Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 by Various (page 3)

And said, “O mists, make room for me!”

It hailed the ships, and cried, “Sail on, Ye mariners! the night is gone!”

And hurried landward far away,
Crying, “Awake! it is the day!”

It said unto the forest, “Shout!
Hang all your leafy banners out!”

It touched the wood-bird’s folded wing, And said, “O bird, awake and sing!”

And o’er the farms, “O chanticleer,
Your clarion blow! the day is near!”

It whispered to the fields of corn,
“Bow down, and hail the coming morn!”

It shouted through the belfry-tower, “Awake, O bell! proclaim the hour!”

It crossed the churchyard with a sigh, And said, “Not yet! in quiet lie!”

TEA.

Gossiping Mr. Pepys little imagined, when he wrote in his Diary, September 25th, 1660, “I did send for a cup of tee, (a China drink,) of which I never had drank before,” that he had mentioned a beverage destined to exert a world-wide influence on civilization, and in due time gladden every heart in his country, from that of the Sovereign Lady Victoria, down to humble Mrs. Miff with her “mortified bonnet.” Reader, if you wish some little information on the subjects of tea-growing, gathering, curing, and shipping, you must come with us to China, in spite of the war. We know how to elude the blockade, how to beard Viceroy Yeh; and in one of the great _hongs_ on the Canton River we will give you a short lecture on the virtues of Souchong and flowery Pekoe.

The native name of the article is _Cha_, although it has borne two or three names among the Chinese,–in the fourth century being called _Ming_. To botanists it is known as _Thea_, having many affinities with the Camellia. It has long been a doubtful point whether or not two species exist, producing the green and black teas. True, there are the green-tea country and the black-tea region, hundreds of miles apart; but the latest investigation goes to prove that there is really but one plant. Mr. Robert Fortune, whose recent and interesting work, “The Tea Countries of China and India,” is familiar to many of our readers, has not only had peculiar facilities for gaining a knowledge of tea as grown in the Central Flowery Kingdom, but is, moreover, one of the most scientific of English botanists. He maintains the “unity theory” of the plant, and we are content to agree with him,–the differences in the leaves being owing to climate, situation, soil, and other accidental influences. The shrub is generally from three to six feet high, having numerous branches and a very dense foliage. Its wood is hard and tough, giving off a disagreeable smell when cut. The leaves are smooth, shining, of a dark green color, and with notched edges; those of the _Thea Bohea_, the black tea, being curled and oblong,–while those of the _Thea viridis_, the green tea, are broader in proportion to their length, but not so thick, and curled at the apex. The plant flowers early in the spring, remaining in bloom about a month; and its seeds ripen in December and January. According to Chinese authority, tea is grown in nearly every province of the empire; but the greater part of it is produced in four or five provinces, affording all that is shipped from Canton. Very large quantities, however, are consumed by the countries adjoining the western frontier, and Russia draws an immense supply by caravans, all of which is the product of the northwest provinces. The Bohea Hills, in Lat. 27 deg. 47′ North, and Long. 119 deg. East, distant about nine hundred miles from Canton, produce the finest kinds of black tea; while the green teas are chiefly raised in another province, several hundred miles farther north. The soil of many plantations examined by Mr. Fortune is very thin and poor, in some places little more than sand, such soil as would grow pines and scrub oaks. The shrubs are generally planted on the slopes of hills, the plants in many places not interfering with the cultivation of wheat and other grain. They are always raised from seeds, which in the first place are sown very thickly together, as many of them never shoot; and when the young plants have attained the proper size they are transplanted into the beds prepared for them, although in some cases the seeds are sown in the proper situations without removal. Care is taken that the plants be not overshadowed by large trees, and many superstitious notions prevail as to the noxious influence of certain vegetables in the vicinity. Although the shrub is very hardy, not being injured even by snow, yet the weather has great influence on the quality of the leaves, and many directions are given by Chinese authors with regard to the proper care to be observed in the culture of the plant. Leaves are first gathered from it when it is three years old, but it does not attain its greatest size for six or seven,–thriving, according to care and situation, from ten to twenty years.

The famous Bohea Hills are said to derive their name from two brothers, Woo and E, the sons of a prince in ancient times, who refused to succeed him, and came to reside among these mountains, where to this day the people burn incense to their memory. Another legend states that the people of this district were first taught the use of tea as a beverage by a venerable man who suddenly appeared among them, holding a sprig in his hand, from which he proposed that they should make a decoction and drink it. On their doing so and approving the drink, he instantly vanished.

There is very great choice in the teas; connoisseurs being much more particular in their taste than even the most fastidious wine-drinkers. Purchasers inquire the position of the gardens from which the samples were taken; teas from the summit of a hill, from the middle, and from the base bearing different values. Some of the individual shrubs are greatly prized; one being called the “egg-plant,” growing in a deep gully between two hills, and nourished by water which trickles from the precipice. Another is appropriated exclusively to the imperial use, and an officer is appointed every year to superintend the gathering and curing. The produce of such plants is never sent to Canton, being reserved entirely for the emperor and the grandees of the court, and commanding enormous prices; the most valuable being said to be worth one hundred and fifty dollars a pound, and the cheapest not less than twenty-five dollars. There is said to be a very fine kind called “monkey tea,” from the fact that it grows upon heights inaccessible to man, and that monkeys are therefore trained to pick it. For the truth of this story I cannot vouch, and of course ask no one to believe it.

The picking of the leaf is frequently performed by a different class of laborers from those who cultivate it; but the customs vary in different places. There are four pickings in the course of the year,–the last one, however, being considered a mere gleaning. The first is made as early as the 15th of April, and sometimes sooner, when the delicate buds appear and the foliage is just opening, being covered with a whitish down. From this picking the finest kinds of tea are made, although the quantify is small. The next gathering is technically called “second spring,” and takes place in the early part of June, when the branches are well covered, producing the greatest quantity of leaves. The third gathering, or “third spring,” follows in about one month, when the branches are again searched, the most common kinds of tea being the result. The fourth gleaning is styled the “autumn dew”; but this is not universally observed, as the leaves are now old and of very inferior quality. These poorest sorts are sometimes clipped off with shears; but the general mode of gathering is by hand, the leaves being laid lightly on bamboo trays.

The curing of the leaf is of the utmost importance,–some kinds of tea depending almost entirely for their value on the mode of preparation. When the leaves are brought to the curing-houses, they are thinly spread upon bamboo trays, and placed in the wind to dry until they become somewhat soft; then, while lying on the trays, they are gently rubbed and rolled many times. From the labor attending this process the tea is called _kung foocha_, or “worked tea”; hence the English name of Congou. When the leaves have been sufficiently worked they are ready for the firing, an operation requiring the exercise of the greatest care. The iron pan used in the process is made red hot, and the workman sprinkles a handful of leaves upon it and waits until each leaf pops with a slight noise, when he at once sweeps all out of the pan, lest they should be burned, and then fires another handful. The leaves are then put into dry baskets over a pan of coals. Care is taken, by laying ashes over the fire, that no smoke shall ascend among the leaves, which are slowly stirred with the hand until perfectly dry. The tea is then poured into chests, and, when transported, placed in boxes enclosing leaden canisters, and papered to keep out the dampness. In curing the finest kinds of tea, such as Powchong, Pekoe, etc., not more than ten to twenty leaves are fired in the pan at one time, and only a few pounds rolled at once in the trays. As soon as cured, these fine teas are packed in papers, two or three pounds in each, and stamped with the name of the plantation and the date of curing.

Beside the hongs in Canton, which I shall presently speak of, there are large buildings, styled “pack-houses,” containing all the apparatus for curing. Into these establishments foreigners are not readily admitted. Two or three rows of furnaces are built in a large, airy apartment, having a number of hemispherical iron pans inserted into the brick-work, two pans being heated by one fire. Into these pans the rolled leaves are thrown and stirred with the arm until too hot for the flesh to bear, when they are swept out and laid on a table covered with matting, where they are again rolled. The firing and rolling are sometimes repeated three or four times, according to the state of the leaves. The rolling is attended with some pain, as an acrid juice exudes from the leaves, which acts upon the hands; and the whole operation of tea-curing and packing is somewhat unpleasant, from the fine dust arising, and entering the nose and mouth,–to prevent which, the workmen often cover the lower part of the face with a cloth. The leaves are frequently tested, during the process of curing, by pouring boiling water upon them; and their strength and quality are judged of by the number of infusions that can be made from the same leaves, as many as fifteen drawings being obtained from the richest kinds.

Many persons have imagined that the peculiar effects of green tea upon the nerves after drinking it, as well as its color, are owing to its having been fired in copper pans, which is not the case, as no copper instruments are used in its manufacture; but these effects are probably due to the partial curing of the leaf, and its consequent retention of many of the peculiar properties of the growing plant. The bloom upon the cheaper kinds of green tea is produced by gypsum or Prussian blue; and perhaps the effects alluded to are in some degree caused by these minerals. Such teas are prepared entirely for exportation, the Chinese themselves never drinking them.

Each foreign house employs an inspector or taster, whose business it is to examine samples of all the teas submitted to the firm for purchase. When a taster has a lot of teas to examine, several samples, selected from various chests, being placed before him, he first of all takes up a large handful and smells it repeatedly, then chews some of it, and records his opinion in a huge folio, wherein are chronicled the merits of every lot examined by him; and lastly, he puts small portions of the various kinds into a great many little cups into which boiling water is poured, and when the tea is drawn he takes a sip of the infusion. With all due deference to his art, sometimes, when the taster does not know exactly what to say of a sample, the book will bear witness that the parcel has “a decided tea flavor.” But the accuracy of good tasters is really wonderful; they will classify and fix the true value of a chop of teas beyond dispute, and the East India Company’s tasters were occasionally of eminent service in detecting frauds. A first-rate tea-taster may make a fortune in a few years; but, from constantly inhaling minute particles of the herb, the health is frequently ruined.

The teas which come to Canton are brought chiefly by water. Only occasional land stages are used in transportation, the principal one being the pass which crosses the Ineiling Mountain, in the north of the Canton or Quang-tong Province, cut through at the beginning of the eighth century. As every article of merchandise which goes through the pass, either from the south or the north, is carried across on the backs of men, several hundred thousand porters are here employed. Many tortuous paths are cut over the mountain, and through them are continually passing these poor creatures, condemned by poverty to terrible fatigue, the work being so laborious that the generality of them live but a short time. At certain intervals are little bamboo sheds, where travellers rest on their journey, smoking a pipe and drinking tea for refreshment; while at the summit of the pass is an immense portal, or kind of triumphal arch, erected on the boundary line of the two Provinces of Quang-tong and Kiang-si. The teas, securely packed in chests wrapped in matting, are placed in the boats which ply upon the rivers flowing from the tea countries into the Poyang Lake, and after successive changes are at length brought to the foot of the Ineiling Mountain, carried over it on the backs of men, and reshipped on the south side of the pass. The boats in which the tea is brought to Canton convey from five hundred to eight hundred chests each, and are called chopboats by foreigners, from each lot of teas being called a _chop_. They serve admirably for inland navigation, drawing but little water, and are so rounded as to make it almost impossible to overset one. A ledge is built upon each side of the boat for the trackers, who, when the wind fails, collect in the bow, and, sticking long bamboo poles into the bed of the stream, walk along the ledge to the stern, thus propelling the barge, and repeating the operation as often as they have traversed the length of the planks. A number of excise posts and custom-houses are established along the route from the tea regions to Canton, for the purpose of levying duties on the teas, none being allowed to be sent to that city by coastwise voyages.

And now of the various kinds of black and green teas.–But, Reader, I hear you cry, “Halt! halt! pray do not bore us with a dry catalogue of the ‘Padre Souchongs’ and ‘Twankays’; we know them already.”–Then speak for me, immortal Pindar Cockloft! crusty bachelor that thou art! who hast told that tea and scandal are inseparable, and hast so wittily described a gathering around the urn as

“A convention of tattling, a tea-party hight, Which, like meeting of witches, is brewed up at night,
Where each matron arrives fraught with tales of surprise,
With knowing suspicion and doubtful surmise; Like the broomstick-whirled hags that appear in Macbeth,
Each bearing some relic of venom or death, To stir up the toil and to double the trouble, That fire may burn, and that cauldron may bubble.
The wives of our cits of inferior degree Will soak up repute in a little Bohea;
The potion is vulgar, and vulgar the slang With which on their neighbors’ defects they harangue.
But the scandal improves,–a refinement in wrong!–
As our matrons are richer and rise to Souchong. With Hyson, a beverage that’s still more refined, Our ladies of fashion enliven their mind, And by nods, innuendoes, and hints, and what not,
Reputations and tea send together to pot; While madam in cambrics and laces arrayed, With her plate and her liveries in splendid parade,
Will drink in Imperial a friend at a sup, Or in Gunpowder blow them by dozens all up.”

There, now, Reader, you have the best classification extant of teas; and I will not detain you with any long descriptions of other kinds, seldom heard of by Americans, such as the “Sparrow’s Tongue,” the “Black Dragon,” the “Dragon’s Whiskers,” the “Dragon’s Pellet,” the “Flowery Fragrance,” and the “Careful Firing.”

Perhaps a notice of the great hongs will prove more interesting to you. They stretch for miles along the Canton River, and in the busy season are crammed with hundreds of thousands of chests, filled with the fragrant herb. The hongs front upon the river, in order that cargo-boats may approach them; but they have also another entrance at the end which opens from the suburbs. Imagine a building twelve hundred feet long by twenty to forty broad, and in some portions fifty feet high, built of brick, of one story, here and there open to the sky, with the floor as level as that of a ropewalk, and of such extent, that, to a person standing at one end, forms at the other end appear dwarfed, and men seem engaged in noiseless occupations: you have here the picture of a Chinese hong. In these warehouses the tea is assorted, repacked, and then put on board the chop-boats and sent down the river to the ships at their anchorage off Whampoa. Here are enormous scales for weighing the chests; here, where the light falls in from the roof, are tables placed for superintendents, who carefully watch the workmen; farther off, are foreigners inspecting a newly arrived chop; at the extreme end is the little apartment where the tea merchant receives people upon business; and through the high door beyond, we see the crowded river, and chopboats waiting for cargoes. At the river end of the building a second story is added, often fitted up with immense suites of beautiful rooms, elegantly furnished, and abounding with rare and costly articles of _virtu_. Here is a door leading higher still, out upon the roof, which is flat. Below us is the river with its myriads of boats, visible as far as the eye can reach, no less than eighty-four thousand belonging to Canton alone. On our right is the public square, where of late stood the foreign factories, now destroyed by the mob, while the flags of France, England, and America have disappeared. On our left is another vista of river life, the pagoda near Whampoa, and the forts of Dutch and French Folly. In our rear is the immense city of Canton, and opposite to us, across the river, lies the verdant island of Honan, with its villages, its canals, and its great Buddhist temple. On descending, we find that a servant has placed for us on a superb table in one of the pretty rooms cups of delicious tea,–it being the custom in all the hongs to offer the beverage to strangers at all times. A cup of the aromatic Oulong will serve to steady our nerves for the completion of the tea-lecture.

The visitor will soon form some idea of the magnitude of the tea trade, by going from one hong to another, and finding all of them filled with chests, while armies of coolies are bringing in chops, sorting cargoes, loading chop-boats, making leaden canisters, packing, and labelling the packages. A heavy gate, with brilliant, figures painted on it, and adorned with enormous lanterns, swings yawning open, and admits the stranger. Just inside of the gate, at a little table, sits a man who keeps count of the coolies, as they enter with chests of tea, and sees that they do not carry any out except for good reasons. Looking down the length of the hong, a busy scene presents itself. It is crammed with big square chests just from the tea regions, and piled up to the roof. Presently a string of coolies, stretching out like a flock of wild geese, come past, and set down chests enough on the floor to cover half an acre. These half-naked fellows are nimble workmen, and will unload a boat full of tea in an incredibly short time. Very valuable as an animal is the cooly: he is a Jack-at-all-trades; works at the scull of a boat, or in a tea pack-house; bears a mandarin’s sedan-chair, or sweeps out a chamber. His ideas are as limited as his means, and nearly as much so as his clothing; but he works all day without grumbling at his lot, is cheerful, and seems to enjoy life, although he lives on a few cents a day. He sleeps soundly at night, though his accommodations are such as an American beggar would scorn. Any person visiting a hong will see on the sides of the building, at a considerable elevation from the ground, a number of shelves with divisions arranged like berths in a steamboat, intended for beds, but consisting of rough boards with square wooden blocks for pillows. Each one is enclosed with a coarse blue mosquito-netting; and mounting to the apartments by a ladder, here the coolies sleep the year round.

The teas are not generally brought to the hongs until sold. Before sale they are stored in warehouses, chiefly on Honan Island, opposite the city; but after disposal the large-sized chests are carried into the hongs, where they are sorted and repacked into smaller boxes, according to the wants of the purchaser. You will see different parts of the floor covered with packages large and small, into which the coolies are shaking teas. Each box contains a leaden canister, into some of which the teas are loosely poured, while in others the herb is wrapped in papers of half a pound weight, each stamped with Chinese characters. The canister is then closed by a lid, and afterward securely fastened down by the top of the chest. These canisters are made near at hand. Look around, and a few rods off you will see three or four expert hands turning the large sheets of the prepared metal into shape. Knowing the required size, the operators have a cubic block placed on the metal sheet, which, bending like paper, is folded over the block, assuming its shape, and the edges of the canister are instantly soldered by a second hand; a third, with the aid of another wooden form, prepares the lids; and thus a knot of half a dozen workmen, keeping steadily at their tasks, will make a large number of canisters in a day. Besides the laborers who cultivate and those who cure the tea, and the porters and boatmen who transport it, thousands are employed in different occupations connected with the trade. Carpenters make the chests, plumbers the leaden canisters, while painters adorn the boxes containing the finer kinds of teas with brilliant flowers or grotesque scenes.

About the season of the arrival of the tea in Canton, the Chinese dealers come to the foreign factories with “musters,” or samples in nice little tin canisters, with the names of the owners written on paper pasted down the sides, and you can select such as you like. The principal business is of course held with the tea merchants themselves, not those who come from the North, but the Cantonese, while the minor business of all the hongs is in a great measure conducted through the “pursers,” or foremen, who act between the Chinese and the foreigners, bringing in the accounts to the shipping-houses, and receiving the orders for cargoes. Give one of these men an order for tea and go to the hong shortly afterward, you will find numbers of workmen employed for you;–some bringing in the small boxes; others filling them, or, when filled, fastened, papered, and covered with matting, securing them firmly with ratans; others, finally, labelling them on the outer covering,–the labels being printed with the name of the vessel, of the tea merchant, of the tea, and of the Canton forwarding-house, also with the initials of the purchaser, and the number of the lot. These labels are printed rapidly, being cut by one set of hands to the proper size for the use of the others who stamp them. All the types are carved in blocks of wood, and the whole farmed into a frame; then, in a little space just large enough for work,–for the printer has no immense establishment with signs on the outside of “Book and Job Printing,”–a Chinaman will sit down, snatch up a paper in one hand, and stamp it instantly with the wooden block letters, moistened with the coloring mixture used in printing.

When the teas are fairly ready to be conveyed to the ships, heavy cargo-boats are moored at the foot of the hong, their crews prepare for the chop, and the coolies within the hong stand ready to carry the chests. Every box is properly weighed, papered, and bound with split ratan, the bill of the purchase has gone duly authenticated to the foreign factory, and the teas bid farewell to their native soil. The word is given, and each cooly, placing his two chests in the ropes swinging from his shoulder-bar, lifts them from the ground, and with a brisk walk conveys them on board the chop-boat, where they are carefully stowed away. As they are carried out of the hong, a fellow stands ready, and, as if about to stab the packages, thrusts at each one two sharp sticks with red ends, leaving them jammed between the ratan and the tea-box. One of these sticks is taken out when the chest leaves the chop-boat, and the other when it reaches the deck of the vessel; and as soon as one hundred chests are passed into the ship, the sticks are counted and thus serve as tallies. Should the two bundles not correspond, a chest is missing somewhere, and woe betide the blunderer!

In the busy season the chop-boats are seen pushing down the river with every favorable tide. As for pushing against the tide, no Chinaman ever thinks of such a thing, unless absolutely compelled, the value of time being quite unknown in China. Coolly anchoring as soon as the tide is adverse, the crew fall to playing cards until it is time to get under way again. Nearly every chop-boat contains a whole family, father, mother, and children,–sometimes an old grandparent, also, being included in the domestic circle,–and all assist in working. At the stern of the boat the wife has a little cooking-apparatus, and prepares the cheap rice for the squad of eager gormandizers, who bolt it in huge quantities without fear of indigestion. The family sit down to their repast on the deck; the men keep an eye to windward and a hand on the tiller; the mother knots the cord that goes around the baby’s waist into an iron ring, and, feeling secure against the bantling’s falling overboard, chats sociably, occasionally enforcing a mild reproof to a vagabond son by a tap on the head with her chopstick. There is but one dish, rice, of a very ordinary sort and of a pink color, but all seem to thrive upon it. The meal over, the men smoke their pipes, and the wife washes her cooking utensils with water drawn from the muddy river, and then, strapping her infant to her back, overhauls the scanty wardrobe and mends the ragged garments.

It is interesting to mark how accurately the chop-boat is brought alongside of the ship for which it is destined. No matter how strong the wind blows or the tide runs, the sails are trimmed as occasion requires, and the big scull does its offices without ever the least mistake. The boat running under the quarter scrapes along the edge, the ropes are thrown, caught, and belayed, and the crew prepare for passing the cargo into the vessel’s hold. The stevedores who load the ships are very active men. They have also good heads, and, measuring the length, breadth, and height of the hold, calculate pretty accurately how many chests the ship will carry, and the number of small boxes to be squeezed into narrow places. When the hold is full the hatch is fastened down and caulked, as exposure to the salt air injures the teas. The finest kinds are so delicate, indeed, that they cannot be exported by sea; for, however tightly sealed, they would deteriorate during the voyage. The very superior flavor noticed by travellers in the tea used at St. Petersburg is doubtless to be attributed in an important measure to its overland transportation, and its consequent escape from dampness; the large quantities consumed in Russia being, as before observed, all carried from the northwest of China to Kiakhta, whence it is distributed over the empire.

One of the most remarkable and interesting facts in the history of commerce is the comparatively recent origin of the tea trade. The leaves of the tea-plant were extensively used by the people of China and Japan centuries before it was known to Western nations. This is the more singular from the fact that the silks of China found their way to the West at a very early period,–as early, at least, as the first century of the Christian era,–while the use of tea in Europe dates back only about two hundred years. The earliest notices of its use in the countries where it is indigenous are found in the writings of the Moorish historians and travellers, about the end of the eighth century, at which time the Mahometans were freely allowed to visit China, and travel through the empire as they pleased. Soliman, an Arabian merchant, who visited China about A.D. 850, describes it under the name of _Sah_, as being the favorite beverage of the people; and Ibn Batuta, A.D. 1323, speaks of it as used for correcting the bad properties of water, and as a medicine. Mandelslo, a German, who travelled in India, 1638-40, in describing the customs of the European merchants at Surat, speaks of tea as of something unfamiliar. The reasons he gives for drinking both it and coffee are charmingly incongruous, as is generally the case when men undertake to find some solemn excuse for doing what they like. “At our ordinary meetings every day we took only _The_, which is commonly used all over the Indies, not only among those of the Country, but among the _Dutch_ and _English_, who take it as a Drug that cleanses the stomach and digests the superfluous humours, by a temperate heat particular thereto. The Persians, instead of _The_, drink their _Kahwa_, which cools and abates the natural heat which _The_ preserves.”[A] Of its first introduction into Europe little is known. In 1517, King Emanuel of Portugal sent a fleet of eight ships to China, and an embassy to Peking; but it was not until after the formation of the Dutch East India Company, in 1602, that the use of tea became known on the Continent, and even then, although the Hollanders paid much attention to it, it made its way slowly for many years. The first notice of it in England is found in Pepys’s “Diary,” under date of September 25th, 1660,–as before quoted. In 1664, the East India Company presented to the king, among other “raretyes,” 2 lb. 2 oz. of “thea”; and in 1667, they desire their agent at Bantam to send “100 lb. waight of the best tey that he can gett.”[B] From this insignificant beginning the importation has grown from year to year, until ninety million pounds went to Great Britain in 1856, forty million coming to the United States the same year.

[Footnote A: Mandelslo’s _Voyages and Travels into the East Indies_, p. 18, ed. 1662.]

[Footnote B: Grant’s _History of the East India Company_. London, 1813, p. 76.]

The “Edinburgh Review,” in an article on this subject, says: “The progress of this famous plant has been somewhat like the progress of _Truth_;–suspected at first, though very palatable to those who had the courage to taste it; resisted as it encroached; abused as its popularity seemed to spread; and establishing its triumph at last in cheering the whole land, from the palace to the cottage, only by the slow and resistless efforts of time and its own virtues.”

Many substitutes for tea are in vogue among the Chinese, but in general only the very lowest of the population are debarred the use of the genuine article. Being the universal drink, it is found at all times in every house. Few are so poor that a simmering tea-pot does not stand ever filled for the visitor. It is invariably offered to strangers; and any omission to do so is considered, and is usually intended, as a slight. It appears to be preferred by the people to any other beverage, even in the hottest weather; and while Americans in the heats of July would gladly resort to ice-water or lemonade, the Chinaman will quench his thirst with large draughts of boiling tea.

The Muse of China has not disdained to warble harmonious numbers in praise of her favorite beverage. There is a celebrated ballad on tea-picking, in thirty stanzas, sung by a young woman who goes from home early in the day to work, and lightens her labors with song. I give a few of the verses, distinctly informing the reader, at the same time, that for the real sparkle and beauty of the poem he must consult the Chinese original.

“By earliest dawn I at my toilet only half-dress my hair And seizing my basket, pass the door, while yet the mist is thick. The little maids and graver dames, hand in hand winding along, Ask me, ‘Which steep of Semglo do you climb to-day?’

“In social couples, each to aid her fellow, we seize the tea twigs, And in low words urge one another, ‘Don’t delay!’ Lest on the topmost bough the bud has now grown old, And lest with the morrow come the drizzling silky rain.

“My curls and hair are all awry, my face is quite begrimed; In whose house lives the girl so ugly as your slave? ‘Tis only because that every day the tea I’m forced to pick; The soaking rains and driving winds have spoiled my former charms.

“Each picking is with toilsome labor, but yet I shun it not; My maiden curls are all askew, my pearly fingers all benumbed; But I only wish our tea to be of a superfine kind,– To have it equal his ‘Sparrow’s Tongue’ and their ‘Dragon’s Pellet.’

“For a whole month where can I catch a single leisure day? For at the earliest dawn I go to pick, and not till dusk return; Till the deep midnight I’m still before the firing-pan. Will not labor like this my pearly complexion deface?

“But if my face is lank, my mind is firmly fixed So to fire my golden buds they shall excel all beside. But how know I who’ll put them into the gemmy cup? Who at leisure will with her taper fingers give them to the maid to draw?”

Will any one say, after this, that there is no poetry connected with tea?

The theme, in truth, is replete with poetical associations, and of a kind that we look in vain for in connection with any other potable. Unlike the Anacreontic in praise of the grape,–song suggestive chiefly of bacchanal revels and loose jollity,–the verse which extols “the cup that cheers, but not inebriates,” brings to mind home comforts and a happy household. And not only have some of the “canonized bards” of England celebrated its honors,–like Pope, in the “Rape of the Lock,” when describing Hampton Court,–

“There, thou great Anna, whom three realms obey, Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes _tea_,”–

but, if it be true that

“Many are poets who have never penned Their inspiration,”

how many an unknown bard have we among us, who, at the close of a hard day’s work, tramps cheerily home, whistling,–

“Molly, put the kettle on,
We’ll all have tea,”–

and thinking of a well-spread board, a simmering urn, a sweet wife, and rosy-cheeked children, waiting his coming. Grave father of a family! Your heart has grown cold and hard, if you have ceased to enjoy such scenes. Young husband! cannot you remember the first time you hoped with good reason, when, as you took leave after an afternoon call, a pair of witching eyes looked into yours, and a sweet voice sounded sweeter, as it timidly asked, “Won’t you stay–_and take a cup of tea_?”

THE OLD BURYING-GROUND.

Our vales are sweet with fern and rose, Our hills are maple-crowned;
But not from them our fathers chose The village burying-ground.

The dreariest spot in all the land
To Death they set apart;
With scanty grace from Nature’s hand, And none from that of Art.

A winding wall of mossy stone,
Frost-flung and broken, lines
A lonesome acre thinly grown
With grass and wandering vines.

Without the wall a birch-tree shows
Its drooped and tasselled head;
Within, a stag-horned sumach grows, Fern-leafed with spikes of red.

There, sheep that graze the neighboring plain Like white ghosts come and go,
The farm-horse drags his fetlock chain, The cow-bell tinkles slow.

Low moans the river from its bed,
The distant pines reply;
Like mourners shrinking from the dead, They stand apart and sigh.

Unshaded smites the summer sun,
Unchecked the winter blast;
The school-girl learns the place to shun, With glances backward cast.

For thus our fathers testified–
That he might read who ran–
The emptiness of human pride,
The nothingness of man.

They dared not plant the grave with flowers, Nor dress the funeral sod,
Where, with a love as deep as ours, They left their dead with God.

The hard and thorny path they kept,
From beauty turned aside;

Nor missed they over those who slept The grace to life denied.

Yet still the wilding flowers would blow, The golden leaves would fall,
The seasons come, the seasons go.
And God be good to all.

Above the graves the blackberry hung In bloom and green its wreath,
And harebells swung as if they rung The chimes of peace beneath.

The beauty Nature loves to share,
The gifts she hath for all,
The common light, the common air,
O’ercrept the graveyard’s wall.

It knew the glow of eventide,
The sunrise and the noon,
And glorified and sanctified
It slept beneath the moon.

With flowers or snow-flakes for its sod, Around the seasons ran,
And evermore the love of God
Rebuked the fear of man.

We dwell with fears on either hand,
Within a daily strife,
And spectral problems waiting stand Before the gates of life.

The doubts we vainly seek to solve,
The truths we know, are one;
The known and nameless stars revolve Around the Central Sun.

And if we reap as we have sown,
And take the dole we deal,
The law of pain is love alone,
The wounding is to heal.

Unharmed from change to change we glide, We fall as in our dreams;
The far-off terror, at our side,
A smiling angel seems.

Secure on God’s all-tender heart
Alike rest great and small;
Why fear to lose our little part,
When He is pledged for all?

O fearful heart and troubled brain!
Take hope and strength from this,– That Nature never hints in vain,
Nor prophesies amiss.

Her wild birds sing the same sweet stave, Her lights and airs are given,
Alike, to playground and the grave,– And over both is Heaven.

* * * * *

THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.

EVERY MAN HIS OWN BOSWELL.

[I am so well pleased with my boarding-house that I intend to remain there, perhaps for years. Of course I shall have a great many conversations to report, and they will necessarily be of different tone and on different subjects. The talks are like the breakfasts,–sometimes dipped toast, and sometimes dry. You must take them as they come. How can I do what all these letters ask me to? No. 1. wants serious and earnest thought. No. 2. (letter smells of bad cigars) must have more jokes; wants me to tell a “good storey” that he has copied out for me. (I suppose two letters before the word “good” refer to some Doctor of Divinity who told the story.) No. 3. (in female hand)–more poetry. No. 4. wants something that would be of use to a practical man. (_Prahctical mahn_ he probably pronounces it.) No. 5. (gilt-edged, sweet-scented)–“more sentiment,”–“heart’s outpourings.”—-

My dear friends, one and all, I can do nothing but report such remarks as I happen to have made at our breakfast-table. Their character will depend on many accidents,–a good deal on the particular persons in the company to whom they were addressed. It so happens that those which follow were mainly intended for the divinity-student and the school-mistress; though others, whom I need not mention, saw fit to interfere, with more or less propriety, in the conversation. This is one of my privileges as a talker; and of course, if I was not talking for our whole company, I don’t expect all the readers of this periodical to be interested in my notes of what was said. Still, I think there may be a few that will rather like this vein,–possibly prefer it to a livelier one,–serious young men, and young women generally, in life’s roseate parenthesis from —- years of age to —- inclusive.

Another privilege of talking is to misquote.–Of course it wasn’t Proserpina that actually cut the yellow hair,–but _Iris_. It was the former lady’s regular business, but Dido had used herself ungenteelly, and Madame d’Enfer stood firm on the point of etiquette. So the bathycolpian Here–Juno, in Latin–sent down Iris instead. But I was mightily pleased to see that one of the gentlemen that do the heavy articles for this magazine misquoted Campbell’s line without any excuse. “Waft us _home_ the _message_” of course it ought to be. Will he be duly grateful for the correction?]

—-The more we study the body and the mind, the more we find both to be governed, not _by_, but _according to_ laws, such as we observe in the larger universe.–You think you know all about _walking_,–don’t you, now? Well, how do you suppose your lower limbs are held to your body? They are sucked up by two cupping vessels, (“cotyloid”–cup-like-cavities,) and held there as long as you live, and longer. At any rate, you think you move them backward and forward at such a rate as your will determines, don’t you? On the contrary, they swing just as any other pendulums swing, at a fixed rate, determined by their length. You can alter this by muscular power, as you can take hold of the pendulum of a clock and make it move faster or slower; but your ordinary gait is timed by the same mechanism as the movements of the solar system.

[My friend, the Professor, told me all this, referring me to certain German physiologists by the name of Weber for proof of the facts, which, however, he said he had often verified. I appropriated it to my own use; what can one do better than this, when one has a friend that tells him anything worth remembering?

The Professor seems to think that man and the general powers of the universe are in partnership. Some one was saying that it had cost nearly half a million to move the Leviathan only so far as they had got it already.–Why,–said the Professor,–they might have hired an EARTHQUAKE for less money!]

Just as we find a mathematical rule at the bottom of many of the bodily movements, just so thought may be supposed to have its regular cycles. Such or such a thought comes round periodically, in its turn. Accidental suggestions, however, so far interfere with the regular cycles, that we may find them practically beyond our power of recognition. Take all this for what it is worth, but at any rate you will agree that there are certain particular thoughts that do not come up once a day, nor once a week, but that a year would hardly go round without your having them pass through your mind. Here is one that comes up at intervals in this way. Some one speaks of it, and there is an instant and eager smile of assent in the listener or listeners. Yes, indeed; they have often been struck by it.

_All at once a conviction flashes through us that we have been in the same precise circumstances as at the present instant, once or many times before_.

O, dear, yes!–said one of the company,–everybody has had that feeling.

The landlady didn’t know anything about such notions; it was an idee in folks’ heads, she expected.

The schoolmistress said, in a hesitating sort of way, that she knew the feeling well, and didn’t like to experience it; it made her think she was a ghost, sometimes.

The young fellow whom they call John said he knew all about it; he had just lighted a cheroot the other day, when a tremendous conviction all at once came over him that he had done just that same thing ever so many times before. I looked severely at him, and his countenance immediately fell–_on the side toward me;_ I cannot answer for the other, for he can wink and laugh with either half of his face without the other half’s knowing it.

—-I have noticed–I went on to say–the following circumstances connected with these sudden impressions. First, that the condition which seems to be the duplicate of a former one is often very trivial,–one that might have presented itself a hundred times. Secondly, that the impression is very evanescent, and that it is rarely, if ever, recalled by any voluntary effort, at least after any time has elapsed. Thirdly, that there is a disinclination to record the circumstances, and a sense of incapacity to reproduce the state of mind in words. Fourthly, I have often felt that the duplicate condition had not only occurred once before, but that it was familiar, and, as it seemed, habitual. Lastly, I have had the same convictions in my dreams.

How do I account for it?–Why, there are several ways that I can mention, and you may take your choice. The first is that which the young lady hinted at;–that these flashes are sudden recollections of a previous existence. I don’t believe that; for I remember a poor student I used to know told me he had such a conviction one day when he was blacking his boots, and I can’t think he had ever lived in another world where they use Day and Martin.

Some think that Dr. Wigan’s doctrine of the brain’s being a double organ, its hemispheres working together like the two eyes, accounts for it. One of the hemispheres hangs fire, they suppose, and the small interval between the perceptions of the nimble and the sluggish half seems an indefinitely long period, and therefore the second perception appears to be the copy of another, ever so old. But even allowing the centre of perception to be double, I can see no good reason for supposing this indefinite lengthening of the time, nor any analogy that bears it out. It seems to me most likely that the coincidence of circumstances is very partial, but that we take this partial resemblance for identity, as we occasionally do resemblances of persons. A momentary posture of circumstances is so far like some preceding one that we accept it as exactly the same, just as we accost a stranger occasionally, mistaking him for a friend. The apparent similarity may be owing, perhaps, quite as much to the mental state at the time as to the outward circumstances.

—-Here is another of these curiously recurring remarks. I have said it and heard it many times, and occasionally met with something like it in books,–somewhere in Bulwer’s novels, I think, and in one of the works of Mr. Olmsted, I know.

_Memory, imagination, old sentiments and associations, are more readily reached through the sense of SMELL than by almost any other channel._

Of course the particular odors which act upon each person’s susceptibilities differ.–O, yes! I will tell you some of mine. The smell of _phosphorus_ is one of them. During a year or two of adolescence I used to be dabbling in chemistry a good deal, and as about that time I had my little aspirations and passions like another, some of these things got mixed up with each other: orange-colored fumes of nitrous acid, and visions as bright and transient; reddening litmus-paper, and blushing cheeks;–_eheu!_

“Soles occidere et redire possunt,”

but there is no reagent that will redden the faded roses of eighteen hundred and—-spare them! But, as I was saying, phosphorus fires this train of associations in an instant; its luminous vapors with their penetrating odor throw me into a trance; it comes to me in a double sense “trailing clouds of glory.” Only the confounded Vienna matches, _ohne phosphor-geruch_, have worn my sensibilities a little.

Then there is the _marigold_. When I was of smallest dimensions, and wont to ride impacted between the knees of fond parental pair, we would sometimes cross the bridge to the next village-town and stop opposite a low, brown, “gambrel-roofed” cottage. Out of it would come one Sally, sister of its swarthy tenant, swarthy herself, shady-lipped, sad-voiced, and, bending over her flower-bed, would gather a “posy,” as she called it, for the little boy. Sally lies in the churchyard with a slab of blue slate at her head, lichen-crusted, and leaning a little within the last few years. Cottage, garden-beds, posies, grenadier-like rows of seedling onions,–stateliest of vegetables,–all are gone, but the breath of a marigold brings them all back to me.

Perhaps the herb _everlasting_, the fragrant _immortelle_ of our autumn fields, has the most suggestive odor to me of all those that set me dreaming. I can hardly describe the strange thoughts and emotions that come to me as I inhale the aroma of its pale, dry, rustling flowers. A something it has of sepulchral spicery, as if it had been brought from the core of some great pyramid, where it had lain on the breast of a mummied Pharaoh. Something, too, of immortality in the sad, faint sweetness lingering so long in its lifeless petals. Yet this does not tell why it fills my eyes with tears and carries me in blissful thought to the banks of asphodel that border the River of Life.

—-I should not have talked so much about these personal susceptibilities, if I had not a remark to make about them that I believe is a new one. It is this. There may be a physical reason for the strange connection between the sense of smell and the mind. The olfactory nerve–so my friend, the Professor, tells me–is the only one directly connected with the hemispheres of the brain, the parts in which, as we have every reason to believe, the intellectual processes are performed. To speak more truly, the olfactory “nerve” is not a nerve at all, he says, but a part of the brain, in intimate connection with its anterior lobes. Whether this anatomical arrangement is at the bottom of the facts I have mentioned, I will not decide, but it is curious enough to be worth remembering. Contrast the sense of taste, as a source of suggestive impressions, with that of smell. Now the Professor assures me that you will find the nerve of taste has no immediate connection with the brain proper, but only with the prolongation of the spinal cord.

[The old gentleman opposite did not pay much attention, I think, to this hypothesis of mine. But while I was speaking about the sense of smell he nestled about in his seat, and presently succeeded in getting out a large red bandanna handkerchief. Then he lurched a little to the other side, and after much tribulation at last extricated an ample round snuff-box. I looked as he opened it and felt for the wonted pugil. Moist rappee, and a Tonka-bean lying therein. I made the manual sign understood of all mankind that use the precious dust, and presently my brain, too, responded to the long unused stimulus.—-O boys,–that were,–actual papas and possible grandpapas,–some of you with crowns like billiard-balls,–some in locks of sable silvered, and some of silver sabled,–do you remember, as you doze over this, those after-dinners at the Trois Freres, when the Scotch-plaided snuff-box went round, and the dry Lundy-Foot tickled its way along into our happy sensoria? Then it was that the Chambertin or the Clot Vougeot came in, slumbering in its straw cradle. And one among you,–do you remember how he would have a bit of ice always in his Burgundy, and sit tinkling it against the sides of the bubble-like glass, saying that he was hearing the cow-bells as he used to hear them, when the deep-breathing kine came home at twilight from the huckleberry pasture, in the old home a thousand leagues towards the sunset?]

Ah, me! what strains and strophes of unwritten verse pulsate through my soul when I open a certain closet in the ancient house where I was born! On its shelves used to lie bundles of sweet-marjoram and pennyroyal and lavender and mint and catnip; there apples were stored until their seeds should grow black, which happy period there were sharp little milk-teeth always ready to anticipate; there peaches lay in the dark, thinking of the sunshine they had lost, until, like the hearts of saints that dream of heaven in their sorrow, they grew fragrant as the breath of angels. The odorous echo of a score of dead summers lingers yet in those dim recesses.

—-Do I remember Byron’s line about “striking the electric chain”?–To be sure I do. I sometimes think the less the hint that stirs the automatic machinery of association, the more easily this moves us. What can be more trivial than that old story of opening the folio Shakspeare that used to lie in some ancient English hall and finding the flakes of Christmas pastry between its leaves, shut up in them perhaps a hundred years ago? And, lo! as one looks on those poor relics of a bygone generation, the universe changes in the twinkling of an eye; old George the Second is back again, and the elder Pitt is coming into power, and General Wolfe is a fine, promising young man, and over the Channel they are pulling the Sieur Damiens to pieces with wild horses, and across the Atlantic the Indians are tomahawking Hirams and Jonathans and Jonases at Fort William Henry; all the dead people that have been in the dust so long–even to the stout-armed cook that made the pastry–are alive again; the planet unwinds a hundred of its luminous coils, and the precession of the equinoxes is retraced on the dial of heaven! And all this for a bit of pie-crust!

—-I will thank you for that pie,–said the provoking young fellow whom I have named repeatedly. He looked at it for a moment, and put his hands to his eyes as if moved.–I was thinking,–he said, indistinctly—-

—-How? What is’t?–said our landlady.

—-I was thinking–said he–who was king of England when this old pie was baked,–and it made me feel bad to think how long he must have been dead.

[Our landlady is a decent body, poor, and a widow, of course; _cela va sans dire_. She told me her story once; it was as if a grain of corn that had been ground and bolted had tried to individualize itself by a special narrative. There was the wooing and the wedding,–the start in life,–the disappointment,–the children she had buried,–the struggle against fate,–the dismantling of life, first of its small luxuries, and then of its comforts,–the broken spirits,–the altered character of the one on whom she leaned,–and at last the death that came and drew the black curtain between her and all her earthly hopes.

I never laughed at my landlady after she had told me her story, but I often cried,–not those pattering tears that run off the eaves upon our neighbors’ grounds, the _stillicidium_ of self-conscious sentiment, but those which steal noiselessly through their conduits until they reach the cisterns lying round about the heart; those tears that we weep inwardly with unchanging features;–such I did shed for her often when the imps of the boarding-house Inferno tugged at her soul with their red-hot pincers.]

Young man,–I said,–the pasty you speak lightly of is not old, but courtesy to those who labor to serve us, especially if they are of the weaker sex, is very old, and yet well worth retaining. The pasty looks to me as if it were tender, but I know that the hearts of women are so. May I recommend to you the following caution, as a guide, whenever you are dealing with a woman, or an artist, or a poet;–if you are handling an editor or politician, it is superfluous advice. I take it from the back of one of those little French toys which contain paste-board figures moved by a small running stream of fine sand; Benjamin Franklin will translate it for you: “_Quoiqu’elle soit tres solidement montee, il faut ne pas BRUTALISER la machine_.”–I will thank you for the pie, if you please.

[I took more of it than was good for me,–as much as 85 deg., I should think,–and had an indigestion in consequence. While I was suffering from it, I wrote some sadly desponding poems, and a theological essay which took a very melancholy view of creation. When I got better I labelled them all “Pie-crust,” and laid them by as scarecrows and solemn warnings. I have a number of books on my shelves that I should like to label with some such title; but, as they have great names on their title-pages,–Doctors of Divinity, some of them,–it wouldn’t do.]

—-My friend, the Professor, whom I have mentioned to you once or twice, told me yesterday that somebody had been abusing him in some of the journals of his calling. I told him that I didn’t doubt he deserved it; that I hoped he did deserve a little abuse occasionally, and would for a number of years to come; that nobody could do anything to make his neighbors wiser or better without being liable to abuse for it; especially that people hated to have their little mistakes made fun of, and perhaps he had been doing something of the kind.–The Professor smiled.–Now, said I, hear what I am going to say. It will not take many years to bring you to the period of life when men, at least the majority of writing and talking men, do nothing but praise. Men, like peaches and pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay–I don’t know what it is,–whether a spontaneous change, mental or bodily, or whether it is thorough experience of the thanklessness of critical honesty,–but it is a fact, that most writers, except sour and unsuccessful ones, tired of finding fault at about the time when they are beginning to grow old. As a general thing, I would not give a great deal for the fair words of a critic, if he is himself an author, over fifty years of age. At thirty we are all trying to cut our names in big letters upon the walls of this tenement of life; twenty years later we have carved it, or shut up our jack-knives. Then we are ready to help others, and care less to hinder any, because nobody’s elbows are in our way. So I am glad you have a little life left; you will be saccharine enough in a few years.

—-Some of the softening effects of advancing age have struck me very much in what I have heard or seen here and elsewhere. I just now spoke of the sweetening process that authors undergo. Do you know that in the gradual passage from maturity to helplessness the harshest characters sometimes have a period in which they are gentle and placid as young children? I have heard it said, but I cannot be sponsor for its truth, that the famous chieftain, Lochiel, was rocked in a cradle like a baby, in his old age. An old man, whose studies had been of the severest scholastic kind, used to love to hear little nursery-stories read over and over to him. One who saw the Duke of Wellington in his last years describes him as very gentle in his aspect and demeanor. I remember a person of singularly stern and lofty bearing who became remarkably gracious and easy in all his ways in the later period of his life.

And that leads me to say that men often remind me of pears in their way of coming to maturity. Some are ripe at twenty, like human Jargonelles, and must be made the most of, for their day is soon over. Some come into their perfect condition late, like the autumn kinds, and they last better than the summer fruit. And some, that, like the Winter-Nelis, have been hard and uninviting until all the rest have had their season, get their glow and perfume long after the frost and snow have done their worst with the orchards. Beware of rash criticisms; the rough and astringent fruit you condemn may be an autumn or a winter pear, and that which you picked up beneath the same bough in August may have been only its worm-eaten windfalls. Milton was a Saint-Germain with a graft of the roseate Early-Catherine. Rich, juicy, lively, fragrant, russet-skinned old Chaucer was an Easter-Beurre; the buds of a new summer were swelling when he ripened.

—-There is no power I envy so much–said the divinity-student–as that of seeing analogies and making comparisons. I don’t understand how it is that some minds are continually coupling thoughts or objects that seem not in the least related to each other, until all at once they are put in a certain light, and you wonder that you did not always see that they were as like as a pair of twins. It appears to me a sort of miraculous gift.

[He is rather a nice young man, and I think has an appreciation of the higher mental qualities remarkable for one of his years and training. I try his head occasionally as housewives try eggs,–give it an intellectual shake and hold it up to the light, so to speak, to see if it has life in it, actual or potential, or only contains lifeless albumen.]

You call it _miraculous_,–I replied,–tossing the expression with my facial eminence, a little smartly, I fear.–Two men are walking by the poly-phloesboean ocean, one of them having a small tin cup with which he can scoop up a gill of sea-water when he will, and the other nothing but his hands, which will hardly hold water at all,–and you call the tin cup a miraculous possession!

It is the ocean that is the miracle, my infant apostle! Nothing is clearer than that all things are in all things, and that just according to the intensity and extension of our mental being we shall see the many in the one and the one in the many. Did Sir Isaac think what he was saying when he made _his_ speech about the ocean,–the child and the pebbles, you know? Did he mean to speak slightingly of a pebble? Of a spherical solid which stood sentinel over its compartment of space before the stone that became the pyramids had grown solid, and has watched it until now! A body which knows all the currents of force that traverse the globe; which holds by invisible threads to the ring of Saturn and the belt of Orion! A body from the contemplation of which an archangel could infer the entire inorganic universe as the simplest of corollaries! A throne of the all-pervading Deity, who has guided its every atom since the rosary of heaven was strung with beaded stars!

So,–to return to _our_ walk by the ocean,–if all that poetry has dreamed, all that insanity has raved, all that maddening narcotics have driven through the brains of men, or smothered passion nursed in the fancies of women,–if the dreams of colleges and convents and boarding-schools,–if every human feeling that sighs, or smiles, or curses, or shrieks, or groans, should bring all their innumerable images, such as come with every hurried heart-beat,–the epic that held them all, though its letters filled the zodiac, would be but a cupful from the infinite ocean of similitudes and analogies that rolls through the universe.

[The divinity-student honored himself by the way in which he received this. He did not swallow it at once, neither did he reject it; but he took it as a pickerel takes the bait, and carried it off with him to his hole (in the fourth story) to deal with at his leisure.]

–Here is another remark made for his especial benefit.–There is a natural tendency in many persons to run their adjectives together in _triads_, as I have heard them called,–thus: He was honorable, courteous, and brave; she was graceful, pleasing, and virtuous. Dr. Johnson is famous for this; I think it was Bulwer who said you could separate a paper in the “Rambler” into three distinct essays. Many of our writers show the same tendency,–my friend, the Professor, especially. Some think it is in humble imitation of Johnson,–some that it is for the sake of the stately sound only. I don’t think they get to the bottom of it. It is, I suspect, an instinctive and involuntary effort of the mind to present a thought or image with the _three dimensions_ that belong to every solid,–an unconscious handling of an idea as if it had length, breadth, and thickness. It is a great deal easier to say this than to prove it, and a great deal easier to dispute it than to disprove it. But mind this: the more we observe and study, the wider we find the range of the automatic and instinctive principles in body, mind, and morals, and the narrower the limits of the self-determining conscious movement.

—-I have often seen piano-forte players and singers make such strange motions over their instruments or song-books that I wanted to laugh at them. “Where did our friends pick up all these fine ecstatic airs?” I would say to myself. Then I would remember My Lady in “Marriage a la Mode,” and amuse myself with thinking how affectation was the same thing in Hogarth’s time and in our own. But one day I bought me a Canary-bird and hung him up in a cage at my window. By-and-by he found himself at home, and began to pipe his little tunes; and there he was, sure enough, swimming and waving about, with all the droopings and liftings and languishing side-turnings of the head that I had laughed at. And now I should like to ask, WHO taught him all this?–and me, through him, that the foolish head was not the one swinging itself from side to side and bowing and nodding over the music, but that other which was passing its shallow and self-satisfied judgment on a creature made of finer clay than the frame which carried that same head upon its shoulders?

—-Do you want an image of the human will, or the self-determining principle, as compared with its prearranged and impassable restrictions? A drop of water, imprisoned in a crystal; you may see such a one in any mineralogical collection. One little fluid particle in the crystalline prism of the solid universe!

—-Weaken moral obligations?–No, not weaken, but define them. When I preach that sermon I spoke of the other day, I shall have to lay down some principles not fully recognized in some of your text-books.

I should have to begin with one most formidable preliminary. You saw an article the other day in one of the journals, perhaps, in which some old Doctor or other said quietly that patients were very apt to be fools and cowards. But a great many of the clergyman’s patients are not only fools and cowards, but also liars.

[Immense sensation at the table.–Sudden retirement of the angular female in oxydated bombazine. Movement of adhesion–as they say in the Chamber of Deputies–on the part of the young fellow they call John. Falling of the old-gentleman-opposite’s lower jaw–(gravitation is beginning to get the better of him). Our landlady to Benjamin Franklin, briskly,–Go to school right off, there’s a good boy! Schoolmistress curious,–takes a quick glance at divinity-student. Divinity-student slightly flushed; draws his shoulders back a little, as if a big falsehood–or truth–had hit him in the forehead. Myself calm.]

—-I should not make such a speech as that, you know, without having pretty substantial indorsers to fall back upon, in case my credit should be disputed. Will you run up stairs, Benjamin Franklin, (for B.F. had _not_ gone right off, of course,) and bring down a small volume from the left upper corner of the right-hand shelves?

[Look at the precious little black, ribbed-backed, clean-typed, vellum-papered 32mo. “DESIDERII ERASMI COLLOQUIA. Amstelodami. Typis Ludovici Elzevirii. 1650.” Various names written on title-page. Most conspicuous this: Gul. Cookeson: E. Coll. Oum. Anim. 1725. Oxon.

—-O William Cookeson, of All-Souls College, Oxford,–then writing as I now write,–now in the dust, where I shall lie,–is this line all that remains to thee of earthly remembrance? Thy name is at least once more spoken by living men;–is it a pleasure to thee? Thou shalt share with me my little draught of immortality,–its week, its month, its year, whatever it may be,–and then we will go together into the solemn archives of Oblivion’s Uncatalogued Library! ]

—-If you think I have used rather strong language, I shall have to read something to you out of the book of this keen and witty scholar,–the great Erasmus,–who “laid the egg of the Reformation which Luther hatched.” Oh, you never read his _Naufragium_, or “Shipwreck,” did you? Of course not; for, if you had, I don’t think you would have given me credit–or discredit–for entire originality in that speech of mine. That men are cowards in the contemplation of futurity he illustrates by the extraordinary antics of many on board the sinking vessel; that they are fools, by their praying to the sea, and making promises to bits of wood from the true cross, and all manner of similar nonsense; that they are fools, cowards, and liars all at once, by this story: I will put it into rough English for you,–“I couldn’t help laughing to hear one fellow bawling out, so that he might be sure to be heard, a promise to Saint Christopher of Paris–the monstrous statue in the great church there–that he would give him a wax taper as big as himself. ‘Mind what you promise!’ said an acquaintance that stood near him, poking him with his elbow; ‘you couldn’t pay for it, if you sold all your things at auction.’ ‘Hold your tongue, you donkey!’ said the fellow,–but softly, so that Saint Christopher should not hear him,–‘do you think I’m in earnest? If I once get my foot on dry ground, catch me giving him so much as a tallow candle!'”

Now, therefore, remembering that those who have been loudest in their talk about the great subject of which we were speaking have not necessarily been wise, brave, and true men, but, on the contrary, have very often been wanting in one or two or all of the qualities these words imply, I should expect to find a good many doctrines current in the schools which I should be obliged to call foolish, cowardly, and false.

—-So you would abuse other people’s beliefs, Sir, and yet not tell us your own creed!–said the divinity-student, coloring up with a spirit for which I liked him all the better.

—-I have a creed,–I replied;–none better, and none shorter. It is told in two words,–the two first of the Paternoster. And when I say these words I mean them. And when I compared the human will to a drop in a crystal, and said I meant to _define_ moral obligations, and not weaken them, this was what I intended to express: that the fluent, self-determining power of human beings is a very strictly limited agency in the universe. The chief planes of its enclosing solid are, of course, organization, education, condition. Organization may reduce the power of the will to nothing, as in some idiots; and from this zero the scale mounts upwards by slight gradations. Education is only second to nature. Imagine all the infants born this year in Boston and Timbuctoo to change places! Condition does less, but “Give me neither poverty nor riches” was the prayer of Agur, and with good reason. If there is any improvement in modern theology, it is in getting out of the region of pure abstractions and taking these every-day working forces into account. The great theological question now heaving and throbbing in the minds of Christian men is this:–

No, I wont talk about these things now. My remarks might be repeated, and it would give my friends pain to see with what personal incivilities I should be visited. Besides, what business has a mere boarder to be talking about such things at a breakfast-table? Let him make puns. To be sure, he was brought up among the Christian fathers, and learned his alphabet out of a quarto “Concilium Tridentinum.” He has also heard many thousand theological lectures by men of various denominations; and it is not at all to the credit of these teachers, if he is not fit by this time to express an opinion on theological matters.

I know well enough that there are some of you who had a great deal rather see me stand on my head than use it for any purpose of thought. Does not my friend, the Professor, receive at least two letters a week, requesting him to ….. .. ….. .. .. …,–on the strength of some youthful antic of his, which, no doubt, authorizes the intelligent constituency of autograph-hunters to address him as a harlequin?

—-Well, I can’t be savage with you for wanting to laugh, and I like to make you laugh, well enough, when I can. But then observe this: if the sense of the ridiculous is one side of an impressible nature, it is very well; but if that is all there is in a man, he had better have been an ape at once, and so have stood at the head of his profession. Laughter and tears are meant to turn the wheels of the same machinery of sensibility; one is wind-power, and the other water-power; that is all. I have often heard the Professor talk about hysterics as being Nature’s cleverest illustration of the reciprocal convertibility of the two states of which these acts are the manifestations; but you may see it every day in children; and if you want to choke with stifled tears at sight of the transition, as it shows itself in older years, go and see Mr. Blake play _Jesse Rural_.

It is a very dangerous thing for a literary man to indulge his love for the ridiculous. People laugh _with_ him just long as he amuses them; but if he attempts to be serious, they must still have their laugh, and so they laugh _at_ him. There is in addition, however, a deeper reason for this than would at first appear. Do you know that you feel a little superior to every man who makes you laugh, whether by making faces or verses? Are you aware that you have a pleasant sense of patronizing him, when you condescend so far as to let him turn somersets, literal or literary, for your royal delight? Now if a man can only be allowed to stand on a dais, or raised platform, and look down on his neighbor who is exerting his talent for him, oh, it is all right!–first-rate performance!–and all the rest of the fine phrases. But if all at once the performer asks the gentleman to come upon the floor, and, stepping upon the platform, begins to talk down at him,–ah, that wasn’t in the programme!

I have never forgotten what happened when Sydney Smith–who, as everybody knows, was an exceedingly sensible man, and a gentleman, every inch of him–ventured to preach a sermon on the Duties of Royalty. The “Quarterly,” “so savage and tartarly,” came down upon him in the most contemptuous style, as “a joker of jokes,” a “diner-out of the first water,” in one of his own phrases; sneering at him, insulting him, as nothing but a toady of a court, sneaking behind the anonymous, would ever have been mean enough to do to a man of his position and genius, or to any decent person even. If I were giving advice to a young fellow of talent, with two or three facets to his mind, I would tell him by all means to keep his wit in the background until after he had made a reputation by his more solid qualities. And so to an actor: _Hamlet_ first, and _Bob Logic_ afterwards, if you like; but don’t think, as they say poor Liston used to, that people will be ready to allow that you can do anything great with _Macbeth’s_ dagger after flourishing about with _Paul Pry’s_ umbrella. Do you know, too, that the majority of men look upon all who challenge their attention,–for a while, at least,–as beggars, and nuisances? They always try to get off as cheaply as they can; and the cheapest of all things they can give a literary man–pardon the forlorn pleasantry!–is the _funny_-bone. That is all very well so far as it goes, but satisfies no man, and makes a good many angry, as I told you on a former occasion.

—-Oh, indeed, no! I am not ashamed to make you laugh, occasionally. I think I could read you something I have my desk that would probably make you smile. Perhaps I will read it one of these days, if you are patient with me when I am sentimental and reflective; not just now. The ludicrous has its place in the universe; it is not a human invention, but one of the Divine idea; illustrated in the practical jokes of kittens and monkeys long before Aristophanes or Shakspeare. How curious it is that we always consider solemnity and the absence of all gay surprises and encounter of wits as essential to the idea of the future life of those whom we thus deprive of half their faculties and then call _blessed!_ There are not a few who, even in this life, seem to be preparing themselves for that smileless eternity to which they look forward, by banishing all gayety from their hearts and all joyousness from their countenances. I meet one such in the street not unfrequently, a person of intelligence and education, but who gives me (and all that he passes) such a rayless and chilling look of recognition,–something as if he were one of Heaven’s assessors, come down to “doom” every acquaintance he met,–that I have sometimes begun to sneeze on the spot, and gone home with a violent cold, dating from that instant. I don’t doubt he would cut his kitten’s tail off, if he caught her playing with it. Please tell me, who taught her to play with it?

No, no!–give me a chance to talk to you, my fellow-boarders, and you need not be afraid that I shall have any scruples about entertaining you, if I can do it, as well as giving you some of my serious thoughts, and perhaps my sadder fancies. I know nothing in English or any other literature more admirable than that sentiment of Sir Thomas Browne: “EVERY MAN TRULY LIVES, SO LONG AS HE ACTS HIS NATURE, OR SOME WAY MAKES GOOD THE FACULTIES OF HIMSELF.”

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

Don’t misunderstand that metaphor of heaving the log, I beg you. It is merely a smart way of saying that we cannot avoid measuring our rate of movement by those with whom we have long been in the habit of comparing ourselves; and when they once become stationary, we can get our reckoning from them with painful accuracy. We see just what we were when they were our peers, and can strike the balance between that and whatever we may feel ourselves to be now. No doubt we may sometimes be mistaken. If we change our last simile to that very old and familiar one of a fleet leaving the harbor and sailing in company for some distant region, we can get what we want out of it. There is one of our companions;–her streamers were torn into rags before she had got into the open sea, then by and by her sails blew out of the ropes one after another, the waves swept her deck, and as night came on we left her a seeming wreck, as we flew under our pyramid of canvas. But lo! at dawn she is still in sight,–it may be in advance of us. Some deep ocean-current has been moving her on, strong, but silent,–yes, stronger than these noisy winds that puff our sails until they are swollen as the cheeks of jubilant cherubim. And when at last the black steam-tug with the skeleton arms, that comes out of the mist sooner or later and takes us all in tow, grapples her and goes off panting and groaning with her, it is to that harbor where all wrecks are refitted, and where, alas! we, towering in our pride, may never come.

So you will not think I mean to speak lightly of old friendships, because we cannot help instituting comparisons between our present and former selves by the aid of those who were what we were, but are not what we are. Nothing strikes one more, in the race of life, than to see how many give out in the first half of the course. “Commencement day” always reminds me of the start for the “Derby,” when the beautiful high-bred three-year olds of the season are brought up for trial. That day is the start, and life is the race. Here we are at Cambridge, and a class is just “graduating.” Poor Harry! he was to have been there too, but he has paid forfeit; step out here into the grass back of the church; ah! there it is:–

“HUNC LAPIDEM POSUERUNT SOCII MOERENTES.”

But this is the start, and here they are,–coats bright as silk, and manes as smooth as _eau lustrale_ can make them. Some of the best of the colts are pranced round, a few minutes each, to show their paces. What is that old gentleman crying about? and the old lady by him, and the three girls, all covering their eyes for? Oh, that is _their_ colt that has just been trotted up on the stage. Do they really think those little thin legs can do anything in such a slashing sweepstakes as is coming off in these next forty years? Oh, this terrible gift of second-sight that comes to some of us when we begin to look through the silvered rings of the _arcus senilis_!

_Ten years gone_. First turn in the race. A few broken down; two or three bolted. Several show in advance of the ruck. _Cassock_, a black colt, seems to be ahead of the rest; those black colts commonly get the start, I have noticed, of the others, in the first quarter. _Meteor_ has pulled up.

_Twenty years_. Second corner turned. _Cassock_ has dropped from the front, and _Judex_, an iron-gray, has the lead. But look! how they have thinned out! Down flat,–five,–six,–how many? They lie still enough! they will not get up again in this race, be very sure! And the rest of them, what a “tailing off”! Anybody can see who is going to win,–perhaps.

_Thirty years_. Third corner turned. _Dices_, bright sorrel, ridden by the fellow in a yellow jacket, begins to make play fast; is getting to be the favorite with many. But who is that other one that has been lengthening his stride from the first, and now shows close up to the front? Don’t you remember the quiet brown colt _Asteroid_, with the star in his forehead? That is he; he is one of the sort that lasts; look out for him! The black “colt,” as we used to call him, is in the background, taking it easy in a gentle trot. There is one they used to call _the Filly_, on account of a certain feminine air he had; well up, you see; the Filly is not to be despised, my boy!

_Forty years_. More dropping off,–but places much as before.

_Fifty years_. Race over. All that are on the course are coming in at a walk; no more running. Who is ahead? Ahead? What! and the winning-post a slab of white or gray stone standing out from that turf where there is no more jockeying or straining for victory! Well, the world marks their places in its betting-book; but be sure that these matter very little, if they have run as well as they knew how!

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

THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS.

This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign, Sails the unshadowed main,–
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings In gulfs enchanted, where the siren sings, And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.

Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl; Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every chambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell, As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell, Before thee lies revealed,–
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!

Year after year beheld the silent toil That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year’s dwelling for the new, Stole with soft step its shining archway through, Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.

Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee, Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap, forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn! While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:–

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!

* * * * *

BERANGER.

Beranger is certainly the most popular poet there has ever been in France; there was convincing proof of it at the time of and after his death. He had not printed anything since 1833, the epoch when he published the last collection of his poems; when he died, then, on the 16th of July, 1857, he had been silent twenty-four years. He had, it is true, appeared for a moment in the National Assembly, after the Revolution of February, 1848; but it was only to withdraw again almost immediately and to resign his seat. In spite of this long silence and this retirement, in which he seemed a little forgotten, no sooner did the news of his last illness spread and it was known that his life was in danger, than the interest, or we should rather say the anxiety, of the public was awakened. In the ranks of the people, in the most humble classes of society, everybody began inquiring about him and asking day by day for news; his house was besieged by visitors; and as the danger increased, the crowd gathered, restless, as if listening for his last sigh. The government, in charging itself with his obsequies and declaring that his funeral should be celebrated at the cost of the State, may have been taking a wise precaution to prevent all pretext for disturbance; but it responded also to a public and popular sentiment. At sight of the honors paid to this simple poet, with as much distinction as if he had been a Marshal of France,–at sight of that extraordinary military pomp, (and in France military pomp is the great sign of respectability, and has its place whenever it is desired to bestow special honor,) no one among the laboring population was surprised, and it seemed to all that Beranger received only what was his due.

And since that time there has been in the French journals nothing but a succession of hymns to the memory of Beranger, hymns scarcely interrupted by now and then some cooler and soberer judgments. People have vied with each other in making known his good deeds done in secret, his gifts,–we will not call them alms,–for when he gave, he did not wish that it should have the character of alms, but of a generous, brotherly help. Numbers of his private letters have been printed; and one of his disciples has published recollections of his conversations, under the title of _Memoires de Beranger_. The same disciple, once a simple artisan, a shoemaker, we believe, M. Savinien Lapointe, has also composed _Le petit Evangile de la Jeunesse de Beranger_. M. de Lamartine, in one of the numbers of his _Cours familier de Litterature_, has devoted two hundred pages to an account of Beranger and a commentary on him, and has recalled curious conversations which he had with him in the most critical political circumstances of the Revolution of 1848. In short, there has been a rivalry in developing and amplifying the memory of the national songster, treating him as Socrates was once treated,–bringing up all his apophthegms, reproducing the dialogues in which he figured,–going even farther,–carrying him to the very borders of legend, and evidently preparing to canonize in him one of the Saints in the calendar of the future.

What is there solid in all this? How much is legitimate, and how much excessive? Beranger himself seems to have wished to reduce things to their right proportions, having left behind him ready for publication two volumes: one being a collection of his last poems and songs; the other an extended notice, detailing the decisive circumstances of his poetic and political life, and entitled “My Biography.”

The collection of his last songs, let us say it frankly, has not answered expectation. In reading them, we feel that the poet has grown old, that he is weary. He complains continually that he has no longer any voice,–that the tree is dead,–that even the echo of the woods answers only in prose,–that the source of song is dried up; and says, prettily,–

“If Time still make the clock run on, He makes it strike no longer.”

And unhappily he is right. We find here and there pretty designs, short felicitous passages, smiling bits of nature; but obscurity, stiffness of expression, and the dragging in of Fancy by the hair continually mar the reading and take away all its charm. Even the pieces most highly lauded in advance, and which celebrate some of the most inspiring moments in the life of Napoleon,–such as his Baptism, his Horoscope cast by a Gypsy, and others,–have neither sparkle nor splendor. The prophet is not intoxicated, and wants enthusiasm. On the theme of Napoleon, Victor Hugo has done incomparably better; and as to the songs, properly so called, of this last collection, there are at this moment in France numerous song-writers (Pierre Dupont and Nadaud, for instance) who have the ease, the spirit, and the brilliancy of youth, and who would be able easily to triumph over this forced and difficult elevation of the Remains of Beranger, if one chose to institute a comparison. We may well say that youth is youth; to write verses, and especially songs, when one is old, is to wish still to dance, still to mount a curvetting horse; one gains no honor by the experiment. Anacreon, we know, succeeded; but in French, with rhyme and refrain, (that double butterfly-chase,) it seems to be more difficult.

But in prose, in the Autobiography, the entire Beranger, the Beranger of the best period, the man of wit, freshness, and sense, is found again; and it is pleasant to follow him in the story of his life, till now imperfectly known. He was born at Paris, on the 19th of August, 1780; and he glories in being a Parisian by birth, saying, that “Paris had not to wait for the great Revolution of 1789 to be the city of liberty and equality, the city where misfortune receives, perhaps, the most sympathy.” He came into the world in the house of a tailor, his good old grandfather, in the Rue Montorgueil,–one of the noisiest of the Parisian streets, famous for its _restaurants_ and the number of oysters consumed in them. “Seeing me born,” he says, “in one of the dirtiest and noisiest streets, who would have thought that I should love the woods, fields, flowers, and birds so much?” It is true that Beranger loved them,–but he loved them always, as his poems show, like a Parisian and child of the Rue Montorgueil. A pretty enclosure, as many flowers and hedges as there are in the Closerie des Lilas, a little garden, a courtyard surrounded by apple-trees, a path winding beside wheat-fields,–these were enough for him. His Muse, we feel, has never journeyed, never soared, never beheld its first horizon in the Alps, the ocean, or the illimitable prairie. Lamartine, born in the country, amid all the wealth of the old rural and patriarchal life, had a right to oppose him, to put his own first instincts as poet in contrast with his, and to say to him, “I was born among shepherds; but you, you were born among citizens, among proletaries.” Beranger loved the country as people love it on a Sunday at Paris, in walks just without the suburbs. How different from Burns, that other poet of the people, with whom he has sometimes been compared! But, on the other hand, Beranger loved the dweller in the city, the mechanic, the _ouvrier_, industrious, intellectual, full of enthusiasm and also of imprudence, passionate, with the heart of a soldier, and with free, adventurous ideas. He loved him even in his faults, aided him in his poverty, consoled him with his songs. Before all things he loved the street, and the street returned his love.

His father was a careless, dissipated man, who had tried many employments, and who strove to rise from the ranks of the people without having the means. His mother was a pretty woman, a dress-maker, and thorough _grisette_, whom his father married for her beauty, and who left her husband six months after their marriage and never gave a thought to her child. The little Beranger, born with difficulty and only with the aid of instruments, put out to nurse in the neighborhood of Auxerre, and forgotten for three years, was the object of no motherly cares. He may be said never to have had a mother. His Muse always showed traces of this privation of a mother’s smile. The sentiment of home, of family, is not merely absent from his poems,–it is sometimes shocked by them.

Returning to his grandparents in Paris, and afterwards sent to a school in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where, on the 14th of July, 1789, he saw the Bastille taken, he pursued his primary studies very irregularly. He never learned Latin, a circumstance which always prejudiced him. Later in life, he sometimes blushed at not knowing it, and yet mentioned the fact so often as almost to make one believe he was proud of it. The truth is, that this want of classical training must have been felt more painfully by Beranger than it would have been by almost any other person; for Beranger was a studied poet, full of combinations, of allusion and artifice, even in his pleasantry,–a delicate poet, moreover, of the school of Boileau and Horace.

The _pension_ in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, even, was too much for the narrow means of his father. He was taken away and sent to Peronne, in Picardy, to an aunt who kept an inn in one of the suburbs, at the sign of the Royal Sword. It was while he was with this excellent person, who had a mind superior to her condition, that he began to form himself by the reading of good French authors. His intelligence was not less aroused by the spectacle of the events which were passing under his eyes. The Terror, the invasion by the armies of the Coalition, the roar of cannon, which could be heard at this frontier town, inspired him with a patriotism which was always predominant in him, and which at all decisive crises revived so strongly as even to silence and eclipse for the moment other cherished sentiments which were only less dear.

“This love of country,” said he, emphatically, “was the great, I should say the only, passion of my life.” It was this love which was his best inspiration as poet,–love of country, and with it of equality. Out of devotion to these great objects of his worship, he will even consent that the statue of Liberty be sometimes veiled, when there is a necessity for it. That France should be great and glorious, that she should not cease to be democratic, and to advance toward a democracy more and more equitable and favorable to all,–such were the aspirations and the programme of Beranger. He goes so far as to say that in his childhood he had an aversion, almost a hatred, for Voltaire, on account of the insult to patriotism in his famous poem of _La Pucelle_; and that afterwards, even while acknowledging all his admirable qualities and the services he rendered to the cause of humanity, he could acquire only a very faint taste for his writing. This is a striking singularity, if Beranger does not exaggerate it a little; it is almost an ingratitude,–for Voltaire is one of his nearest and most direct masters.

There is, indeed, a third passion which disputes with those for country and equality the heart of Beranger, and which he shares fully with Voltaire,–the hatred, namely, we will not say of Christianity, but of religious hypocrisy, of Jesuitic Tartufery. What Voltaire did in innumerable pamphlets, _facetioe_, and philosophic diatribes, Beranger did in songs. He gave a refrain, and with it popular currency to the anti-clerical attacks and mockeries of Voltaire; he set them to his violin and made them sing with the horsehair of his bow. Beranger was in this respect only the minstrel of Voltaire.

Bold songs against hypocrites, the Reverend Fathers and the Tartufes, so much in favor under the Restoration, and some which carry the attack yet higher, and which sparkle with the very spirit of buffoonery, like _Le Batard du Pape_; beautiful patriotic songs, like _Le vieux Drapeau_; and beautiful songs of humanity and equality, like _Le vieux Vagabond_;–these are the three chief branches which unite and intertwine to make the poetic crown of Beranger in his best days, and they had their root in passions which with him were profound and living,–hatred of superstition, love of country, love of humanity and equality.

His aunt at Peronne was superstitious, and during thunder-storms had recourse to all kinds of expedients, such as signs of the cross, holy-water, and the like. One day the lightning struck near the house and knocked down young Beranger, who was standing on the door-step. He was insensible for some time, and they thought him killed. His first words, on recovering consciousness, were, “Well, what good did your holy-water do?”

At Peronne he finished his very irregular course of study at a kind of primary school founded by a philanthropic citizen. During the Directory, attempts were made all over France to get up free institutions for the young, on plans more or less reasonable or absurd, by men who had fed upon Rousseau’s _Emile_ and invented variations upon his system. On leaving school, Beranger was placed with a printer in the city, where he became a journeyman printer and compositor, which has occasioned his being often compared to Franklin,–a comparison of which he is not unworthy, in his love for the progress of the human race, and the piquant and ingenious turn he knew how to give to good sense. From this first employment as printer Beranger acquired and retained great nicety in language and grammar. He insisted on it, in his counsels to the young, more than seems natural in a poet of the people. He even exaggerated its importance somewhat, and might seem a purist.

Beranger’s father reappeared suddenly during the Directory and reclaimed his son, whom he carried to Paris. The father had formed connections in Brittany with the royalists. He had become steward of the household of the Countess of Bourmont, mother of the famous Bourmont who was afterwards Marshal of France and Minister of War. Bourmont himself, then young, was living in Paris, in order the better to conspire for the restoration of the Bourbons. The elder Beranger was neck-deep in these intrigues, and was even prosecuted after the discovery of one of the numerous conspiracies of the day, but acquitted for want of proof. He was the banker and money-broker of the party,–a wretched banker enough! The narrative of the son enables us to see what a miserable business the father was engaged in. This near view of political intriguers, of royalists driven to all manner of expedients and standing at bay, of adventurers who did not shrink from the use of any means, not even the infernal-machine, did not dispose the young man already imbued with republican sentiments to change them, and this initiation into the secrets of the party was not likely to inspire him with much respect for the future Restoration. He had too early seen men and things behind the scenes. His father, in consequence of his swindling transactions, made a bankruptcy, which reduced the son to poverty and filled him with grief and shame.

He was now twenty years old; he had courage and hope, and he already wrote verses on all sorts of subjects,–serious, religious, epic, and tragic. One day, when he was in especial distress, he made up a little packet of his best verses and sent them to Lucien Bonaparte, with a letter, in which he set forth his unhappy situation. Lucien loved literature, and piqued himself on being author and poet. He was pleased with the attempts of the young man, and made him a present of the salary of a thousand or twelve hundred francs to which he was entitled as member of the Institute. It was Beranger’s first step out of the poverty in which he had been plunged for several years, and he was indebted for the benefit to a Bonaparte, and to the most republican Bonaparte of the family. He was always especially grateful for it to Lucien, and somewhat to the Bonapartes in general.

Receiving a small appointment in the bureau of the University through the intervention of the Academician Arnault, a friend of Lucien Bonaparte, Beranger lived gayly during the last six years of the Empire. He managed to escape the conscription, and never shouldered a musket. He reserved himself to sing of military glory at a later day, but had no desire to share in it as soldier. He was elected into a singing club called _The Cellar_, all of whose members were songwriters and good fellows, presided over by Desaugiers, the lord of misrule and of jolly minstrels. Beranger, after his admission to the _Caveau_, at first contended with Desaugiers in his own style, but already a ground of seriousness and thought showed through his gayety. He wrote at this time his celebrated song of the _Roi d’Yvetot_, in which, while he caricatured the little play-king, the king in the cotton nightcap, he seemed to be slyly satirizing the great conquering Emperor himself.

The Empire fell, and Beranger hesitated for some time to take part against the Bourbons. It was not till after the battle of Waterloo and the return of Louis XVIII. under convoy of the allied armies, that he began to feel the passion of patriotism blaze up anew within him and dictate stinging songs which soon became darts of steel. Meanwhile he wrote pretty songs, in which a slight sentiment of melancholy mingled with and heightened the intoxication of wine and pleasure. _La bonne Vieille_ is his _chef-d’oeuvre_ in this style. He arranged the design of these little pieces carefully, sketching his subjects beforehand, and herein belongs to the French school, that old classic school which left nothing to chance. He composed his couplets slowly, even those which seem the most easy. Commonly the song came to him through the refrain;–he caught the butterfly by the wings;–when he had seized the refrain, he finished at intervals, and put in the nicer shadings at leisure. He wrote hardly ten songs a year at the time of his greatest fecundity. It has since been remarked that they smell of the lamp here and there; but at first no one had eyes except for the rose, the vine, and the laurel.

The Bourbons, brought back for the second time in 1815, committed all manner of blunders: they insulted the remains of the old _grande armee_; they shot Marshal Ney and many others; a horrible royalist reaction ensanguined the South of France. The Jesuit party insinuated itself at Court, and assumed to govern as in the high times of the confessors of Louis XIV. It was hoped to conquer the spirit of the Revolution, and to drive modern France back to the days before 1789; hence thousands of hateful things impossible to be realized, and thousands of ridiculous ones. Towards 1820 the liberal opposition organized itself in the Chambers and in the press. The Muse of Beranger came to its assistance under the mask of gay raillery. He was the angry bee that stung flying, and whose stings are not harmless; nay, he would fain have made them mortal to the enemy. He hated even Louis XVIII., a king who was esteemed tolerably wise, and more intelligent than his party. “I stick my pins,” said Beranger, “into the calves of Louis XVIII.” One must have seen the fat king in small-clothes, his legs as big as posts and round as pin-cushions, to appreciate all the point of the epigram.

Beranger had been very intimate since 1815 with the Deputy Manuel, a man of sense and courage, but very hostile to the Bourbons, and who, for words spoken from the Tribune, was expelled from the Chamber of Deputies and declared incapable of reelection. Though intimate with many influential members of the opposition, such as Laffitte the banker, and General Sebastiani, it was only with Manuel that Beranger perfectly agreed. It is by his side, in the same tomb, that he now reposes in Pere la Chaise, and after the death of Manuel he always slept on the mattress upon which his friend had breathed his last. Manuel and Beranger were ultra-inimical to the Restoration. They believed that it was irreconcilable with the modern spirit of France, with the common sense of the new form of society, and they accordingly did their best to goad and irritate it, never giving it any quarter. At certain times, other opposition deputies, such as General Foy, would have advised a more prudent course, which would not have rendered the Bourbons impossible by attacking them so fiercely as to push them to extremes. However this might have been, poetry always more at home in excess than in moderation. Beranger was all the more a poet at this period, that he was more impassioned. The Bourbons and the Jesuits, his two most violent antipathies, served him well, and made him write his best and most spirited songs. Hence his great success. The people, who never perceive nice shades of opinion, but love and hate absolutely, at once adopted Beranger as the singer of its loves and hatreds, the avenger of the old army, of national glory and freedom, and the inaugurator or prophet of the future. The spirit prisoned in these little couplets, these tiny bodies, is of amazing force, and has, one might almost say, a devilish audacity. In larger compositions, breath would doubtless have failed the poet,–the greater space would have been an injury to him. Even in songs he has a constrained air sometimes, but this constraint gave him more force. He produces the impression of superiority to his class.

Beranger had given up his little post at the University before declaring open war against the government. He was before long indicted, and in 1822 condemned to several months’ imprisonment, for having scandalized the throne and the altar. His popularity became at once boundless; he was sensible of it, and enjoyed it. “They are going to indict your songs,” said some one to him. “So much the better!” he replied,–“that will gilt-edge them.” He thought so well of this _gilding_, that in 1828, during the ministry of M. Martignac, a very moderate man and of a conciliatory semi-liberalism, he found means to get indicted again and to undergo a new condemnation, by attacks which some even of his friends then thought untimely. Once again Beranger was impassioned; he declared his enemies incurable and incorrigible; and soon came the ordinances of July, 1830, and the Revolution in their train, to prove him right.

In 1830, at the moment when the Revolution took place, the popularity of Beranger was at its height. His opinion was much deferred to in the course taken during and after “the three great days.” The intimate friend of most of the chiefs of the opposition who were now in power, of great influence with the young, and trusted by the people, it was essential that he should not oppose the plan of making the Duke of Orleans King. Beranger, in his Biography, speaks modestly of his part in these movements. In his conversations he attributed a great deal to himself. He loved to describe himself in the midst of the people who surrounded the Hotel of M. Laffitte, going and coming, listening to each, consulted by all, and continually sent for by Laffitte, who was confined to his armchair by a swollen foot. Seeing the hesitation prolonged, he whispered in Laffitte’s ear that it was time to decide, for, if they did not take the Duke of Orleans for King pretty soon, the Revolution was in danger of turning out an _emeute_. He gave this advice simply as a patriot, for he was not of the Orleans party. When he came out, his younger friends, the republicans, reproached him; but he replied, “It is not a king I want, but only a plank to get over the stream.” He set the first example of disrespect for the plank he thought so useful; indeed, the comparison itself is rather a contemptuous one.

He afterwards behaved, however, with great sense and wisdom. He declined all offices and honors, considering his part as political songster at an end. In 1833 he published a collection in which were remarked some songs of a higher order, less partisan, and in which he foreshadowed a broader and more peaceful democracy. After this he was silent, and as he was continually visited and consulted, he resolved upon leaving Paris for some years, in order to escape this annoyance. He went first to the neighborhood of Tours, and then to Fontainebleau; but the free, conversational life of Paris was too dear to him, and he returned to live in seclusion, though always much visited by his troops of friends, and much sought after. In leaving Paris during the first years of Louis Philippe’s reign, and _closing_, as he called it, _his consulting office_, his chief aim was to escape the questions, solicitations, and confidences of opposite parties, in all of which he continued to have many friends who would gladly have brought him over to their way of thinking. He did not wish to be any longer what he had been so much,–a consulting politician; but he did not cease to be a practical philosopher with a crowd of disciples, and a consulting democrat. Chateaubriand, Lamennais, Lamartine,–the chiefs of parties at first totally opposed to his own,–came to seek his friendship, and loved to repose and refresh themselves in his conversation. He enjoyed, a little mischievously, seeing one of them (Chateaubriand) lay aside his royalism, another (Lamennais) abjure his Catholicism, and the third (Lamartine) forget his former aristocracy, in visiting him. He looked upon this, and justly, as a homage paid to the manners and spirit of the age, of which he was the humble but inflexible representative.

When the Revolution of 1848 burst unexpectedly, he was not charmed with it,–nay, it made him even a little sad. Less a republican than a patriot, he saw immense danger for France, as he knew her, in the establishment of the pure republican form. He was of opinion that it was necessary to wear out the monarchy little by little,–that with time and patience it would fall of itself; but he had to do with an impatient people, and he lamented it. “We had a ladder to go down by,” said he, “and here we are jumping out of the window!” It was the same sentiment of patriotism, mingled with a certain almost mystical enthusiasm for the great personality of Napoleon, nourished and augmented with growing years, which made him accept the events of 1851-2 and the new Empire.

The religion of Beranger, which was so anti-Catholic, and which seems even to have dispensed with Christianity, reduced itself to a vague Deism, which in principle had too much the air of a pleasantry. His _Dieu des bonnes gens_, which he opposed to the God of the congregation and the preachers, could not be taken seriously by any one. Nevertheless, the poet, as he grew older, grew more and more attached to this symbol of a Deity, indulgent before all else, but very real and living, and in whom the poor and the suffering could put their trust. What passed in the days preceding his death has been much discussed, and many stories are told about it. He received, in fact, some visits from the curate of the parish of Saint Elizabeth, in which he lived. This curate had formerly officiated at Passy,–a little village near Paris, where Beranger had resided,–and was already acquainted with the poet. The conversations at these visits, according to the testimony of those best informed, amounted to very little; and the last time the curate came, just as he was going out, Beranger, already dying, said to him, “Your profession gives you the right to bless me; I also bless you;–pray for me, and for all the unfortunate!” The priest and the old man exchanged blessings,–the benedictions of two honest men, and nothing more.

Beranger had one rare quality, and it was fundamental with him,–obligingness, readiness to perform kind offices, humanity carried to the extent of Charity. He loved to busy himself for others. To some one who said that time lay heavy on his hands, he answered, “Then you have never occupied yourself about other people?” “Take more thought of others than of yourself” was his maxim. And he did so occupy himself,–not out of curiosity, but to aid, to succor with advice and with deeds. His time belonged to everybody,–to the humblest, the poorest, the first stranger who addressed him and told him his sorrows. Out of a very small income (at most, four or five thousand francs a year) he found means to give much. He loved, above all, to assist poor artisans, men of the people, who appealed to him; and he did it always without wounding the fibre of manhood in them. He loved everything that wore a blouse. He had, even stronger than the love of liberty, the love of equality, the great passion of the French.

He spent the last years of his life with an old friend of his youth by the name of Madame Judith. This worthy person died a few months before him, and he accompanied her remains to the church. He was seventy-seven years old when he died.

Estimating and comparing chiefly literary and poetic merits, some persons in France have been astonished that the obsequies of Beranger should have been so magnificently celebrated, while, but a few months before, the coffin of another poet, M. Alfred de Musset, had been followed by a mere handful of mourners; yet M. de Musset was capable of tones and flights which in inspiration and ardor surpassed the habitual