall call down bless 
 ings on the name of Florence Nightingale. 
 
 And yet you if I might venture a word outside 
 of the Fraternity you who have brought your wo 
 manly smile and countenance to cheer us here to 
 night, can act the charity over: can graft all its 
 nobility, if not its notice, upon your social inter 
 course in ever so little kindnesses regard for the 
 wishes and feelings of others a constant leaven of 
 charity, which will make duty rise to nobleness. 
 
 And you, gentlemen of the Fraternity, remember 
 that we have other brothers in the world beside 
 those of our Society : do not forget do not limit 
 good-fellowship. 
 
 The literary and social league which ties us to 
 gether, is, after all, but the educational programme 
 of something to do in life. You will easily slip 
 away easier than you now think from the spe 
 cialities of this College alliance ; be out of the 
 range of its provisions be engrossed w r ith quite 
 other interests. It will seem to you as I venture 
 to say it seemed to me but a rich vine hiding the 
 roughness of the old walls which once sheltered us, 
 and nodding welcome from its leaves of green. 
 
 But let the faith and courage its exercises may 
 have taught, go with you. Remember that there ia 
 a degree of swift vitality in this American world of 
 
190 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 ours, which calls for something more than the slow 
 processes of schools or the severity of classicism 
 which demands the practical, the earnest, the 
 helpful. But though the classicism you love may 
 be outrun holding place only like the shrined 
 saints on Papish road-side, whereat votaries bow, 
 say prayers, and hurry on remember that cultiva 
 tion of other kinds is still demanded : that a judg 
 ment refined by much study still presides over all 
 that is well done : that an enlightened criticism will 
 attend you quick to the necessities of the hour, 
 and based upon those enduring and substantial 
 principles of art, which pervade all thinking minds 
 at this day. 
 
 Eem ember, that the taste which is expressing it 
 self in ever new and improving forms all around us, 
 will have its measure upon your accomplishment. 
 
 Remember, we have this great scheme of Repub 
 licanism to carry out in our lives to keep warm in 
 our hearts. All its contrasts its wantings its 
 hardnesses its stains are ours, as truly as its 
 spread and its promise. 
 
 Live up to the level of your best thought ; keep 
 the line of your life tense and true ; it is but a 
 thread ; but it belongs to the great Republican 
 warp, where Time is weaving a Nation. You can 
 not alter its attachment yonder, to the past nor 
 
TWO COLLEGE TALKS. 191 
 
 yonder, to the unrolling years. The shuttle of to 
 day is flying swift knitting blotches knitting 
 beauties ; and if you would broider such things 
 there as will stand fast, and carry your name wor 
 thily upon the roll of history, you will have need of 
 all your Energy to dare of all your Cultivation to 
 refine of all your Charity to ennoble. 
 
SECOND TALK. 
 
 (At Academy of Music, New York, 1882.) 
 
 mWENTY-FIVE years have lapsed again, since at 
 -- the order of this Society, I spoke before 
 your convention of the Literary growth of the 
 previous quarter of a century : and now when I 
 ought by the privileges of age to be a listener and 
 not a talker I am called on to add twenty-five 
 more years to that tale of Letters, and to com 
 pass the whole story within a quarter of an hour. 
 
 I cannot do it : I cannot put the vintage of half a 
 century into a quart-flagon. No man can. 
 
 I can only give such glimpse as you and I and all 
 of us might have, if whirled at railway speed through 
 the pleasant interval of Letters stretching from the 
 year 1832 or thereabout to our date to-night 
 looking out with swift glances upon a few salient 
 
TWO COLLEGE TALKS. 193 
 
 objects, and at the end of this whirl of vision hav 
 ing only a vague sense (perhaps sufficient for such 
 a time of jubilee) of the drift and trend of the In 
 terval we had hurtled over. 
 
 I seem to see far away about the time your 
 Association was founded in the wilds of Central 
 New York bright young fellows, by the light of 
 whale-oil lamps, and seated on hard-bottomed 
 benches regaling themselves with the Dandyism of 
 Bulwer s Pelham, and wondering overmuch at the 
 versatility of parts which could achieve a History of 
 Athens, and set Kienzi upon his legs amidst the 
 turmoil of decaying Home, and put color and pulse 
 and passion into the dry bones of Richelieu. And 
 yet the Dandyism of Bulwer is forgettable, when we 
 think what Exemplar he was to young men all 
 through his life ; of that System, and Industry, 
 which alone make work tell. 
 
 I recal too how collegians of that date, looked 
 out longingly through recitation-room windows, to 
 catch glimpse of the two horsemen of Mr. G. P. R. 
 James, as they rose above our literary horizon 
 steadily as the tides. 
 
 Byron was dead : but had left a fiery trail, where 
 at we of New England birth and breeding looked in 
 a maze of wonder and dread. Scott we mourned 
 
 for differently, and gathered with all the world in 
 13 
 
194 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 company, to throw flowers upon his fresh grave at 
 Dryburgh. 
 
 We thought it wise to read Wordsworth, then at 
 the pinnacle of his fame : So it was wise ; So it is 
 wise : wiser maybe, than it is winning. For the 
 regret must ever attach, I think, to this venerated 
 r lame, that he who bore it lacked the critical sagacity 
 or the hardy courage to condemn and strip away his 
 own redundancies : whether of fluffy languor, or 
 homely iteration, and by so doing, to leave in bold 
 and conquering relief such graces as made his odes 
 cumulative with poetic splendors, and such far-reach 
 ing spiritual insight, as carries some of his utter 
 ances above all the brilliant levels of Dryden or 
 Pope far up amongst the Miltonian heights of song. 
 
 Christopher North we young fellows swore by, 
 in that day. There was a breeziuess, and a vigor 
 in him, and a broad-shouldered, devil-may-care au 
 dacity that extorted our Bravos ; alas, all gone now ! 
 and aside from a few witty lunges of the Noctes Am- 
 brosiance, nothing seems left but a far-away, tinkling 
 clamor of echoing vocables amongst the Highland 
 Lochs. 
 
 Chiefest of critics about those times was Jeffrey : 
 Gifford and Lockhart and Southey coming hard 
 after : but what a king we counted Jeffrey who, in 
 his Edinboro Review, by a half score of pages 
 
TWO COLLEGE TALKS. 195 
 
 had made and unmade the reputation of Poets, and 
 Historians, and Metaphysicians ! So apt so witty 
 so ready so knowing in all the Literary appetites 
 of men and women, with not a compeer in the wide 
 world except it might be our own Professor of 
 Literature. 
 
 To think, now, that such a pretty band-box of a 
 man could put to the shiver, such another as Thomas 
 Carlyle ! We have no such King of Criticism now ; 
 we have outlived that monarchism ; our kings are in 
 high schools, and on college benches ; the critical 
 instinct under much and wide schooling, has shot 
 up into a vagrancy that possesses us all. Here and 
 there some heroic expert puts on the old lion-like 
 ways, and growls fiercely, and snarls to the life ; but 
 if we look hard enough we shall find jackal shanks 
 sticking out under the lion s skin. 
 
 I named Carlyle : He too grew quickly into a 
 deity of our young heaven, when he painted his 
 brother poet Burns, walking 
 
 " In glory and in joy 
 
 Behind his plough, upon the mountain side ! " 
 
 It was only a few years before the beginnings of 
 this Society when he blazed out in the Edinboro and 
 Foreign Reviews. I remember well the prim green 
 covers of the first Boston edition of his Miscellany 
 
196 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 bringing rich meat to our hard college commons. 
 And for fifty years on, he kept ringing out his 
 fierce challenge to shams and untruths warring on 
 Tradition, yet loving defiantly the Tradition of old- 
 fashioned kingship : Sneering at orthodoxies and 
 carrying a theologic back-bone as stiff as Calvin s ; 
 hirsute, rough, uncombed, grim as the wastes of 
 his own moorland by Dumfries ; but withal having 
 a savage, uncourteous honesty in him, which is so 
 much better than a courteous dishonesty. 
 
 They tell us he was not a model husband : Well, 
 who among us is? Indeed, there was not much 
 place in him for tenderness ; only that sweetest ten 
 derness with which he followed to the last with 
 messages of love and affection that old Scotch 
 mother of his, who milked the cows in the Byre 
 of Scots-Brig. Who shall say that these last fifty 
 years are not over-much the richer for his life? 
 Under all his convolutions of speech, that weary 
 us, and his petulancies that tease us, and his rough 
 ness that maddens us, there is a fire slumbering 
 which does not go down. This great Galleon upon 
 the sea of literature has left a broad, boiling wake 
 behind him ; and all the traffickers in critical lore, 
 and all the orthodox trimmers traversing his path 
 as they will for pleasure or for pains can never 
 wipe out the glow of its phosphorescence. 
 
TWO COLLEGE TALKS. 197 
 
 I cannot forget in this kaleidoscopic show of ours, 
 that as early as 1833 Tennyson first gathered a 
 budget of his young poems, which caught the sneers 
 of the New-Tiinon ; and which with rare exceptions 
 had no quality beyond the millinery of Literature. 
 But through these fifty years past, how bravely and 
 steadily, grade by grade illustrating in his own 
 career the literary progress of the times has he 
 wrought on to that fulness of power, by which he 
 has wrested the old Arthurian Legends from the 
 lax hands of Geoffrey, and Map and Wace and 
 Layamon, and brought the old British worthies to 
 life once more, amongst the green meadows of 
 Camelot ! 
 
 Camelot was hard by Glastonbury ; and that name 
 recals the richest days of the old church in England 
 toward whose Traditions, John Henry Newman 
 had eyes reverently turned, when with the devout 
 Keble of the Christian Year, and the elder Froude, 
 he joined in those Oxford "Tracts for the Times," 
 which a little less than fifty years ago, kindled an 
 ecclesiastic war in England whose angry din buzzed 
 about our ears in the colleges. What came of it, 
 we cannot stay to tell. But the name of Cardinal 
 Newman is one that this age will not easily let die. 
 So pure a heart ; so keen a mind ; master of that 
 best Ehetoric which shows thought through it, as 
 
198 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 we see faces through glass monastic in his severi 
 ties most tender of conscience shivering for years 
 in the winds of Doctrine, and riding up at last into 
 the harbor of that ancient Trans-Alpine Church, 
 where so many fine old hulks lie moored waiting 
 
 waiting for the rise of some new Mediaeval Tide. 
 There, too, at Oxford we encounter the Apostle of 
 
 so many new Dogmas in art whose "Lamps of 
 Architecture " first showed their splendors some 
 forty years ago : earnest, indefatigable, headstrong 
 
 he too, blown about in these latter years by 
 strange gusts of Doubt always eloquent tangled 
 somewhiles in the meshes of his own tropical 
 Rhetoric petulant, rash : But what if in the im 
 patient speech of his Clauigera he would tear up 
 Railways, and burn New York? What if doubtful 
 prophets come in his name, whose food is sun 
 flowers and Wilde 1 honey? Let us have "Patience" 
 young gentlemen: let us have "Patience"! And 
 let us remember, that back of all Ruskin s teach 
 ings, and for a testimony which can never be 
 
 ] Just at this time, Mr. Oscar Wilde, the apostle of Ms- 
 theticism, was making his triumphal march, under lead of 
 D Oyley Carte ; the same astute manager also carried to suc 
 cess in that day (by a sort of double campaign), Mr. Gilbert s 
 play of Patience which with its musical tric-trac and its 
 plush-y pertinences, delighted everybody. 
 
TWO COLLEGE TALKS. 199 
 
 shaken, stands the beauty of the flowers, and of the 
 clouds, and of the everlasting hills. 
 
 There are other typical Englishmen I should like 
 to speak of Freeman and Green putting new faces 
 upon old English history Matthew Arnold, widen 
 ing the outlook, and deepening the grounds of in 
 telligent criticism ; and Scientists chief est among 
 them that old man 1 who has just passed away in his 
 quiet Kentish home putting such quality in their 
 reports of discoveries as gives literary charm 
 frightening the timid maybe, by the new cross 
 lights which seem to flame athwart the Heavenly 
 order ; but which as the eye becomes used to them, 
 lose their defiant glare, and blend like Galileo s 
 heresies of old in that great trail of Light and 
 Law which testify to the infinite Power that shaped 
 the beginnings of things, and which will surely 
 shape their ends " rough hew them how we will." 
 
 And what now of our side the water ? Has there 
 been gain since the days when dear old Mr. Irving 
 w r as furbishing up his stories of Granada and the 
 Alhambra, and Cooper putting his Leather- stocking 
 on his last tramp through the wilderness ? 
 
 All of the deeps of Hawthorne lie between. And, 
 since in the field of Fiction, such wide blossom- 
 
 1 Darwin. 
 
200 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 ing of persistent, and of half-hardy flowers, that I 
 cannot name them. I note only a prevailing ten 
 dency as in other Art to lavish skill upon tech 
 nique, and minute touches that give vraisemblance 
 so deftly done, that the record beguiles, enchants, 
 and makes us forget we want the story which we 
 hardly find. 
 
 How proud we oldish people were in college 
 days of the flowing smoothness and dainty scholar 
 ship which went to the making of Prescott s His 
 tories ; and how much prouder we should have been 
 of the more masculine handling, and larger range 
 which Motley gave to his studies of the Netherlands. 
 Here, too, within three days last past, our octogen 
 arian friend Mr. Bancroft, the Historian of the 
 United States, has crowned his labors with a story 
 of the Federal Constitution putting to it, though 
 years hang heavy on him all his old conscience 
 and vigor. Nor can I forbear to mention in this 
 presence, that old Poet, whose Homeric head came so 
 often to the front in New York assemblages who 
 wrote of Ulysses, as Homer might have written, if he 
 had lived at Roslin and edited the Post ; and who so 
 filled these last fifty years with zeal, and good work as 
 to be an exemplar to every ambitious young American. 
 
 By the same token, we may well join tonight 
 in flinging our tributary flowers upon the grave of 
 
TWO COLLEGE TALKS. 20, 
 
 that other Poet, whose " Voices of the Night " first 
 streamed like a meteor across our literary firmament 
 in the days when we elderly people of the platform 
 were wearing our badges with Greek initials. 
 
 He loved traditions perhaps overmuch ; but he 
 spangled them with gold of his own coinage ; and he 
 so wrought through half a century with such bal 
 ance of literary judgment such exactitude of 
 scholarship such delicate ear for rhythm such 
 guilelessness of purpose such reverence for all 
 sacred and ah 1 beautiful things, as to make of his 
 career one long, melodious " Psalm of Life." 
 
 And then that other, whose grave is even fresher 
 there in Concord ; he a poet too ; not leaning on 
 rhythm, but making rhythm bend to his thought ; 
 called a Philosopher, but last in ah 1 the world to call 
 himself so : called an Idealist, yet loving more than 
 most men home-spun words and home- spun ways. 
 Gentlest of men, yet chafing like a lion if harnessed 
 to creeds ; full of learning that only showed by 
 leakings he could not help ; stalwart as a knight of 
 old where wrong confronted him in all else, as 
 yielding as a woman. 
 
 Emerson hated impostures, much as ever Carlyle ; 
 but unlike the Scotchman he was wary and concilia 
 tory. He could twinkle his eye winningly, as Carlyle 
 never would, or could. He was sagacious, placable, 
 
202 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 kindly, and withal saying things in a short, dense 
 way, that compels a halt, and a wrestle with them 
 if not acceptance ; and if acceptance, then a vital 
 acceptance that thenceforth colors life and character. 
 
 Many another amongst the living, whom we love 
 and honor I would like to name : but I forbear : and 
 in conclusion note only among other aspects of our 
 present literary outlook, the vast increase of intel 
 ligent readers, which has given great quickening to 
 literary work. There can be no good talk, except 
 there be good listeners : these carry higher and 
 higher the plane of literary accomplishment ; not in 
 deed gauging the volcanic peaks genius will throw 
 up through the crusted level of average work, but 
 making and keeping this average level better and 
 worthier. 
 
 Compare our Journalism to-day, with that of fifty 
 years ago, and you will see my meaning. There is 
 reach, and grace, and pliancy, and force, where there 
 was stolid statement only and narrow captiousness. 
 
 1 While paying this tribute to the larger intellectual re 
 sources at the service of the Press, there is room for doubt if 
 there has been corresponding growth in morale ; doubt if 
 the potent influences of railway magnates, of corporations, 
 of traveling showmen, of enterprising managers musical 
 or histrionic do not modify newspaper opinions, to the ex 
 clusion of old-time honesty. 
 
TWO COLLEGE TALKS. 203 
 
 Again, there is everywhere a cosmopolitan large 
 ness belonging to all literary endeavor ; unyielding 
 creeds do not cramp utterance ; conflicting beliefs 
 inarch good-naturedly, side by side ; divers colors 
 of thought blend with aesthetic harmonies. 
 
 Between the same covers, lie fellow essays in easy 
 companionship, and yet of such monstrous antagon 
 ism, as fifty years ago would have exploded, and set 
 the paper on fire. Honest opinions, of whatever 
 sort, do not now need the nursing and coddling of 
 sectaries. They stand for what they are worth, 
 and if they do not stand, they lie. You may be 
 sure of a pulpit and a hearing, if you have some 
 what to say: and if you have nothing to say, you 
 can get a hearing for once. 
 
 Then, I note the wonderful accession to the sup 
 ply of Young People s w r ants : such school-books 
 such engravings such journals such helps at 
 every hand such tender companionship in col 
 leges. 
 
 Ah, if we had possessed these in our callow days ! 
 
 Again there is the Copyright Question inter 
 national and other taking what seems shape of 
 faint promise ; as if at last at last, the world were 
 waking up to the notion that it is as bad a thing to 
 rob an author as it is to rob a grocer. 
 
 Young gentlemen, there is a fair and a most 
 
204 BOUND TOGETHER, 
 
 promising field before you. Who can doubt that 
 this Fraternity with its embranchments in so many 
 colleges will furnish a large quota of those who will 
 be responsible for the reach Literature shall make 
 in the twenty-five or fifty years to come ? 
 
 Some happier talker, at some happier Centennial 
 of the future, will maybe have some of your 
 names to broider upon his Legend of the great 
 Workers. Let the hope of this, and the belief of 
 this tingle in your blood to-night ! 
 
 Let it keep you wakeful to all honorable duties. 
 Let it make you bold, and honest, and painstaking. 
 Let it nerve you to shun affectations to hate 
 shams to love truth to cherish simplicity : and 
 then whatever may betide you will walk with 
 a freer, and a more elastic step toward the gates, 
 where we must all go in. 
 
VI. 
 
 IN-DOORS AND OUT OF DOORS. 
 A Quatrain. 
 
IN-DOORS AND OUT OF DOORS. 
 
 Fires and Fireside. 
 
 rTlHE gray of a winter s morning, so gray, as it 
 -- comes through the eastern panes, that it shows 
 only dimly the scattered books and papers of yester 
 night s reading, so gray that the raked-up coals 
 of last night s fire, as I draw them forth, glow like a 
 heap of rubies, a great nestling company of red 
 jewels which will give flame of adornment to the 
 whole day. A certain degree of art went to the 
 making of the old wood fire ; first, in the lap of 
 ashes and against the chimney was to be coyly 
 placed the great back-log. This might be green ; it 
 might be oak, it might be elm or pepperidge ; at 
 least it should be round, and with its bark intact ; 
 upon its top, and lying snugly between its upward 
 swell and the advancing throat of the chimney 
 
208 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 should be placed a second bit of unsplit tree-trunk, 
 one-half the bigness of the supporting log below; 
 a third, of even smaller diameter, what time a 
 biting northeaster made demand for grand propor 
 tions, was placed as a crowning finish upon the 
 pair of back logs already in position. 
 
 Then came the careful posturing of the great fire- 
 dogs firmly against this wall of wood, spreading 
 somewhat as they stood sturdily upon the hearth, 
 but yet so near together as to give unquestioned 
 support to the great forestick of cleft hickory, a 
 quartered bole, with its flat side snugly settled 
 upon the black fire-dogs. A gap of six inches or 
 of ten, if the outside roar called for a great mass of 
 flame was next to be filled in with two or three 
 round hickory cudgels, between whose interstices 
 free circulation would be given to fan the coals, 
 which (the next thing in order) were piled upon the 
 wood. Then light kindlings that crinkled with the 
 heat, even as one placed them adroitly athwart 
 the glowing coals ; and as the smoke thickened and 
 grew denser, the fire-maker piled on more and more 
 of hickory saplings, of stout sticks, of cleft wood, 
 higher and higher, hotter and hotter, criss-crossed, 
 with great air gaps, lightly as a child s cob-house, 
 fuming and steaming with the sulking heat of the 
 ruby remnants of last night s fire-logs, until with a 
 
FIRES AND FIRESIDE. 209 
 
 sudden whisk, and a sudden vanishing of the toiling 
 smoke, a white flame leaps among the light wood, 
 and darts through the great pile, and comes licking 
 round the forestick with live tongues, and with 
 a crackle and a roar goes sweeping and waving 
 through the whole chimney-front. 
 
 There should be space in a chimney for good 
 show of flame. The little deep-seated French fire 
 places, where only one or two small sticks of a foot in 
 length smoulder away, offer nothing generous to the 
 eye. A " cut " of two feet, and an opening of three 
 to four, is the least that can revive the pageantry of 
 an old-time flame, and the traditions of that fireside 
 which gives its gleam and play to the winter nights 
 of old tales and poems. Five and six feet of width 
 belonged to the old tavern fires of New England, 
 around which village gossips made circle, and where 
 three or four flip-irons might find a tempting red 
 ness. As for the chimney-corner which admitted a 
 child or two, or some crunched-up figure of a dame, 
 with pipe or knitting, within shelter of the jambs, it 
 involved an amplitude of fireplace of which there are 
 only scattered relics. 
 
 I can recall such a one in an old lumbering house 
 of a seaport town of New England. It was below 
 stairs in a sort of basement that had its eyelets of 
 
 windows looking out upon a bold stretch of harbor, 
 14 
 
210 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 where coasters and fishing-smacks lay at anchor. 
 Not used, save on great days (for the novelties of 
 narrowed fires and black cooking-stoves had crept 
 in above stairs) ; the cobwebs hung their tracery from 
 the beams ; the old roasting-jack that stood athwart 
 the chimney opening was rusted ; the great iron crane 
 bore no burden of kettles ; the hearth with its spent 
 brands and its heap of moistened ashes slumbered 
 for weeks together ; but the fire-dogs were in place, 
 and a wilderness of cupboards to the right and to 
 the left still piqued curiosity. I can remember how 
 a company of us roistering youngsters equipped 
 those cupboards one day on the sly ; a brown paper 
 parcel (it may have been salt or sausages), a couplet 
 of bottles of small beer in another corner, a relay of 
 potatoes, a loaf of baker s bread, a pound or two of 
 box raisins for dessert, a dozen or more of nice bak 
 ing apples, and, grandest of all, a fat fowl ready for 
 the spit ; but no spit had we, such effeminacy 
 was discarded ; we oiled the bearings of the rusty 
 roasting-jack, and presently, by the light of a great 
 roaring blaze, set the prized fowl a-twirling. And 
 what a savory odor exuded as the flesh began to 
 brown, and what a basting we gave it with the drip 
 into the extemporized sauce-pan which, we had 
 planted below upon the heaped-np firebrands ! There 
 was some hot drink, too, simmering away in the 
 
FIRES AND FIRESIDE. 211 
 
 corner, a sort of mulled beer, and a row of toast 
 ing apples, and a score of potatoes coming to a mealy 
 ripeness under the hot ashes. At last the banquet 
 was spread out upon an oaken cross-legged table as 
 old as the fireplace ; and we rioted upon the spoils 
 with a gusto that I think none of us have felt over 
 the grandest suppers since. The huge chimney and 
 the roaring mass of white flame, and the self-help 
 ing, were marvellous appetizers. 
 
 I am inclined to think that the subject of chim 
 neys ought to have a literature of its own, ending 
 in smoke, very likely ; but the trailing blue pennant 
 over a house-top is a symbol of domesticity, and a 
 token of civilization. A savage fire and a heathen 
 fire squanders its color in the woods, or its smoke 
 finds vent from some gross aperture of a cavern or 
 hut, and is not borne up by that ascending current 
 which belongs only to the chimney flue, and which 
 carries its little fireside waifs and wreaths of blue 
 writing upon the sky. The fat thrushes of the Ro 
 man times were cooked under difficulties ; Horace 
 has his plaint about smarting eyes in a smoky hos 
 telry, and it is quite certain that Tiberius never had 
 a good draft to his fire on any winter s day in his 
 best palace. Herculaneum shows no chimneys, and 
 the marble houses of Augustus, when they had fires 
 in them, must have given ooze to the smoke out of 
 
212 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 doorways, or some crude scuttle in the roof. Who 
 can tell what the Delias and Lucretias of those times 
 may have suffered when the wood was wet, and the 
 paterfamilias sour? Bat it must be mentioned, in 
 justice to provident husbands of that day, that ami 
 able ones took the precaution to give their fuel a 
 previous baking, so that it might consume away 
 with as little smoke as possible. For all this, the 
 atrium (as its name implies) must have been a terri 
 ble murky place, and Vitruvius cautions against too 
 much carved work, which will gather soot, and re 
 quire infinite labor for the cleaning. 
 
 At what date a true chimney first carried its 
 streamer of blue above the house-tops, is a vexed 
 question, certainly not much before the four 
 teenth century, if so early as then. The Venetian 
 chroniclers are sturdy advocates of the Venetian 
 claim to their first adoption ; and, if we may believe 
 the most zealous among them, old Dandolo may 
 have been regaled with the sight of chimney-topa 
 pouring out their wavelets of smoke, when he sailed 
 back from his brave conquest of the great city of 
 the Dardanelles. The representative word for chim 
 neys Caminus does certainly appear in the 
 chronicles of a time long anterior to this event. 
 But when did chimneys cease to mean a mere vent 
 for the smoke, and when did they begin to mean a 
 
FIRES AND FIRESIDE. 213 
 
 piled-up flue that should give draft and token of 
 something like a fireside below ? 
 
 In a chronicle of the year 1347 there is indeed 
 mention of a great earthquake, and further mention 
 (only casual, and so more fitting for testimony) that 
 a great many chimneys were toppled over by it. 
 This, certainly, is positive ; for by no stretch of im 
 agination can we conceive of a mere hole in the wall 
 or roof being toppled over. Hereabout, then, Mr. 
 Beckmann, in his history of inventions (which is 
 only so full as to pique, and no way satisfy), places 
 the start-point of chimneys proper. 
 
 But suppose say the sturdy Venetian antiqua 
 rians of our day that an earthquake of a century 
 previous was not powerful enough to stir the chim 
 neys, or suppose the mortar was better, or suppose 
 the chronicler was not so observant of so homely 
 facts ? I leave the doubt and the date in a curl of 
 smoke from my pipe. 
 
 Quite certain it is, however, that many of our tra 
 ditional notions of old English firesides are less 
 smoky than they should be. Through those early 
 centuries, England was a long way behind Italy in 
 
 1 A much earlier date of similar occurrence is given by 
 Filiasi ( Veneti Primi et Secondi), who claims chimneys for 
 Venetians from " time immemorial." 
 
214 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 the fashion of her houses and her cookery. If Jes 
 sica had no chimney-corner to nestle in, it is more 
 than probable that her flax-haired contemporary 
 in London had none. King Alfred never watched 
 the cooking of the cakes (of the neatherd s wife) 
 upon anything like what we should call a hearth ; 
 and the chances are ten to one that the good Saxon 
 king suffered from smarting eyes in that season of 
 his moralizing. Henry Beauclerc and the enterpris 
 ing Matilda (who crossed the river at Oxford on the 
 ice, all clad in white, to escape from the renegade 
 Stephen), never knew the comforts of a good, cosy 
 fireside. It is doubtful even if Scott, ordinarily so 
 correct in matters of history, has not stretched a 
 point in arranging so comfortable a chimney-corner 
 in the house of Cedric the Saxon, where Isaac the 
 Jew and the disinherited knight hobnobbed to 
 gether, on their way to the great tournament of 
 Ashby de la Zouche. 
 
 If the Saxon host had a tolerably good chimney 
 in those days, at either end of the hall, he had what 
 few of his fellow-landholders in England had, 
 whether Saxon or Norman. But with the glamour 
 of that rich story of Ivanhoe floating before me, 
 such punctilious historic inquiry seems only imper 
 tinent. I shall never cease to believe (whatever 
 Beckmann may say) in a good, generous fireplace, 
 
FIRES AND FIRESIDE. 215 
 
 at the foot and at the head of the great low hall of 
 the Saxon franklin ; I shall never cease to believe in 
 the cringing figure of Isaac of York, screening him 
 self as he best may in the shadow of the jambs ; I 
 shall never cease to believe in the thin, earnest face 
 of Ivanhoe, glowing in the light of that fireside, and 
 stealing glances across the long line of table to the 
 queenly and ice-cold Rowena ; I shall never cease to 
 believe in the fire-play glimmering over those old 
 oaken rafters of Cedric the Saxon, and lighting up 
 the swart visage of Brian de Bois-Guilbert, any 
 more than I shall cease to believe in the next day s 
 journey toward the tournament, or in the slouching 
 giant in black armor who won the battle, or in the 
 half- veiled bosom of the pretty Rebecca, or in any 
 minutest item of that grand old story of Ivanhoe. 
 
 The real truth was, I suspect, that in Cceur de 
 Lion s day, most hall fires were made upon a rude 
 stone hearth in the centre of the apartment, and 
 that the smoke found its way out of vent-holes at 
 either end of the roof. 
 
 If the men of Venice were the first to construct 
 modern chimneys, it is quite certain that the mod 
 ern men of Venice have not kept pace with the 
 progress of the art ; for I doubt if, on the score of 
 drafts, a more villainously constructed set of chim 
 neys is to be found in the world than in that city of 
 
2i6 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 gondolas. Smoking fires are not rare anywhere in 
 Italy ; but in Venice, whether by reason of the 
 blasts that sweep down from the Yicentine Moun 
 tains, or the eddies of wind in the narrow street- 
 ways, a freely drawing chimney is most rare. 
 The writer can never forget, and will not forbear to 
 tell, a certain illustrative experience of his own, 
 within a quiet little house, which was seated in a 
 garden upon the banks of the Grand Canal. 
 
 Through all the autumn months I had eyed, sus 
 piciously, certain sooty stains, which stretched from 
 the fireplace up the frescoed wall ; yet my landlord 
 a debonnair little Frenchman, who had come 
 thither in the trail of the Marshal Marmont as his 
 major-domo, and who had inherited most of that old 
 sinner s household goods assured me that the 
 chimney drew " charmingly." It was indeed a co 
 quettish-looking affair for a fireplace, with a quan 
 tity of brazen trappings, and polished steel grate ; 
 and upon a sour November day, far earlier than 
 most people in that region think of the luxury of a 
 fire, I placed in it a little fagot of sticks that had 
 grown upon some one of the capes of Istria, and 
 lighting it coyly, threw myself back in my chair for 
 an enjoyment of that home-like cheer which a rol 
 licking blaze upon the hearth is apt to breed in a 
 ruminative man. 
 
FIRES AND FIRESIDE. 217 
 
 There came a blaze to be sure ; but with it such 
 a persistent, intermittent outpouring of smoke, as 
 half-blinded and wholly maddened me. I sum 
 moned the Frenchman, who came in his black vel 
 vet cap with gold tassel, and posed theatrically 
 before the chimney. He had never, never seen 
 the like of it, parole d honneur ; he was all astonish 
 ment ; he thought the wood must be w r et ; and, 
 again, thought there was too much wood ; two 
 sticks, three sticks were quite enough ; wood was 
 excessivement dear (in which he was quite right) ; 
 besides w^hich, there must be a draft through the 
 room, such a door must be opened, a little 
 crack in a window as well, and he explained to me 
 kindly what the action of fire was in promoting cur 
 rents of air (with a wealth of pretty gesticulation), 
 and how new supplies of air were needed, and how 
 a Russian princess had occupied the same apart 
 ments, and had been " ravished " by the little fire 
 place and its brazen adornments. 
 
 To all which I listened in a dazed w r ay, half- 
 blinded still by the smoke, and watching through 
 the murk the swaying tassel of my landlord s cap as 
 he grew earnest in exposition. I yielded mechani 
 cally to his various suggestions ; the quantity of 
 wood was reduced to the Venetian standard ; the 
 door was set ajar ; the window had its scapement ; 
 
218 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 the new currents were set a-flow ; but the chimney 
 maintained its obstinacy. If there was less smoke, 
 it was only because there was less of fire ; if there 
 was less of murkiness about the walls of the little 
 salon, it was because the keen November winds 
 from off the lagoon were drifting in. I tried faith 
 fully to live at Rome like the Romans, and to yield 
 to the objurgations of my tasselled friend, and be 
 lieve that all was parfaitement clear. A week or 
 more of this sort of acclimatization only made my 
 eyes the sorer, and my temper the sourer, until the 
 Yankee in me declared itself for revolution. 
 
 I summoned anew r my tasselled friend, and in 
 formed him that, whatever the yielding Russian 
 princess might have thought, my own notion was, 
 that his chimney was good for nothing. I insisted 
 upon thorough investigation. So w r e called up a 
 workman from an adjoining court, and down came 
 the brazen trappings, disclosing a great chimney- 
 mouth deeper than the fireplace itself. I ordered 
 up brick and mortar, and set the mason at work to 
 build up the chimney-back anew. Both mason and 
 landlord were astounded by my pretentious. Yet 
 both earned out my directions with very much the 
 same interest, I thought, with which they would 
 have humored the fancies of a lunatic. The throat 
 was narrowed by eight inches or more ; the frontal 
 
FIRES AND FIRESIDE. 219 
 
 blazonry of metal was brought down to meet this 
 new advance of the masonry behind, and when all 
 was complete, and the work fairly dried, I sum 
 moned my tasselled friend to see the result. We 
 lighted a great fagot and thrust it in ; there was a 
 crackle and a blaze, and a succession of pouring 
 flame that went roaring up the new throat of the 
 chimney, carrying every twirling jet of smoke or 
 vapor, so complete a success, in short, that even 
 the major-domo clapped his hands and cried, " C est 
 magnifique ! " 
 
 I never sat by a fireside that was better proof 
 against erring jets of smoke, never knew a haler 
 and cheerier roar through any chimney-throat than 
 in that Yankee-improved one of Venice. The major- 
 domo brought his friends to look at it and to wan 
 der. I doubt if the major-domo has ceased wonder 
 ing yet. I am credibly informed that he exhibits it 
 with pride to curious lodgers as an extraordinary 
 chimney, a chimney d VAm ericain. It is ques 
 tionable if there be a better chimney in Venice to 
 day ; and I trust the egotism will be pardoned if I 
 say that I regard it as the solitary triumph of a 
 short and not eminently lucrative consular career, 
 in that city of boats and palaces. 
 
 If the Venetians of modern times are not apt in 
 the construction of a good chimney for draft, they 
 
220 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 are certainly not without abundant architectural 
 fancies in the construction of chimney-tops. In no 
 city are they more various, more quaint, or more 
 picturesque ; nor is this an unworthy direction 
 wherein architectural ability may disport itself. It 
 is the crowning finial of the house ; the campanile, 
 and ventilator, and cupola, in comparison with it, 
 are mere adventitious excrescences. These tell 
 nothing of the fireside, and may be packed with 
 equal significance upon a stable, or a Tammany 
 Hall, or a State capitol. But the chimney most 
 of all, a group of chimneys tells a story of the 
 family, and of the chimney-corner, and of smoking 
 breakfasts, and of the prattle of little ones. It is 
 the complement of every true home. Why not give 
 it grace ? Expensive materials are no way essential ; 
 wonders can be done with ordinary brick by adroit 
 juxtaposition ; and if those of different colors are 
 selected, very charming effects may be wrought out, 
 even in the smallest cottage chimneys. Those who 
 have seen the brick chimneys upon Hampton Court 
 and Eton College will have a hint of what I would 
 suggest. The earthen ornamental chimney-pots 
 which were in favor a few years ago are excessively 
 cockneyish, and carry no flavor of that sturdy hos 
 pitality which a home-like chimney should show by 
 its mass and its solidity. In the country-house there 
 
FIRES A. YD FIRESIDE. 221 
 
 is of course more range for such over-roof demonstra 
 tion than in the town, where narrowness of space, 
 and narrower conventionalisms, will compel uniform 
 appearance ; or, what is worse, compel a resort to 
 those metallic whirligigs which may carry away 
 smoke, indeed, but carry away at the same time all 
 dignity from the hearth-stone. No hearth-stones in 
 fact belong to them, since they are only the patent 
 indicators and adjuncts of some patent device for 
 packing all heat appliances into some kindred me 
 tallic abomination of a stove. 
 
 The honest wood-fire should be upon the same 
 level with the floor, and diffuse its glow all abroad. 
 Hence even that economic broad-cheeked device of 
 the Franklin-stove lacks at least one of the proper 
 requirements. There is a line of murky blackness 
 between hearth and floor, which irks terribly a man 
 who is used to plant himself of a winter s morning 
 upon a good, solid hearth-stone. There is a mend 
 ing of the matter indeed, which has its consolations ; 
 the iron bottom may be discarded, and the super 
 structure dropped directly upon the hearth, thus se 
 curing the economies of the great economizer s plan, 
 and giving the regalement of a clean and clear level 
 for the fire. I have put this method in practice for 
 a good many years now, with a very serene satis 
 faction. 
 
222 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 I doubt if the people of any Southern or semi- 
 tropical countries know the fullness and richness 
 which, for a Northerner, lie crowded in that word 
 FIRESIDE. The Italian shortcomings I have hinted 
 at ; and where wood is marketed by the pound, and 
 an armful is a godsend for a week, there is reason 
 for shortcoming. But on the Albanian hills, where 
 fagots of ripe alder are not worth a king s ransom, 
 the blundering people have no keen relish for 
 a great blaze and its domestic accompaniments ; 
 and within stone s throw of abounding wood upon 
 the Apennines, you shall see old women in the 
 mountain houses, besetting a little meagre earth 
 en brazier of fuming charcoal. Happily the loose 
 doors and windows spare them the pains of poison 
 ing. 
 
 In our own country, as you get southward of the 
 Potomac, you begin to see the chimneys built up 
 outside the houses, giving them a raw and inhospita 
 ble look. Even in well-appointed homesteads, where 
 all other cheer used to abound, the fires depended 
 upon such chance supplies of green, sappy wood, 
 and were so lost in the depths of monstrous broad- 
 throated chimneys, as to belie all the New England 
 traditions of fireside comfort. 
 
 Without being much versed in the culinary art, it 
 does seem to me that the fullest accomplishment 
 
FIRES AND FIRESIDE. 223 
 
 in that line must belong to a great open hearth. Is 
 it conceivable that the tight, closed, prison-like, 
 black ranges of our modern kitchens can put a 
 plump turkey to that kindly, blistered, chocolate- 
 colored browning, which used to belong to that cov 
 eted edible in the boy-days of broad fires and toasted 
 drum-sticks? Are there ashes about wherein a boy 
 may slip a pig s tail, wrapped in tissue-paper, and 
 achieve that other roasting triumph? Any broad 
 plateau of ruby coals whereon the old gridiron, with 
 its little runlets for the juices, may be posed, pre 
 paratory to the wallop on it of a tender porter-house 
 steak ? All the time, too, a pot aufeu, lovely with a 
 faint blush of onion, may be singing its song in the 
 corner of the great fireplace ; and presently the artist 
 may come (in paper cap, if he lives in France), 
 and toss an omelet out of his bright, long-handled 
 sauce-pan, in a twinkling, from over the streaming 
 blaze. 
 
 Is it true that the dismal range is capable of these 
 things? 
 
 There be quite other meats, too, which seems 
 to me always got their finest and rarest taste in 
 the glow of a great roaring January fire, when the 
 hearth was swept and the curtains drawn. 
 
 What feasts there were to be sure in those winter 
 nights, with Mr. De Foe and Miss Porter and all the 
 
224 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 rest, for furnishers and providers ! What a choice 
 morsel was that marvellous story of Sindbad the 
 Sailor, and how old Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves 
 regaled us ! From my soul I pity those later born 
 youth, who come to their first knowledge and taste 
 of such delicacies under the toasting of an anthracite 
 stove, or a patent register ! Even as we listened in 
 those old times, with eyes intent upon the blaze, every 
 sudden nicker was a watchfire on the Scottish moun 
 tains, every tumble of a brand was a flash of the fierce 
 Kirkpatrick s claymore, and a sudden burst of sparks 
 was a flight of arrows from the English bowmen. As 
 for Crusoe, he made his voyage, and suffered wreck, 
 and saved his stores, and dug his cavern, all under 
 the forestick, where our eyes rested. Some oysters 
 (in the shell), simmering upon the coals, and pres 
 ently opening with a gape, were the Friday victims 
 of some cannibal folk, and (horror of horrors !) we 
 shortly turned cannibals ourselves, and laughed away 
 all thought of indigestion. 
 
 Or, if we of larger growth, knuckled down our 
 selves to the dog s-eared volumes, with elbows on 
 the table, every unusual flash of light from the wav 
 ing fire was a burst of some magic vase in the pages 
 of the Arabian Nights, and every rustle in the em 
 bers seemed the stealth} 7 tread of some one of the 
 Forty Thieves. Even the slightest crackle on the 
 
FIRES AND FIRESIDE. 225 
 
 hearth offered somehow a grateful symphony with 
 the rare tone of those grand old stories. 
 
 Well, we shall never read them again as we read 
 them once. Adieu, sweet Helen Mar ! Adieu, 
 Amanda ! Adieu, old Scheherazade ! 
 
 The decorators with all their arts and all their 
 vermilion and gold can never match the blaze from 
 the Fireside. I think we might well spare our 
 spendings in other directions for the sake of keep 
 ing alive this flame so full of traditional charm 
 so full of joyousness and cheer. 
 
 It is the wisest, fullest, fittest, richest of all the 
 decorative adjuncts of a home room. It redeems 
 poverty of equipment ; it gilds the plainest furni 
 ture ; it sheds cheerful illumination over the scantest 
 of floors ; it kindles the best tints on soberest of 
 ceilings ; it steals with its warm reflections the chill- 
 ness from the deadest of carven images ; it puts a 
 roseate flush (that is more than Capo-Monti, or 
 Dresden finish) on simplest cottage crockery ; it 
 gilds the backs of homeliest books making them 
 each one, a Roger Payne in binding ; it deepens by 
 contrast the dark embayed corners of your room, so 
 that Rembrandtish effects are your companions ; it 
 wakens fairy glimpses into fairy realms of shadow ; 
 it sets astir depths of sentiment for which no man 
 ever is the worse as it brings into view under 
 
226 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 its ruddy glow, portraits of lost ones upon your 
 walls eyes long closed are touched with a tenderer 
 light 
 
 u There is no Fireside howsoe er defended 
 But lias one vacant chair." 
 
 Is it a phantom fire, that I see once again ? A 
 hearth all swept ; gigantic brazen fire-dogs, with 
 minarets and quadrant balustrade sweeping round 
 half the hearth, with minarets and balustrade shining 
 like gold ; a great back-log, half spent, and check 
 ered with irregular squares of red coal ; a hickory 
 fore-stick round which the white fingers of flame 
 play and dance ; a broad red glow of firelight on the 
 ceiling ; a sparkle of brightness on the hyacinth 
 glasses upon the ledge of the windows, waiting to 
 morrow s sun ; a diffused, mellow, wavering play of 
 light over hearth-rug and carpet, out to the dim 
 wilderness where the chairs rise like trees planted in 
 fours ; a dog, half in shadow and half in light, who 
 if one says " Watch ! " (sharply) lifts his head, and 
 tracks the voice, and comes out of the dimness to 
 lick the hand of the caller ; a round table, comfort 
 ably near the hearth, whereon a tall astral lamp 
 throws down a softened glow of light ; a gray-haired 
 man, with spectacles on nose, who reads : " For now 
 we see through a glass darkly " ; a lady in white 
 
FIRES AND FIRESIDE. 227 
 
 cap, who listens, and as she listens, shifts the 
 needles in some boyish wrap of winter ; a girl with 
 golden ringlets, in the which her fingers are weaving 
 a vision, as she looks meditatively at the glowing 
 embers ; a cuiiy-pated boy, with face in shadow, 
 whose hand is on the dog " Watch " 
 Phantoms, phantoms all ! 
 
Highways and Parks. 
 
 ~VT ARROW streets make long death-rolls ; but 
 **^ narrowness is not a constant quantity. It is 
 a thing of conditions. If New Yorkers persist in 
 building such towers as flank the corners of Beek- 
 man Street and Nassau, they will presently reduce 
 either of those streets to a condition which it would 
 delight a Sanitarian to ventilate by discussion. 
 But there must be not only spaces for sun and air ; 
 there must also be in the wider openings, with which 
 an orderly civilization should cleave the streets 
 foliage. Vigorous trees are great disinfectants. 
 Their lively laboratories appropriate what is bad, 
 and set free what is good. 
 
 Indeed, an ideal city when we have one from 
 a sanitary point of view, should have its little nu 
 cleus of business quarters upon a bay, or a river, or 
 a great thoroughfare as the case might be ; and 
 this business nucleus crystallizing there under the 
 compression of an outlying circle of green, jealously 
 
HIGHWAYS AND PARKS. 229 
 
 guarded, would project its rays, or avenues of traf 
 fic atliwart this circle ; and these avenues of traffic, 
 by their accretions of lesser and lighter business, 
 would demand zebra-like cross-bars of space and 
 greenness and foliage, to be flanked with files of 
 houses in such sort that a man could not go to 
 his business without sight of trees, or a chance to 
 put his foot to the live earth ; while all schools and 
 courts and hospitals should have their setting of 
 green. 
 
 This sounds fanciful ; but it is not fanciful at all, 
 and is only another way of setting forth that inter 
 spacing of greenness and air with brick and stone, 
 wilich the best sanitary regimen is trying to bring 
 about at prodigious costs, in nearly all the old cities 
 of the world. 
 
 The only question is, how much of this curative 
 of green leaves, which are heaven appointed "for 
 the healing of the nations " shall be thrust in amid 
 the crowded alleys of cities, and wedge them open 
 to light and air. 
 
 A good array of figures well placed and well 
 footed, will force us to the belief that such, and 
 such another disposition of ground, or buildings, or 
 trees, is contributory to public health ; but all the 
 figures of the best statisticians alive will not con 
 vince us that this or that disposition of natural ob- 
 
2 3 o BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 jects is beautiful, and by right, should be a delight 
 to us always. This must come of an art-sense which 
 is shapen by education. And I have faith that there 
 will come a time not this year, nor in ten years 
 but some day, when the data for judgment in mat 
 ters of art will be as fixed as are now the data for 
 judgment in matters of engineering. In that good 
 clay coming we shall have bridges not only scientifi 
 cally constructed, but at every point aesthetically 
 good ; and the rarest and fullest obedience to all the 
 laws of scientific construction in bridge, or court, 
 or spire, will carry about it a delightful harmony 
 with all the subtlest rulings of grace. 
 
 Meantime, I want to lay stress upon the fact that 
 all such treatment of ground as we shall consider 
 involves an artistic eye and artistic handling ; and 
 so is brought under the domain of Art. It is not a 
 problem in engineering that may be worked out by 
 laws laid down in the books. 
 
 Take, for instance, the trail of a park road ; it in 
 volves, indeed, good engineering ; but it involves 
 more. There must be grace, there must be win- 
 ningness in every line ; there must be dalh ance with 
 the low declivities, there must be easy and scarce 
 discoverable gain upon the altitudes which are 
 surmounted only for the charms of outlook they 
 offer. 
 
HIGHWAYS AND PARKS. 231 
 
 The engineer aims at easy traffic, and the most 
 economic methods of securing it. But such con 
 siderations do not belong to a scheme of park roads, 
 where the aim is leisurely recreation. Again, the 
 little, meaningless curves, and sharp, sudden turns 
 which may come of too close an economy are so 
 many impertinences and interferences with that 
 large enjoyment and regalement which park roads 
 ought to offer in all their lines. 
 
 Least of all should there be any palpable and 
 arrogant show of engineering triumphs ; a park 
 drive should conquer difficulties of surface so subtly 
 and gracefully as to leave no traces of the struggle ; 
 and that achievement is best of all which makes the 
 resulting street or drive seem much as possible 
 to have been laid down along some happy accident of 
 surface evolved by the processes of nature, with 
 no ambitious scars of quarryman, or miner, challeng 
 ing the eye. The painter whose manner is forever 
 calling attention to his technique, and the thrusts of 
 his brush, never coins such triumphs as the one 
 who makes you forget the details of his workman 
 ship, in the charm with which he enthralls you. 
 
 Again, recognition of the art quality, which should 
 belong to all judicious treatment of public grounds, 
 will put at a discount much of that bustling, busi 
 ness-like, pushing, common-council capacity, which 
 
232 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 attacks the question of park drives, or bridges, or 
 fountains, or monuments, very much as it would at 
 tack a dinner of beef and cabbage, and with a feel 
 ing that a good healthy stomach not much brain 
 being needed would digest it all very easily. For 
 tunately there are common-council men who have 
 taste as well as energy, as there are engineers who 
 unite art-feeling to skill ; I have heard even of alder 
 men thus exceptionally endowed. For this we 
 should be grateful. 
 
 It is certain, however, that we shall never come to 
 the measure of best work on public ground, whether 
 as parks or highways, or village commons, until 
 we come to full recognition of the fact that there is 
 an art quality in all good works of the sort which 
 by light furtherance will make of our roads, and 
 greens, and school-yards great helpers in the ways 
 of refinement and of civilization. 
 
 A well-cared for, and well-ordered highway may 
 in itself take on park-like attributes, and carry with 
 it into the midst of many a small town all that rural 
 flavor and much of the adornment which we associ 
 ate with parks. I need do no more than allude to 
 those old-fashioned New-England towns lying here 
 and there in the laps of the hills into which you 
 enter by green ways, under boughs of elm trees, or 
 of maple, and find the houses with neat door-yards 
 
HIGHWAYS AND PARKS. 233 
 
 before them, flanking a great, broadened highway, 
 so broad that the wheel tracks have gone on either 
 side, leaving a green common between, shaded by 
 ponderous-limbed trees. Here are all the park ele 
 ments which will suffice for years of growth ; and 
 which, if there be neatness and order, the most 
 skilled of gardeners cannot touch without blunder 
 ing into niceties that will weaken, instead of strength 
 ening general effect. 
 
 The trim barriers or railings all the worse 
 if they are ambitious ones of iron which an 
 ugly conventionalism will sometimes plant around 
 such middle part of a great broadened highway 
 is only belittling neither carrying grace of its 
 own, nor lending grace ; and if all the dwellers 
 about such rural common could have the healthy 
 hardihood to tear away their own enclosures 
 fronting them, and flanking them, and boxing them 
 in, for which, in nine cases in ten, there is no more 
 real service than for lamps in the daytime the 
 whole centre of the township could be straightway 
 converted into a park, with all its best appoint 
 ments of shrub and tree. I understand perfectly 
 that there may be private walks gardens in the 
 rear, which must have their barri3rs and screens ; 
 but in the great majority of instances all that 
 space, ordinarily boxed into what is called a front 
 
234 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 door-yard in rural villages might be opened to the 
 road, with great gain, pecuniary and aesthetic, to all 
 concerned. 
 
 Though in many of our public parks we have 
 pushed matters to a very high stage of artistic de 
 velopment, yet as respects our country roads and 
 highways we still border very closely upon sav 
 agery. It is not the road-bed proper, which is so 
 bad though that is many times execrable ; but 
 it is its environment of mud-pits, of bald bould 
 ers, of broken banks, which wherever easiest 
 digging prompted are made cavernous so as to 
 undermine adjoining walls all rubbish from 
 neighboring farm lands being dumped there at in 
 tervals ; and so soon as the kindly vines and brush 
 wood accomplish a little leafy screen for such bar 
 barities, there comes an awful " slicking up " by 
 destruction of all these kindly fig-leaves which 
 nature had put upon the unclean doings of select 
 men or other road-masters, leaving frightful array 
 of stubs and ash-heaps, and blackened stones, 
 and despoiled and struggling brakes and briars. 
 There is mission work needed here, for which I 
 fear the architectural elegancies of city parks do 
 not preach the best sermons. And country folk 
 who go to gape and wonder are as little impressed 
 with a saving conviction as a heathen and thor- 
 
HIGHWAYS AND PARKS. 235 
 
 ough reprobate would be, by the exaltation of 
 Keble s "Christian Year." 
 
 I know nothing which would be more provo 
 cative of that rural grace of heart which public 
 parks are supposed to nourish, than a new, and 
 lively, and persistent attention to the comeliness 
 of our waysides ; nor is there any good reason why 
 every country road leading up to large or small 
 interior towns, should not by its invitingness 
 of aspect, and unpretending and uncostly rural 
 graces, make an everyday trail of sesthetic teaching. 
 More than any parks, I think, even by many cities 
 and towns which begin to talk of them, there is 
 needed attention to their suburban highways. 
 They should be laid out not as every land-owner 
 scheming for long frontages may desire not as 
 every city engineer intent upon nothing but UTTER 
 grading may propose but as the largest features 
 of the land, and most intelligent estimate of future 
 growth may demand. 
 
 Most of these roads will diverge to other and 
 adjoining townships ; so there will be radiation of 
 lines, which in the outskirts will give little trian 
 gular spaces to be held in reserve for parklets, for a 
 public building, a clock-tower, a fountain, a monu 
 ment. Then, naturally, there come about joinings of 
 these outgoing divergent highways by lesser cross- 
 
236 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 roads cut through mostly as easy traffic may de 
 cide ; and in many a growing* town just becoming 
 emulous of parks such cross-roads by a doubling 
 or quadrupling of their breadth, and judicious plant- 
 ing would make a great, irregular, encircling park- 
 like belt of space and of greenness accessible from 
 all points a delight to young and old, and by so 
 much better than a formal park, because it is married 
 with all the economies of their daily life and traffic. 
 
 Again, in such transfiguration of high-roads to 
 larger ends, it is to be considered that the widen 
 ing process may touch upon some unsightly and 
 comparatively worthless localities as morasses, bits 
 of cliff which may be wrought into the scheme, by 
 special enlargement thereabout of its boundaries, 
 and the morass be changed into a limpid pool of 
 water, and the cliff taught to wear its tresses of 
 vines and its plumes of foliage. 
 
 It is amazing what skill and courage and patience 
 may do with unsightly things. I have seen a broad 
 mud-flat in the very eye of a town left bare at 
 every tide which, by the deposit of judicious 
 dredgings upon wattled mattresses of brush, came 
 to show ultimately an irregular peninsula of raised 
 earth, with thrifty-growing wooded-walks upon it, 
 and the ripples breaking cleanly and sparklingly 
 against its borders at every stage of the tide. 
 
HIGHWAYS AND PARKS. 237 
 
 Another instance of the conversion of an area of 
 unmitigated ugliness to park-like uses and beauty, 
 is so notable that I venture to give a detail or two 
 of conditions and results. I allude to the Suites de 
 Chaumont in Paris. It is or was high ground, once 
 called Mont-Faucon, to the northeast of the city, 
 over Belleville way. It was a place for executions a 
 long time, and men used to hang in chains there 
 upon the bald, bare top of the hill : then quarries 
 were worked there, making unsightly pits, and leav 
 ing raw scars of yellow rock : all the offal of the 
 city, for years and years, was taken thither, and 
 thence came the first makings of poudrette for 
 farm uses the screenings, and sunnings, and ma 
 nipulations to that end, all taking place on this 
 bald, treeless, scathed hill of gibbets. Thieves bur 
 rowed in the holes which quarrymen had left, and 
 the lower pits were rank with the accumulated ooze 
 from the offal and foul industries of the locality. 
 
 It was Mr. Haussmann, the intrepid master of im 
 provements under Louis Napoleon, who took this in 
 hand for a cleansing, or if it might be some park- 
 like decoration. The result anybody can see who will 
 go out to Villette a region of the Communisles 
 and not otherwise inviting. The lower levels at the 
 foot of the old quarry are all drowned in a beautiful 
 limpid lake, which is fed by a rivulet flowing down 
 
238 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 from unseen sources in the rock. The bald flank of 
 the hill is covered with lawn, and scattered coppices. 
 Upon a shelf of the high ground a cottage restaurant 
 is embowered in trees ; the old scarred cliffs are 
 lichened over or covered with ivies ; a light wire 
 bridge swings from height to height above the bed of 
 the lake ; and by this you may pass over to the 
 craggy tower of rock which the quarry men had left 
 isolated, and from whose top you may look sheer 
 down upon the water at its base, upon the groups of 
 children loitering along the paths, upon the emerald 
 green of the meadow which flanks the pool and that 
 stretches out shimmering in the sun to a near wall 
 of foliage, over which appear against the haze, or the 
 blue of the sky, the roofs and towers and domes of 
 that wonderful city of Paris. 
 
 Of course all this cost a great deal of money ; but 
 the enhanced taxable value of surrounding property 
 goes very far toward covering costs, if it does not 
 before now completely do so. At the same time a 
 waste of ground, unsightly and polluting, has been 
 converted into a blooming garden, whose civilizing 
 influences are felt in all that region neatness and 
 order coming at last to stand for something of posi 
 tive value, and the children of the neighborhood by 
 loitering in these trim walks, and by contact with 
 others there, and the pretty emulation growing out 
 
HIGHWAYS AND PARKS. 239 
 
 of it becoming more cleanly and comely, yielding 
 thus, in habit, insensibly to their new surroundings. 
 
 I was speaking a little way back about school 
 yards and hospital-yards in connection with our out- 
 of-door aesthetics. And why not ? 
 
 In larger cities, it is true, schools are brought 
 squarely to the street edge, and by preposterous 
 and slavish imitation, in far too many of our smaller 
 cities ; but in country towns there is verge and 
 space, for the most part overgrown with dreary 
 turf, or may be, by exceptional zeal for ornament 
 carrying two or three pyramidal evergreens, stiff as 
 grenadiers, of whose names and habits very likely 
 both teachers and pupils are ignorant. Well, why 
 not bring this space under a sort of park endow 
 ment, with trees, or shrubs, or flowers, or if area 
 permit all of these together ; not as so much dead 
 rubbish to be planted and never looked after, but to 
 be watched, to be labelled, to represent special 
 genera, to be noted and classified, to become a part 
 of the paraphernalia of the school as much as the 
 physical geography-maps, or the globe, or the air- 
 pump if they have one ? 
 
 Would not children come kindly to such out-of- 
 door lessons, and to such practical knowledge as 
 would always bestand them well ? And from such 
 object lessons, might we not hope, in due course, for 
 
240 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 a crop of burgesses who would look after highways 
 with some intelligent sense of their best equipment 
 and a zeal quickened by knowledge ? 
 
 If I join jail-yards to this mention of school en 
 closures, and what may be helpfully done with them, 
 do not count me among those sentimental folk who 
 would force cologne and confits upon criminals, and 
 follow them up with a bevy of women sympathizers : 
 I have, what seems to rne, a wholesome belief that 
 a bad man should carry with him everywhere a 
 stinging sense of his badness not to be hoisted 
 out of him by eleemosynary sweets. But I have also 
 such faith in the right and loving treatment of na 
 ture s furnishings of flower and tree, as to believe 
 that the right adjustment of them before the eyes 
 of the most criminal will, in due time, engage the 
 mind and possess it, to the exclusion of a good many 
 of the devil s artifices. A bald, sandy court, or one 
 reeking with mud-pools and garbage, would set all 
 the rogue s blood in a body to the boil when the 
 same court turfed, and garnished with the fleecy 
 shadows of playing foliage or flecks of bloom, would 
 wean from deviltries as much as a good sermon 
 and a good deal more than an average one. 
 
 But whatever may be true of the criminal class 
 and of the possible influence of those surroundings 
 which show the most winning side of nature, there 
 
HIGHWAYS AND PARKS. 241 
 
 can be no doubt of this influence in the case of 
 those weak-minded and distraught ones who people 
 our retreats for the insane. 
 
 To these, the order, the repose, the graceful con 
 tours, the restful shade, the burst of a thousand 
 flowers, the dash and sparkle of water, bring a self- 
 forgetting which is a gain and a delight. There is 
 danger of falling into a strain here which will sound 
 like mere sentiment with no substantive record at 
 its back ; but such fact substance is not wanting. A 
 veteran superintendent of one of our largest institu 
 tions for the insane in the country, said to me, " I 
 know nothing of all curatives within our reach 
 which, in case of deflection of the mental forces, 
 will so soothe and catch and hold the distrained 
 mind so allure and so cheat it into escape from 
 its own vagaries as well-ordered and attractive park- 
 gardening." 
 
 Passing now from a consideration of these lesser 
 holdings of public lands, which may wisely be 
 made subject of aesthetic treatment, I come to a 
 mention of those great reservations of territory 
 such as the Yosemite Valley and the country of 
 the Yellowstone which have come to be called 
 National Parks. These in their mountain lines and 
 their stupendous fissures carry their own blazon of 
 
 work wonderfully done ; and sestheticisrn has no call 
 16 
 
242 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 in their presence, save to admire and let severely 
 alone. Government duty in respect of both is 
 summed up in a phrase Make access easy and 
 guard from despoilment. 
 
 Among State reservations (or proposed reserva 
 tions) for so-called park purposes, is to be noted the 
 much-mooted one in late years of a certain pre 
 scribed area along the banks of Niagara River. It 
 is understood that action in regard to the latter is 
 stayed (or at least impeded) by the opinion of some 
 expert that the area prescribed in the initiatory 
 legislation is not sufficiently extended. It is much 
 to be regretted that a scheme which so commends it 
 self to every man up to the level of appreciating na 
 ture s wonders, should be impeded by trivialities or 
 by antagonisms in the commission having the work 
 in charge. It is to be hoped, however, that when 
 these are laid, and the scheme meets fulfilment, that 
 the Niagara region will escape the impertinences 
 of fine gardening, or of ambitious architectural dis 
 play; and that the commission will recognize the 
 fact that the grandest park achievement needed 
 will be to give free way to the world, through stately 
 alleys of wood, to unencumbered banks, and open 
 sight of the great spectacle of waters. 
 
 The Adirondacks have been made subject of leg 
 islation more positive in its issues ; but with respect 
 
HIGHWAYS AND PARKS. 243 
 
 to this reservation it is understood that very prompt 
 action is now necessary to guard against spoliation ; 
 and broad trails should be laid bare where they 
 will be least disfiguring to guard against the 
 sweep of forest fires : beyond this, and the enforce 
 ment of rigid forestry laws, the Adirondack Park 
 will "run itself." 
 
 Other States might well follow the example of 
 New York in the matter of such reservations of wild 
 land ; Georgia has a wealth of forest and waterfalls 
 in its north-western region ; North Carolina in its 
 mountain valleys ; Virginia along the Blue Eidge; 
 Pennsylvania in the Alleghanies, and New Hampshire 
 and Maine among their lakes and mountains which 
 are worthy of legislative guardianship. 
 
 The belief is, I think, now fully established that 
 the destruction of forests and consequent denuda 
 tion of the hill lands stifles the mountain springs, 
 and puts in peril our water supply. New England 
 is feeling a scantiness on this score, more and more 
 stringently every year. It is evident that legisla 
 tion must speedily take cognizance of this threat 
 ened peril ; and how better, than by acquiring title 
 if such is not already held by the State to a great 
 forest range, and demonstrating and illustrating 
 there the best conditions for its conservation ? 
 
 I next come to speak of what we currently call 
 
244 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 city parks of their beginnings and of their meth. 
 ods of growth, and of how some of those methods 
 may perhaps be mended. 
 
 It is not often that a city or town goes openly 
 into market, like another buyer for park land ; 
 the scheme gets started quietly and evolves through 
 a world of cautious manoeuvres ; or the gift of a 
 dead man or living gives consequence and a start- 
 point ; or there is some modification of large sur 
 face undertaken for sanitary purposes, which as it 
 progresses suggests and invites such artistic treat 
 ment as results in a great pleasure ground ; but 
 whenever and wherever it becomes a thing of city 
 purchase for declared purpose of park-making, there 
 should be full report by a legally appointed com 
 mission on all available sites, that choice may be 
 open, and have the weight of the popular authority on 
 its side. Any such project which is brought about 
 by chicane or underworking will be handicapped 
 from the start by a certain amount of quiet antag 
 onism, and certainly lack that spontaneity of sup 
 port which gives best results. 
 
 Again, whatever a town does in this way, it 
 should do with full-heartedness and an open hand. 
 Appeals to private munificence in such a work are 
 inglorious : a town that is not ready to be taxed 
 for a public park which offers pleasure ground for 
 
HIGHWAYS AND PARKS. 245 
 
 the convenience of all, is not ready for that enjoy 
 ment and that zealous appreciation which alone 
 gives such project its best conservation. 
 
 I have no great faith in the park tendencies of 
 a town which has not already done the most it can 
 do in the proper and orderly equipment of its sub 
 urban highways, its school enclosures, its little 
 outlying angles of waste ground. The attention 
 given there can alone ripen the aesthetic spirit which 
 may later take larger bloom in the glories of a park. 
 
 There can be no doubt of the fact that no out 
 lying reach of park land, however treated, can ever 
 compensate for the lack of open squares or gardens 
 within a city, and easily accessible. 
 
 For the solid enjoyment of. the masses and their 
 guidance in all rural proclivities, the Bois de Bou 
 logne without Paris, will not compare for a moment 
 with the Monceaux and the Batignolles, and the gar 
 dens of the Luxembourg, and the Tuileries. 
 
 It might almost be said that a city which did 
 not scrupulously regard and care for its lesser waste 
 places deserved no park privileges at ah 1 . And 
 these lesser breathing places of a city should have 
 each their special treatment, guided n<?t by gar 
 deners who gloat over riotous splendors - but by 
 considerate regard for the habits and needs of 
 each neighborhood. Thus, near to great honoa 
 
246 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 whose occupants have large range for their pleas 
 ures, treatment might well be of the severest 
 limited to trees and lawn surfaces ; in neighbor 
 hoods where the families of working men congre 
 gate, there should be parterres of flowers space 
 for child play and whatever within aesthetic limits 
 will contribute most to their pleasures. 
 
 I remark, again, a strong American tendency in 
 late years to excessive over-ornamentation of ground 
 in public places convoluted whirls of surface 
 which carry no meaning in them excessive mar- 
 tinetism in trimmings of walk and turf legions 
 of foliage plants, that fatigue one with their great 
 reaches of tawdry color. 
 
 I suppose it to be the efflorescence of that 
 pseudo-sestheticism which has had other outcome 
 in Sunflowers, and Dude-ism, and crazy quilts, and 
 crushed strawberry tints. This yellowed demonstra- 
 tiveness is all the more afflictive when it is asso 
 ciated with utter neglect of the commoner laws 
 of neatness and fitness, which must everywhere 
 be the bases of all the higher reaches of aesthetic 
 endeavor. There are Western cities, for instance, 
 which with the most monstrous disregard for clean 
 liness or safety in the walks along their streets, 
 yet string roods and roods of the most garish of 
 flowers upon their closely shaven park grounds : 
 
HIGHWAYS AND PARKS. 247 
 
 just so some buxom, ill-trained damsel from the 
 interior, will pace along city streets with a great 
 top-gear of flaunting feathers and ribbons, all the 
 while loftily unconscious of the cow-skin brogans 
 in which she walks ! 
 
 Extraordinarily bad things in dress, in gardening, 
 and in literature are almost always done by those 
 who try to do too much. 
 
 It is quite impossible to lay down laws for the 
 proper treatment of park ground. Every city and 
 community has its own needs ; every landscape 
 must have special interpretation of its compass 
 and aptitudes. Everywhere and under all condi 
 tions, however, treatment must be large and lib 
 eral, and not wasted in petty prettinesses. I doubt 
 the wisdom of large architectural investiture in 
 a cold climate like ours. Terraces and their ac 
 companiments of sculpture, balustrades, and vases 
 belong to a countiy where parks are a delight in 
 winter as well as summer, and where steps are 
 never clothed in ice. 
 
 And though I have inveighed against overstrain 
 toward finery, do not understand me to favor a 
 cheap simplicity. Whatever may be done, should 
 be done thoroughly ; cheap or hap-hazard work 
 wherever done will declare itself sooner or later in 
 awful ways. Good park work should teach the best 
 
248 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 methods of road-making, the best of path-making, 
 and give to every tree and flower their completest 
 development, and their most piquant grace. 
 
 Yet art must not glorify itself ; it must be hum 
 ble ; it must deal reverently and lovingly with na 
 ture, and not divert her unwisely from her own 
 sweet proclivities. Something more is needed than 
 the Engineer, stiff with his instrumentation and his 
 equations and his economies of line. Here are 
 curves that want deftness, not cognizable by one fed 
 solely on conic sections, but varying as cloud shapes 
 vary taking the billows of the hills into their sway 
 sweeping as they sweep. 
 
 Least of all can anything be worthily done in 
 a spirit of stolid imitativeness. Gardens cannot be 
 transferred by line save on flattest and tamest of 
 surfaces ; and even here exigencies of soil or climate 
 may demand their special recognition. A capital 
 success under English skies cannot be wrought out 
 here by simple duplication. Our suns, our flora, 
 our surroundings forbid. The seed-core governs 
 the rounded shape, and from American elements 
 there must be American development : and whoso 
 struggles contrariwise, will have as poor pay for his 
 pains as the very fine people who would accredit a 
 brave old British sport, by hunting tame foxes over 
 Rhode Island potato-fields. 
 
HIGHWAYS AND PARKS. 249 
 
 It used to be imagined that the nicer details of 
 park work would not meet with the same respectful 
 regard with us, as among European nations ; but 
 the results in the Central Park in the old days 
 when kept in its best trim have amply disproved 
 this ; a reverent love for the beautiful things in na 
 ture, in shape of flower, and turf, and tree, is not a 
 British trait or a French one ; it is thank God 
 a trait of humanity. 
 
 And if to a kindly and protective regard for the 
 beautiful things of Nature, can be added that sense 
 of ownership which great public parks bestow upon 
 idlers and half-idlers and all men, we face an aspect 
 of the subject which goes beyond sestheticism and 
 has politico-economic significance. In these days 
 when the stupendous growth of fortunes touches 
 the height and the responsibilities of old Principali 
 ties, and when corporations and monopolies, wit 
 tingly or unwittingly, are fomenting strange, wild 
 comment in such days I say, trees, and flowers, 
 and walks, and lawns, at the public disposition 
 free as air where every workman has equal owner 
 ship with the richest, make a capital safety-valve 
 for the brooding unrest, and the angry, tempestuous 
 desires, and the wide, covetous range of thought 
 which Communism engenders. 
 
 Hereby lies a source of moral culture matching 
 
250 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 and mating well with those other educational influ 
 ences which take hold upon the more instructed. 
 To these the delicate beauties of park scenes 
 planted amidst the clangor of the town, give new 
 readings and new comprehension of what is most 
 subtle, and subtly true, in those poets who have put 
 tender feeling into their descriptions of natural 
 beauties. 
 
 To this end it is not needful that there be agree 
 ment part to part : it is only needful that the 
 faithful and loving treatment of public grounds do 
 bring back that enthrallment of the feelings, and 
 the mellifluous tones which broke on us in rare 
 or felicitous renderings of rural scenes by the 
 poets. 
 
 It is not requisite, I said, that repetition be com 
 plete no more complete than an echo which, 
 dallying with the hills, repeats the melodious 
 chant from whose trail it sprung. I think Keble, 
 and Herbert, and Tennyson, and Cowper all get 
 new illustration and an educational smack from 
 such good w T ork on ground as we are consider 
 ing. And everywhere and always that work of 
 setting best ruralities before men, has good ed 
 ucational office in piquing wonder, in kindling 
 memories, in spurring to inquisition of nature s 
 secrets. 
 
HIGHWAYS AND PARKS. 251 
 
 Littlest things in that new realm we enter cap 
 tivate us: we see with Wordsworth and enjoy 
 with him, the 
 
 " daisy s star-shaped shadow- 
 Thrown on the surface of the naked stone." 
 
House Interiors. 
 
 TROUNCING indoors again, we find that narrow 
 -*-^ halls are as bad as narrow streets. There is 
 no adornment of a hall like breadth. Narrowness 
 makes waste of temper and waste of bric-a-brac. 
 The cunningest lover of the " Lilies," of either sex 
 wants to spread ; and the common-sense man wants 
 free and full room to put on his dreadnaught with 
 out rapping his knuckles against the wainscot. 
 
 The old school of builders did indeed presume 
 that narrow houses and narrow lots compelled nar 
 row halls ; but the ingenuity of modern architects 
 and a little bending of old habits have wrought a 
 relaxation of this law of compulsion, and given re 
 lief from the pinch of a five-foot entrance way. Yet 
 architectural ingenuity has very much more to ac 
 complish still in this direction ; and what it may or 
 may not do affords fruitful topic for fuller discus 
 sion than we have space for here. 
 
 Breadth, however, can be secured, if only con 
 
HOUSE INTERIORS. 253 
 
 ventionalities be discarded, and the larger comforts 
 kept in mind. True it may involve a little stealing 
 from the space in adjoining rooms ; but, ordinarily, 
 no wiser theft could be made. There should be 
 room there for the shaking of hands and for a toss 
 of " circulars." Mistress and maid, and a quartette of 
 children should be able to group there, with verge 
 and space for a last tying of the mufflers, and a last 
 dusting of the frills. 
 
 The light may not be of the best ; indeed full 
 blaze is not desirable. At our first entrance upon 
 a home, a little coy and doubtful peering about 
 through a half-grayish half-golden twilight to 
 lay hold upon the serenities that invite us, is better 
 there. And such mystic glow as this may come 
 easily through the olive-green lights of the lobby, 
 or through some vitreous bit of wonderful opa- 
 lescence half up the stairway. 
 
 It will not be a light that will invite us to the study 
 of minute figures ; nor is such needed in any hall. 
 We can make out the pointing of the hands upon 
 the old hall clock, if there be one present (and it is 
 a capital " Present "). We can catch the shimmer 
 of the metal-work upon the breach of a Moorish 
 gun, if one hangs athwart the hall ; and a general, or 
 an artist, or an archn?ologist, or a sportsman, or 
 even an aesthete could not object to a good group 
 
254 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 of historic weapons. But whether there would be 
 good light for delicate paintings, or for engravings, 
 is quite another question ; certainly no such things 
 should be shown under conditions that would make 
 the study of them a weariness ; and this is good rul 
 ing for corridors, or halls, or libraries. What is 
 worth seeing closely, is worth the light to see it by. 
 
 An old family portrait or two, with homely, 
 strong lines in them, might stand well in the half- 
 dimiiess of a hall, with a historic twilight upon 
 them by day ; and by night (with some kindly fix 
 ture of upper lights) taking on an aureole of wel 
 coming smiles. 
 
 Again, an old bit of tapestry Flemish or other 
 is not a bad thing for the half-dimness of a hall ; 
 not stretched straight, as if we were eager to make 
 the very most of it, but taking easy folds into which 
 figures of stalwart falconers, and trees, and cavaliers 
 shall break and break out again in pretty, mystic be 
 wilderment of change. Then this tapestry (like an 
 arras of old) may hide things that would break 
 upon the artistic harmonies of the hall. It may 
 overhang and conceal a slight recess where the 
 everyday man (though he were a Bunthorne) must 
 keep his galoshes, and his canes, and his mackin 
 tosh, and his ulster. 
 
 And what, pray, should be under foot in our hall, 
 
HOUSE INTERIORS. 255 
 
 and what floor have we ? That floor is best of all 
 which by its smoothness, and evenness, and sound 
 ness, and lowness of tone as compared with all wall 
 surfaces, makes us straightway forget what manner 
 of floor it is. Neither our eye or thought should 
 seek it or pursue it. If there are geometries in it 
 they should not be so voyants as to tempt us to 
 work out their puzzles ; and it is no place for per 
 spectives, even of a cube of color. A hall mat or 
 rug too that tells of warmth and softness is telling 
 about the best story that it can possibly tell. 
 
 Slippery floors again (though of rarest hard 
 woods), and floors waxed and polished to the last 
 degree of smoothness, if they confront us in the en 
 trance-hall, are an abomination. No man of proper 
 sedateness, and no woman of assured domesticity 
 but dreads setting foot upon paths that are slip 
 pery. 
 
 A good old oaken settle is not a bad thing for 
 halls, with its sheer severities of paneled back and 
 its sturdy plank footing ; not easy to be sure ; we do 
 not want any cushioned luxuries in a hallway ; it is 
 rather a good place to receive " bores," if we must 
 receive them at all, and an oaken settle of oldish 
 and homely rectangularities does not tempt a long 
 stay. The same may be said of overwrought oaken 
 chairs with great bulges of uneasy and recreant 
 
256 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 carving ; the hall is a good place for such, except 
 they be inhibited by too palpable a non-agreement 
 with other fixtures. But there is always this good 
 in a hall, that it takes a "jumble" of things mfere 
 justly, and carries them more easily than other 
 rooms. 
 
 As respects disposition of apartments, it is sur 
 prising when we undertake building (if we ever 
 do) how much we are governed by the conven 
 tionalities set before us by the neighbors, or by the 
 architect ; and how much we are inclined to lose 
 sight of our own commonest comforts and every 
 day wants. Yet individuality may express itself as 
 strongly, and as wisely, and as frequently in the 
 distribution of parts, as in exterior or in furnish 
 ings. The friends we most wish to entertain will 
 be those who will have strongest relish for the ap 
 pointments which are most characteristic of our 
 own tastes. If I go out to dine with a plain farmer, 
 I am immensely disappointed to find his substantial 
 corn-beef and cabbage supplanted for the day by 
 stale entrees from a city caterer. We want to see 
 people who are worth seeing at their truest 
 and not at their sham best. 
 
 That interior is not interesting whose disposition 
 of rooms and offices we can annotate by merely 
 looking at the outside. There should be something 
 
HOUSE IN 
 
 to unfold to allure to charm with a pretty be 
 wilderment. We don t want to apprehend all by 
 exterior as we can in so many house fronts ; nor 
 do we want to read through a man at a glance 
 unless he is so shallow we cannot help it ; but if he 
 have values worth computing and cherishing, we 
 shall find them as in well-planned houses open 
 ing out by degrees, and keeping charm at the fullest 
 by their delightful unexpectedness. In this matter 
 of interior divisions the mistress of a house is, in 
 nine cases in ten, a better judge than the mas 
 ter ; and it would be wise to give the judgeship to 
 one who is so apt to take it. 
 
 Whatever may be said in favor of parqueterie and 
 all other pretty devices for drawing attention to the 
 joinery of floors (where no attention should be 
 drawn) winter weather makes one crave a wool cov 
 ering that shall be grateful to the foot, and make 
 grateful silence. Good taste and the buffalo moth 
 have wrought together against the old-time fashion 
 of pushing the carpeting into every angle of a room, 
 while mats and rugs (if large enough) supply all 
 real wants. And it is surprising and grateful to 
 find, how in all floor coverings, large or small 
 the big arabesques and flamboyancies which so de 
 lighted our grandmothers, are giving way to mod- 
 ester and homelier patterns. There are some pur- 
 17 
 
258 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 ists, indeed, who tell us all floral forms should be 
 discarded ; flowers are not to be trodden on, they 
 tell us. Well, I think such critics can know little 
 about the glory and freedom of a dash upon a spring 
 morning over fields that are set with blue violets 
 and sparkle with dandelions. The more gorgeous 
 flowers of the green-house, I will grant, are not 
 things to be scattered carelessly ; but it seems to me 
 that on the floor of some chamber that we keep in 
 gala dress for friends, we may well strew daisies for 
 welcome. 
 
 In rooms more subject to usage, simplest geomet 
 ric figures will be better ; still more proper, perhaps, 
 such fine confused mingling of tints as shall sug 
 gest nothing but softly dalliance with the foot, and 
 be sure, by its negative character, to do no harm to 
 the broidery or drapery, or other show of color 
 which may decorate your walls. 
 
 It is a pity, I think, that we must forego in mod 
 ern house construction a sight of those huge old 
 timbers which used to go to their support in colo 
 nial times, and to stretch athwart ceilings with a 
 show of strength that was mete for whirlwinds. 
 Our economies have sliced them all into thin floor- 
 beams that we take no pride in showing, and so we 
 bury out of sight under plaster a constructive 
 feature w r hich most of any was susceptible of artistic 
 
HOUSE INTERIORS. 259 
 
 handling. Some day, and under advances in art, I 
 am sure the architects will lead us back to an out 
 spoken and poetic assertion of the support which 
 carries a roof over our heads. 
 
 Meantime, it is better every way to dress the 
 mortar surfaces with color, rather than the pon 
 derous plaster reliefs, which carry dust, and mean 
 nothing. To say what that color should be would 
 involve a book full of discussion ; it should be 
 borne in mind, however, for the benefit of what 
 ever large or small houses we may have to deal 
 with, that strong vertical lines of color will go 
 to diminish apparent length of apartments, and hor 
 izontal lines to dimmish apparent height. Either, 
 or both, well adjusted, and dexterously used, may 
 give an air of cosiness to else bare and bald inte 
 riors. Again, explosive and stunning and brilliant 
 colors will work harm every way and everywhere ; 
 modest subjugation of tint, that will mate with 
 furnishings, will better feed the home-feeling of 
 those who prize it. Ambitious engarlanding of 
 walls in fresco, may be well done ; but, in that con 
 junction, what will you do with some quiet portrait 
 of a grandmother? It is true that with neutral, 
 modest tints upon the walls, you cannot push the 
 blaze of chandeliers to such burst of brilliancy ; 
 but the ordinary home-blaze will light up fairly the 
 
260 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 friendly faces that gather at your table, and I think 
 the glow on them will be the tenderer for a certain 
 relief against kindly shadows. 
 
 Wainscot will have its way, and should, along the 
 foot of some home walls ; high, if rooms are high, 
 and low, if rooms are low. It need not be costly, 
 ut as simple as tongned sheathing. In a hall of my 
 own, I have introduced successive strips of Blackwal- 
 nut, Chestnut, Ash, Yellow and White pine, and re 
 peated this assemblage in companies of five, all 
 around the hall ; and these are all tied to their place 
 by a little longitudinal fillet of the dentilated Vene 
 tian moulding, which is itself relieved by a broad 
 horizontal band of Georgia pine. 
 
 Such wainscoting may have its range of panels 
 each at some future day to carry such bit of 
 home decoration as may come to the hearts or 
 hands of those who dwell by it ; or along the nur 
 sery wall, such panels, with adjustable border lines, 
 may take on their pretty childish gear of nursery 
 tales, their quaint lessons in stories, their le 
 gends of the flowers which grow in near woods, 
 their picturings of the birds, which the children 
 come to know, and so a border of lessons and 
 delight shall stretch round the walls. 
 
 The old practise of covering all wood-work with 
 coats of paint, is largely giving way to an exposure 
 
HOUSE INTERIORS. 261 
 
 of natural grain, and to a more careful joinery, 
 which has no need for cover of putty and swash 
 of oil. The treatment has taken the name of hard 
 wood finish ; but hard-wood is by no means essen 
 tial. Butternut and Chestnut are not materially 
 harder than the coniferous woods ; and our white 
 pine, the Strobus of the botanists, by its very com 
 monness has lost that appreciation for in-door finish, 
 which I think is its due. No wood of any country 
 stands better against all changes of temperature ; 
 and by careful selection, it may show such whirls 
 of grain, and undulations of fibre as bring it fairly 
 among decorative woods. Its bright tint may bo 
 subdued to any degree by a little wash of asphaltum 
 not in any degree obscuring the grain, nor, in 
 deed, working so much a change of tint as an anti- 
 dating of the color, which age would be sure to 
 bring. But though I suggest this qualification of 
 its newness, I would advise no varnishes ; they 
 give a distressing shine, and forbid that free con 
 tact with the air which brings swifter to all woods 
 the mellow and delightful hues of age. 
 
 I think we never come to a full sense of what 
 charm may lie in such simple things, until we are 
 planted with them, and in sight of them, for days 
 and weeks together smitten by illness mayhap ; 
 our eyes, too weary for reading, too dazed for 
 
262 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 sleep, run over door, and wainscot, grappling with 
 whatever may feed daintily and consolingly that 
 state of fevered idleness. Then the sick mind, by 
 such door or wainscot of undisguised natural as 
 pect, is put into refreshing company with out-of- 
 door-nature is set down beside great trees, and 
 rapt into forests. It sees the actual tracery of 
 what storms and fierce suns have wrought, and 
 the wrenches and intricacies due to the besom of 
 some great tempest, recorded on the panel of the 
 door ; another easy whirl of texture shows where 
 some great limb began its growth burdened in 
 after-time with snows and sleet, and borne down so 
 as to give stress all through the outer circle of 
 tissue, and making such convolutions of woody 
 muscle and fibre, with such show of strength and 
 vigor, as wakens by sympathy one s own dormant 
 energies. 
 
 How much fuller and richer all this than the 
 dead, dull paint, with its tawny yellow of oils, and 
 its association with some frowzy painter in a paper- 
 cap, smelling strongly of varnish, and slipping cat 
 like around the premises ! 
 
 Of furniture proper, I will not say much, nor is 
 it needful. Every year, more and more of taste 
 and of artistic consideration is brought to its con 
 struction. Though the cheapness of factory-made, 
 
HOUSE INTERIORS. 263 
 
 florid work carries with it a certain depravation of 
 the popular taste, the general tendency of what may 
 be called "leading styles" is, I think, to simple 
 severities of form. And simplicity and strength, 
 if adapted, and grateful to use, will be sure to out 
 live all changes of fashion. 
 
 We all know some of us to our cost what 
 an epidemic of antiquarianism has within the last 
 ten years run over the country dreadfully conta 
 gious, and, I think, sometimes taking on, latterly, 
 symptoms of stark lunacy. Age, with good qualities 
 adorning it, is certainly very much to be venerated ; 
 but I know no better reason why we should dote 
 upon an abominably-shaped old chair, than why we 
 should dote upon an old scoundrel of a man. 
 
 In this matter of furniture, there are those who 
 insist upon entire keeping of the various objects 
 no mingling of different ages, or styles. I can un 
 derstand how, in a thoroughly appointed house, 
 whose master loves art, and knows it, with funds 
 for its cherishment, entire keeping of style may 
 properly be aimed at, and discrepancies offend. 
 But there is no good reason why a modest house 
 holder should not avail himself of any offering 
 chance to lay hold of a good thing, and a pretty 
 thing, and to install it in his rooms. One object of 
 simple good taste will not be without its lesson, 
 
264 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 even if planted amid the crookedest horrors of a 
 flash upholstery. The extreme of propriety, and of 
 artistic keeping in the furnishing of a home, is 
 rather chilling than otherwise. It breeds an uncom 
 fortable sense that our cravat will not be in keep 
 ing. What we want to warm us, is home-like 
 ease ; and I think it gives a measurable ease to find 
 something undeniably out of place. Absolute and 
 unshaken adjustment of every detail, is as fearful a 
 thing to encounter in a house, as a man who never 
 pronounces a word wrongly, and is always on the 
 lookout for a bad pronunciation of yours. 
 
 Now, with respect to pictures, which every home 
 ought to have, and may have, what shall be said ? 
 Chiefest of all, I think don t have pictures that 
 you can have no love for. Because all the world is 
 agog about a new Madonna, don t have it unless you 
 can lay your heart to it kindly. Fashion is well 
 enough in hats, but when it sets down its foot in 
 this domain of art, it is execrable. If the Huguenot 
 lovers tied strange knots under trees, and the story 
 of it brims with pretty sentiment, don t think it has 
 exhausted all pictorial form of sentiment. Let free 
 dom, and life, and earnest feeling go to your choos- 
 ings, without any query as to our friend Mrs. 
 Grundy. Of course, one should yearn to love 
 what is best, and feed the yearning by all available 
 
HOUSE INTERIORS. 265 
 
 sources of culture ; but a lying pretense of loving 
 what we do not love, is the poorest possible basis 
 of culture. 
 
 If you have lived among the mountains at any pe 
 riod of your life, or have wandered up and down 
 those dreamy heights of the Alps, some sketch of 
 mountain scenery, some little brown, battered 
 chalety though not of importance artistically, may 
 yet be a charming reminder to you of other scenes, 
 and carry such refreshment in it as will give abun 
 dant value. 
 
 If you have lived by the sea, some spirited en 
 graving like Haden s " Calais Pier " that shows 
 the flash of the water in its inks and lights, will 
 make the murmur of the waves hang again in solace 
 on your ear. Or, if, independent of all memories, 
 some little charming landscape composition, whose 
 trees you do not know, nor brook, nor moun 
 tain, and yet find so brimming in its every line with 
 nature as to seize upon your sentiment, and win 
 you to such serene enjoyment of tree, and cloud, and 
 sky and flower, as you feel upon a delicious day of 
 June buy it ; hang it on your wall ; there can be 
 no doubt that it is the picture for you. 
 
 The library, so important in many homes, as it 
 should be in all, may have its special decorative 
 treatment, into which the arrangement of the books 
 
266 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 will enter as a large factor. Just now there is a 
 method, partly Eastlakeish, partly sensible, and 
 getting to be wholly fashionable, of keeping book 
 shelves to a low range which shall gird the room 
 about, leaving above them ample space for various 
 adornment. It is a very sensible arrangement if 
 books just suffice, or are less than sufficient, for the 
 filling of such range of cases ; but if it involve pack 
 ing and doubling and crammiog, to keep the fashion 
 good, it is altogether absurd. Books fairly bound 
 make good wall decorations in themselves, and 
 should rise to just such height as may be needful to 
 give full, uncramped show of their titles, every one. 
 There should be no friends there we are ashamed of. 
 And no colors of the paper-hangers can over-pass in 
 piquancy, in rich charm, that assemblage of little 
 parallelograms in gray, in brown, in black, over- 
 crossed with fine spider lines in gold, and legends 
 that carry the names we love always. If books have 
 not accumulated so as to give this complete garni 
 ture, recesses may break into the shelves, with some 
 deft turn of a light supporting arch, under which 
 may be a bit of sculpture, or painting, or map, or 
 historic relics. And as books accumulate and these 
 gaps fill up, your accessories will seek other post of 
 vantage, all gaining, I think, somewhat by a little 
 sense of crowding, and over-fill ; the library being 
 
HOUSE INTERIORS. 267 
 
 the one room in the house, except it be the larder, 
 
 which will bear this over-fulness without causing 
 sesthetic revolt. 
 
 I do not, for my own part, like the notion of keep 
 ing books cribbed and coffined under glass. They are 
 like friends ; if they cannot be used freely, they are 
 worth little. The dust will come, and finger-marks 
 will come. Well, let them if only the finger-mark 
 has given a thought-mark to match it. I cannot say 
 but a little disarray of home-books is a good sign of 
 familiarity, and that sort of acquaintance which 
 makes them worshipful friends. Nay, I go farther 
 than this, and would not give a shuttle-cock for a 
 home-book which I might not annotate. No matter 
 what wealth is there already, our own little half 
 pence may be more relished by home eyes, than the 
 pile of gold which retains its unbroken formality. 
 
 The usableness of books if I may coin the word 
 
 enters for very much into our sesthetic estimate 
 of them as ornaments of home ; and as a relief 
 to these details about interiors, I give a glimpse or 
 two of certain libraries which had charm by reason 
 of their usableness, and which are memorable by 
 their uses. 
 
 One, a low room, rather longer than broad, with 
 one window looking out under forest trees through 
 a heavy old casement upon a bight of the Hudson ; 
 
268 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 the other window looking across a little stretch of 
 green lawn, with the view closed in by trees that 
 shelter a glen. Furniture almost unnoticeable ; a 
 few quaint chairs ; a few drawings endeared by 
 this or that attaching story of friends ; books wall 
 ing you in with motley bindings Spanish, Eng 
 lish, French, poetry, history, some fat, some slim, 
 some unbound a lack of uniformity that would 
 have disgusted an upholsterer ; a long table with its 
 equipment of writing materials, its stand for dic 
 tionaries and books of reference ; a few graceful 
 little mementoes of wide travel scattered over it; 
 and at the desk, in capacious chair which is not 
 luxurious, not artistic, save as fitness and ease give 
 artistic character sat, thirty years ago, the master 
 the amiable old gentleman Washington Irving, 
 whose lurking humor was always playing about an 
 eye that I think never looked upon any human 
 creature but with kindliness. 
 
 Another is that of a poet, who ten years since was 
 living in the vigor of a green old age, at a home 
 upon the shores of Long Island, and embedded 
 amid fields and trees ; yet with the high-road from 
 Koslyn passing near it, and sifting its dust, in sum 
 mer, over patches of the lawn. There were pictures, 
 autotypes, rich historic relics in halls and parlor ; 
 but the library in the rear no way remarkable artist- 
 
HOUSE INTERIORS. 269 
 
 ically, but full of quiet, cosy invitingness. Books of 
 utmost variety all around the walls ; an antique 
 Franklin stove built into a chimney, that carries 
 border of old Dutch Scripture tiles ; a bay-window 
 looking upon orchards and shrubbery, where the 
 lithe old gentleman had intimate and most knowing 
 ompanionship with the trees every summer s day of 
 his life ; another window looking across garden, 
 upon a stretch of bay-water making up from the 
 Sound ; chairs that are cumbrous, even awkward, 
 and table gauged for service only, where was writ 
 ten much of his translation of Homer, and most of 
 those snatches of poetry which had broken in upon 
 his somewhat fiery, but always earnest political life. 
 Still another, where it has been sometime my for 
 tune to go \ears since was in the midst of Paris. 1 
 Stout walls, unpretending entrance, a plain serving- 
 man to usher you in, no gorgeous upholstery 
 but plainest of hangings ; no alabaster vases, no 
 show of gilt work ; at most a marble or two : great 
 amplitude of green baize on table and floor alike ; 
 books that bear every mark of service ; a portrait or 
 two on the walls among them that of Alexander 
 
 1 The library here described, was in that old house of 
 Guizot, not far away from the Grand Opera House which 
 went down much to the historian s discomfiture under 
 that revision of street lines, due to the intrepid Haussmarm. 
 
270 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 Hamilton ; the freshest journals and periodicals, 
 but everywhere a most homely severity in the midst 
 of a city crowded with art ; and the master of it 
 Guizot : a man, on whose word for years to 
 gether, the destinies of France hung. 
 
 I have noted these not as instances of art-decora 
 tion, but as instances where all charms lay in adapta 
 tion to, and in strong expression of the individu 
 ality of the occupants ; and without this, no home 
 interior can have any vital charm whatever the 
 art resources. 
 
 Yet this home expression is given largely by ar 
 rangement far more than by quality of material. 
 The material may be the richest and most artistic 
 if its disposition has only a cold precision, and 
 wearying parallelism, and unbending order, it can 
 never come to its cheerfullest work of welcoming, 
 and making glad. Everybody knows what such 
 interiors are ; stiff, modish ; where displacement of 
 anything is like a dislocation : chairs in pairs and 
 fixed ; vases in pairs ; pictures paired and hung in 
 pairs, and the decorator and upholsterer at the 
 bottom of it all paired, and unhung. Best of 
 arrangement is due after all to a certain intuitive 
 sense of the picturesque, which some people have, 
 and others of equal culture have not. Perhaps that 
 is all that is to be said of it. One woman will 
 
HOUSE INTERIORS. 271 
 
 never tie a knot, but by a flirt of the fingers she 
 gives a picturesque grace to it ; she will not place 
 a chair, but it seems the place ; never assemble 
 a burst of spring flowers, but it has an airy easy 
 toss of its colors and green that is as witching as 
 a wild -wood. 
 
 The home and its apartments should not be 
 treated as a dead thing, where we make best ar 
 rangement of its fittings, and there leave it. It 
 must grow in range and in expression with our 
 necessities, and diverging, and developing tastes. 
 The best of decorators cannot put that last finish 
 which must come from home hands. It is a great 
 canvas always on the easel before us growing in 
 its power to interest every day and year never 
 getting its last touches never quite ready to be 
 taken down and parted with. No home should so 
 far out-top the tastes of its inmates that they can 
 not somewhere and somehow deck it with the rec 
 ord of their love and culture. It is an awful thing 
 to live in a house where no new nail can be driven 
 in the wall, and no tray of wild flowers, or of wood- 
 mosses be set upon a window sill. 
 
 The ways are endless, in short, by which a house 
 can be endowed with that home atmosphere which 
 shall be redolent of the tastes of its inmates. The 
 work will lie in a thousand unimportant things that 
 
272 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 cannot be named ; but which by seeking, with a few 
 main truths in your thought, you may graft to your 
 purpose. You can never tell me with just what 
 lifts and dashes and rests, your fingers will pass 
 over the organ keys ; but, knowing its compass, 
 knowing the tones knowing the result at which 
 you aim, your fingers race away in the exaltation 
 of that knowledge, and by a fairy legerdemain you 
 can never explain to me, call down sweet showers 
 of melody ! 
 
Homes and Holidays. 
 
 "I UST as dividend-days brighten all stock-monger- 
 ^ ing, holidays brighten homes. A holiday that 
 does not take a body home either for its begin 
 ning or its end, is only a poor cousin of a holiday, that 
 must console itself with second-hand finery. School 
 and college holidays are of this sort, which, though 
 they may make little bright gaps in the round of 
 tasks and studies, with consolatory memories drift 
 ing across them, have never the flavor and the unc 
 tion of a home holiday. 
 
 I foresee clearly that the tone into which I am fall 
 ing here, will make of these last pages whether 
 they lead " indoors or out " only a children s chap 
 ter. The little people I have observed always 
 listen intently when the talk of their elders runs upon 
 old boarding-school times, and the punishments (as 
 to which, they prick up their ears very sharply), and 
 the games, and the half-holidays, or the whole ones. 
 
 I was describing to such a group of small people, the 
 
 18 
 
274 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 other night, an old New England school-room of 
 the better sort, as it appeared fifty odd years ago ; 
 
 how it was in the basement of a great ungainly 
 biiilding where forty or more boys lived together, 
 with a teacher in arithmetic and geography, and a 
 teacher in Greek and Latin, and a superintendent, 
 and matron, and cook, and maids, and a " hired 
 man," who astonished the boys by the great weights 
 he could lift, and by a display of the huge biceps 
 muscle under his red-flannel sleeve which he oblig 
 ingly rolled up from time to time, in the familiari 
 ties of evening twilight. That basement school 
 room from some over-sight in construction was 
 subject to periodic dampness, which, in a succes 
 sion of years, had left great mouldy stains upon the 
 walls. Attempts had been made to cover these 
 stains with lime-washes or with oil-paints, and there 
 had been some flakings of the tissue ; in conse 
 quence of all which there was afforded quite a study 
 of color around the room ferruginous and other 
 
 which did not take rank with the ordinary cur 
 riculum. All about this wall was a range of desks, 
 only broken in upon where the door opened at an 
 angle of the school-room, and again upon its further 
 side, where a platform stood with its red table and 
 ruler, and the chair for the master in charge. 
 Within that outer range of desks, stretched other 
 
HOMES AND HOLIDAYS. 275 
 
 and broken ranges divided by alley- ways through 
 which the master could pace up and down, over look 
 ing boy labors, and brandishing in sportive or serious 
 mood as circumstances favored the red ruler. 
 
 Those desks were not of the modern machine 
 sort ; but hand-made, ponderous, their straight 
 pine legs squaring three inches across, and their 
 plank tops innocent of paint or varnish, showed 
 honest ink-stains, and unctuous patches of whale- 
 oil (no other lamp lighting sort in those days), and 
 goodly gashes and cuts illustrating the comparative 
 merits of those patrons of boy cutlery Messrs 
 Rodgers and Wostenholm. As for class-books, we 
 had Olney s Geography (Maltebrun not yet having 
 come in), and Daboll s Arithmetic (with Zerah Col- 
 burn s for the young fry), and the American Pre 
 ceptor, the best story in it being that of the Little 
 Man in Black out of Salmagundi. For Latin, 
 there was Adams Grammar, with Ainsworth s Dic 
 tionary, and the illustrious Cornelius Nepos. The 
 Latin teacher who dealt with us was crazed on the 
 subject of " quantities " and prosody, and he put us 
 through such a drill in penults and antepenults, and 
 " longs and shorts," and spondees and dactyls, as 
 put them to a buzz in my head now sub tegmine 
 Fagi whenever I wander under a beech tree in 
 summer. 
 
276 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 And it was from these surroundings, and from 
 these books, that a holiday or half-holiday at the old 
 school used to set us free. The Saturday afternoons, 
 indeed, which did always belong to us, did not 
 count for very much ; and a knotty Biblical lesson 
 set down for the evening of that day, seemed in a 
 degree to deflower that half-holiday of high Olympic 
 flavors. The coming of a travelling menagerie, how 
 ever, heralded long before by great colored show 
 bills (in a style which has since been prostituted to 
 the glorification of crude histrionics), made a gala 
 day for us. The elephants were indeed elephants 
 in those times, and the giraffes were I am positive 
 taller than any now known among the children 
 of men. With what a redundant alacrity we made 
 our best toilets on those menagerie days, and with 
 what a superior air we marched two abreast 
 through a hole in the tent, among the uninformed 
 rustics who did not know (as did we, through 
 Olney, Malte-brun, and others) about the homes and 
 habits of the strange beasts ! 
 
 Other holidays came from time to time though 
 we thought them unfortunately rare when some 
 magnate of the little village was buried with a cere 
 monial that involved the presence of the masters : 
 such holiday was always unheralded save by the 
 announcement from the platform, in these words, 
 
HOMES AND HOLIDA VS. 277 
 
 dearly remembered " There ll be no school to-day, 
 boys ! " 
 
 "Whoop-la ! " But we did not dare say it ; yet I 
 think that the way in which we shut our books, and 
 let the desk-lids smack down over copybooks, and 
 sums, and geographies, made as solid applause for 
 the master s little speech as he ever won for much 
 longer ones in after life. 
 
 These sudden bits of holiday put us upon our 
 own private trails of amusement. There were a 
 dozen I think I could name them now who in 
 less than half an hour would be " sided " for a game 
 of wicket : there were F. and F. (double F, we called 
 them) who would walk away in meditative mood, 
 with arms interlocked over their shoulders play 
 ing Damon and Pythias. There was S , one of 
 
 our geniuses (of whom we had always half a dozen) 
 who would retire to the attic where he had special 
 privileges ; and presently in paper cap and black 
 apron would be plunged in the intricacies of type 
 setting and printing ; he being owner of a real press 
 established in that privileged quarter a much 
 rarer toy then than now, and not so much given 
 over to the lusts of life and of Satan. There were 
 always one or two who had projects of " grand 
 chances " with prettily contrived lottery schemes 
 for pins or marbles, with prizes of fine " alleys " or 
 
278 BOUND TOGEl^HER. 
 
 whip tops ; and the shrewdest among these did, as I 
 am credibly informed, win and lose afterward no 
 less than four considerable estates in the countries 
 by the Golden Gate. 
 
 There were others who gave the half if not 
 more of those sudden holidays to a tramp upon 
 the mountain that flanked the little village, toil 
 ing through pasture lands where huckleberries grew 
 and where sheep ran away, startled by intruding 
 steps, pausing for a drink from springs that bub 
 bled from the ground, and reaching at length some 
 veteran chestnut, under which the mosses mingled 
 with the turf made delightful lounging place, where 
 we lay for hours, looking down amongst the feeding 
 cattle, and beyond upon the village plain, where the 
 houses stood grouped under trees, and upon shining 
 streaks of road which ran out between gray zigzag 
 fences, till they were lost in distance and the sum 
 mer haze. 
 
 And under the haze that vision of the school and 
 of the school-fellows passes out of sight and out of 
 mind, and other visions of home scenes come to fill 
 its place. 
 
 Smoky autumn days invite to the woods, and 
 
 from time to time there is great stir and excitement 
 among the young people of a certain neighborhood 
 about some forthcoming picnic or nutting frolic. 
 
HOMES AXD HOLIDAYS. 279 
 
 There is the question first of all of time ; it must 
 be on a holiday of course; Wednesday would do, 
 but Saturday is better ; and on Friday, the last thing 
 before bed, eager eyes peer into the darkness to see 
 if the stars are shining. Then there is the great 
 question of invitations : Master Harry must go of 
 course, he is a good climber and good fellow ; 
 and Frank he must go, who thinks of a picnic 
 without Frank? (there are some people who are 
 born to invitations, without knowing the reason ; 
 and their friends often as ignorant). Then there is 
 little Barbara, who shall deny little Barbara? 
 They may have to lift her over the fences, and she 
 may spill more nuts than she gathers ; but all 
 through life she shall go on doing the same by vir 
 tue of her sunny face and of her golden curls. Is it 
 Lamb s mention of it that makes Barbara seem a 
 very attractive name ? Or is it some floating mem 
 ory of another Barbara, a frail little one with ruby 
 lips for whom in boy-days we made a chair, two 
 of us knitting our arms together for that purpose, 
 and trotted off with our proud burden ? I do not 
 think we could lift Mistress Barbara now. 
 
 I could not name the half of the invited ones for 
 our picnic ; but there are some among them whose 
 coming have, I think, quickened a little coquetry of 
 dress : else how happens it that Miss Floy insists 
 
28o BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 upon that blue sash, so rarely brought into requisi 
 tion? Is Master William to be one, Miss Floy? 
 And Miss Floy turns squarely round, to study 
 the weather, and I see only the trailing ends of 
 the sash upon her robe of white, and cannot tell 
 whether she be blushing or no. Master Charles, 
 too, has planted a glowing cockade in that sailor- 
 hat of his, which, with his white drilling trowsers 
 and blue jacket, is very killing. 
 
 Finally, with panniers all made ready, and pro 
 visioned for a long cruise, with oranges and sand 
 wiches and comfits, the disorderly, rollicking pro 
 cession moves away. I see them winding up the 
 hill with shouts and laughter, now lost among 
 the trees and again trailing over the hill pastures, 
 and at last only a speck or two of white flitting in 
 and out by the edge of the wood, and so vanishing 
 into the forest shades. 
 
 Later on in the year, when snow and sunshine 
 together have put a rosier glow into children s 
 faces, we begin to catch sight of little fluttering side- 
 councils and to hear very pregnant whispers, and 
 to have intimations of secret work going forward, 
 and of great mystery which cannot and must not be 
 fathomed until a certain great holiday shall dawn. 
 No money can bribe a disclosure, though it must 
 be confessed that the little eyes look longingly, in 
 
HOMES AND HOLIDAYS. 281 
 
 these December times, upon such bribes as you 
 venture to show. 
 
 There is a very earnest looking after the contents 
 of those little portemonnaies of theirs as if there 
 might possibly be some little stamplet hidden with 
 in, which no eyes but eyes kindled by Christmas 
 could discover. And if emptiness does really ap 
 pear positive dismal emptiness, there is such a 
 show of sighs, and such a begging, hopeful, trust 
 ing look, as is sure to win, and then to pass away in 
 a little burst of merry laughter. Well, we have all 
 played at that game some time in our lives. A 
 well-filled purse on most any date in December or 
 any other month you may be pleased to name, is 
 very provocative of smiles. 
 
 The boys are in the right, who say that half the 
 fun in life is in looking forward to the fun that is 
 to come. What a jolly thing it is to think of the 
 old grandmother s blessed start of surprise when 
 she first catches sight, on Christmas morning, 
 of that what d ye call it ? which these little 
 granddaughters have been working upon with sly 
 fingers, all unbeknown to her, for a month in 
 advance ! How we chuckle for weeks at thought 
 of the glad wonderment of the old gentleman 
 as he unfolds the wrappings, one after another, 
 which cover some little photograph fresh as life, 
 
282 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 daintily set in its garniture of golden plush. No 
 matter whose. 
 
 And whether we believe in toys or not, there is a 
 storm of them gathering that will rain down on 
 Christmas morning. Of course, it stands to rea 
 son that Tom s dancing Jack will have his head 
 broken before nightfall : but what of that ? Little 
 Molly s wax doll will have its hair pulled off at 
 about the same time, but this will only make a 
 good joke against Aunt Jane, who has the same thing 
 happening to her dear old head night after night. 
 
 But books last : and those who can t see the wis 
 dom of breaking toys, may give books. These do 
 not break : though the book-makers sometimes do. 
 
 And so, with toys in stock, and books and the last 
 gifts made ready, the hum of secret merriment grows 
 louder and louder, week by week, until eventide be 
 fore the great December holida} comes flowing in 
 fast and grandly upon the little ones all, with a great 
 roar of mirth subdued it may be, the while they 
 march up the church aisle devoutly and say their 
 Christmas prayers : and subdued still farther, the 
 while they think of some fair fingers that wrought 
 on last year s garlands but not on these. 
 
 And yet I do not know but it is that old New 
 England holiday of Thanksgiving, which for one of 
 
HOMES AND HOLIDAYS. 283 
 
 New England birth has most of home associations 
 tied up with it, and most of glee-ful memories. I 
 know that they are very present ones : 
 
 We all knew when it was coming ; we all loved 
 turkey not Turkey on the map, for which we cared 
 very little, after we had once bounded it by the 
 Black Sea on the east, and by something else on the 
 other sides but, basted turkey, brown turkey, 
 stuffed turkey : Here was richness ! 
 
 We had scored off the days until we were sure 
 to a recitation-mark when it was due ; well into 
 the end of November, when winds would be blowing 
 from the Northwest, with great piles of dry leaves 
 all down the sides of the street, and in the angles 
 of pasture-walls. 
 
 I cannot for my life conceive why anyone should 
 upset the old order of things by marking it down 
 a fortnight earlier. A man in the country wants 
 his crops well in, and housed before he is ready 
 to gush out with a round, out-spoken Thanks 
 giving : but every body knows who knows any 
 thing about it that the Purple tops and the Cow- 
 horn turnips are, nine times in ten, left out till the 
 latter days of November, and husking not half over. 
 
 We all knew, as I said, when it was coming. We 
 had a stock of empty flour-barrels on Town-Hill, 
 stuffed with leaves, and a big pole set in the ground, 
 
284 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 and a battered tar-barrel, with its bung chopped out, 
 to put on top of the pole. It was all to beat the last 
 year s bonfire : and it did. 
 
 The country wagoners had made their little stop 
 pages at the back door. We knew what was to 
 come of that. And if the old cook a monstrous 
 fine woman, who weighed two hundred, if she 
 weighed a pound was brusque and would n t have 
 us "round," we knew what was to come of that too. 
 Such pies as hers demanded thoughtful considera 
 tion : not very large, and baked in scalloped tins, 
 and with such a relishy flavor to them as, on my 
 honor, I do not recognize in any pies of this genera 
 tion. I bought a lithograph of one of Rubens 
 women once, in Antwerp, because I thought I recog 
 nized in it some resemblance to that veteran cook ; 
 albeit Rubens charmer made fearful display of 
 bosom which, on my honor again, I never saw 
 in the cook ; who wore, on the contrary, a decent 
 stuff short-gown, with a white handkerchief tied 
 close round her neck. 
 
 The sermon on that Thanksgiving (and we all 
 heard it) was long unequivocally long. We boys 
 were prepared for that too. But we could n t treat 
 a Thanksgiving sermon as we would an ordinary 
 one ; we could n t doze there was too much ahead. 
 It seemed to me that the preacher made rather a 
 
HOMES AA D HOLIDAYS. 285 
 
 merit of holding us in check with that basted 
 turkey in waiting. At last though, it came to an 
 end ; and I believe Dick and I, both joined in the 
 Doxology. 
 
 All that followed is to me now a cloud of misty 
 and joyful expectation, until we took our places 
 a score or more of cousins and kinsfolk ; and the 
 turkey, and celery, and cranberries, and what-nots, 
 were all in place. 
 
 Did Dick whisper to me as we went in : " Get 
 next to me, old fellow " ? 
 
 I cannot say. I have a half recollection that he 
 did. But, bless me ! what did any body care for 
 what Dick said ? 
 
 And the old gentleman who bowed his head and 
 said grace there is no forgetting him. And the 
 little golden-haired one who sat at his left his pet, 
 his idol who lisped the thanksgiving after him, 
 shall I forget her, and the games of forfeit afterward 
 at evening that brought her curls near to me ? 
 
 These fifty years she has been gone from sight, 
 and is dust. What an awful tide of Thanksgivings 
 has drifted by since she bowed her golden locks, 
 and clasped her hands, and murmured : " Our 
 Father, we thank thee for this, and for all thy boun 
 ties ! " 
 
 Who else? Well, troops of cousins good, bad, 
 
286 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 and indifferent. No man is accountable for his 
 cousins, I think. Or if he is, the law should be 
 changed. If a man can t speak honestly of cousin- 
 hood, to the third or fourth degree, what can he 
 speak honestly of? Didn t I see little Floy (who 
 wore pea-green silk) make a saucy grimace when I 
 made a false cut at that roly-poly turkey drum-stick 
 and landed it on the table-cloth ? 
 
 There was that scamp, Tom, too, who loosened 
 his waistcoat before he went in to dinner (I saw 
 him do it). Didn t he make faces at me, till he 
 caught a warning from Aunt Polly s uplifted finger ? 
 
 How should I forget that good, kindly Aunt 
 Polly very severe in her turban, and with her 
 meeting-house face upon her ; but full of a great 
 wealth of bon-bons and dried fruits on Saturday 
 afternoons, in I know not what capacious 
 pockets ; ample, too, in her jokes, and in her laugh ; 
 making that day a great maelstrom of mirth around 
 her? 
 
 H sells hides now, and is as rich as Croesus 
 
 (whatever that may mean) ; but does he remember 
 his venturesome foray for a little bit of crisp roast- 
 pig that lay temptingly on the edge of the dish that 
 day? 
 
 There was Sarah, too turned of seventeen, edu 
 cation complete, looking down on us all terribly 
 
HOMES AND HOLIDAYS. 287 
 
 learned (I know, for a fact, that she kept Mrs. He- 
 mans in her pocket) ; terribly self-asserting, too : if 
 she had not married happily, and not had a little 
 brood about her in after years (which she did), I 
 think she would have made one of the most terrible 
 Sorosians of our time. At least, that is the way I 
 think of it now, looking back across the basted tur 
 key (which she ate without gravy) and across the 
 range of eager Thanksgiving faces. 
 
 There was Uncle Ned no forgetting him who 
 had a way of patting a boy on the head so that the 
 patting reached clear through to the boy s heart, 
 and made him sure of a blessing hovering over. 
 That was the patting I liked. That s the sort of 
 uncle to come to a Thanksgiving dinner ; the sort 
 that eat double filberts with you, and pay up next 
 day by noon, with a pocket-knife or a riding-whip. 
 Hurrah ! for Uncle Ned ! 
 
 And Aunt Eliza is there any keeping her out of 
 mind ? I never liked the name much ; but the face, 
 and the kindliness which was always ready to cover 
 as well as she might what wrong we did, and 
 to make clear what good we did, make me enroll 
 her now where she belongs evermore among 
 the saints. So quiet, so gentle, so winning, making 
 conquest of all of us, because she never sought it ; 
 full of dignity, yet never asserting it ; queening it 
 
288 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 over all by downright kindliness of heart. What a 
 wife she would have made! Heigho ! How we 
 loved her, and made our boyish love of her a 
 Thanksgiving ! 
 
 Were there oranges? I think there were, with 
 green spots on the peel lately arrived from Flor 
 ida. Tom boasted that he ate four. I dare say he 
 told the truth he looked peaked, and was a great 
 deal the worse for the dinner, next day, I remem 
 ber. 
 
 Was there punch or any strong liquors ? No 
 so far as my recollection now goes there was 
 none. 
 
 Champagne ? 
 
 I have a faint remembrance of a loud pop or two, 
 which set some cousinly curls over opposite me into 
 a nervous shake. Yet I would not like to speak 
 positively. Good bottled cider or pop-beer may 
 possibly account for all the special phenomena I call 
 to mind. 
 
 Old Madeira I have less doubt about ; and it is 
 my impression there were some stereotype gentle 
 men present who talked about "London Particu 
 lar," and the "White Seal," and "Sercial," just as 
 such things are talked about by stereotype people 
 nowadays. 
 
 Was there coffee, and were there olives? Not to 
 
HOMES AND HOLIDAYS. 289 
 
 the best of my recollection ; or, if present, I lose 
 them in the glamour of mince-pies and Marlboro 
 puddings. 
 
 How we .ever sidled away from that board when 
 that feast was done, I have no clear conception. I am 
 firm in the belief that thanksgiving was said at the 
 end, as at the beginning. I have a faint recollection 
 of a gray head passing out at the door, and of a 
 fleece of golden curls beside him, against which I 
 jostle not unkindly. 
 
 Dark? 
 
 Yes, I think the sun had gone down about the 
 time when the mince-pies faded. 
 
 Did Dick and Tom and the rest of us come saun 
 tering in afterward when the rooms were empty, 
 foraging for any little tid-bits of the feast that might 
 be left the tables showing only wreck under the 
 dim light of a solitary candle the long range of 
 white cloth stretching athwart the hall like a great 
 skeleton of the feast lying there in state ? 
 
 How we found our way with the weight of that 
 stupendous dinner by us to the heights of Town- 
 Hill, it is hard to tell. But we did, and when our 
 barrel-pile was fairly ablaze, we danced like young 
 satyrs round the flame shouting at our very loud 
 est when the fire caught the tar-barrel at the top, 
 and the yellow pile of blaze threw its lurid glare 
 19 
 
290 BOUND TOGETHER. 
 
 over hill, and houses, and town, and the far-away bay, 
 and wooded hills. 
 
 Afterward I have recollection of an hour or more 
 in a snug square parlor, which is given over to us 
 youngsters and our games : dimly lighted, as was 
 most fitting ; but a fire upon the hearth flung out 
 a red glory on the floor and on the walls. 
 
 Was it a high old time, or did we only pretend 
 that it was ? 
 
 Didn t I know little Floy, in that pea-green silk, 
 with my hands clasped round her waist, and my 
 eyes blinded ever so fast ? Didn t I give Dick an 
 awful pinch in the leg, when I lay perdu under the 
 sofa in another one of those tremendous games ? 
 
 Didn t the door that led into the hall show a little 
 open gap, from time to time old faces peering in, 
 looking very kindly in the red fire-light flaring on 
 them ? And didn t those we loved best look often- 
 est ? Don t they always ? 
 
 Well, well we were fagged at last : little Floy 
 in a snooze before we knew it ; Dick, pretending not 
 to be sleepy, but gaping in a prodigious way. But 
 the romps and the fatigue made sleep very grateful 
 when it came at last : yet the sleep was very broken : 
 the turkey and the nuts had their rights, and bred 
 stupendous Thanksgiving dreams. What gorgeous 
 dreams they were to be sure ! 
 
HOMES AND HOLIDAYS. 291 
 
 I seem to dream them again to-day. 
 
 Once again, I see the old, revered gray head, 
 bowing in utter thankfulness, with the hands clasped. 
 
 Once again, over the awful tide of intervening 
 years so full, and yet so short I seem to see the 
 shimmer of her golden hair an aureole of light 
 blazing on the borders of boyhood : " For this, and 
 all thy bounties, our Father, we thank thee." 
 
 THE END. 
 
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