passed me with a shudder.
“Teaching is a terrible drudgery,” I said; “the labor and devotion of the true teacher are yet unrecognized by the world.”
“I am not afraid of the vexations,” she replied: “I am very fond of being with young people; yet I have been taught to think it was happier, if our affections could be somewhat more concentrated than–In short, I had better finish an awkward sentence, by saying that I do not feel quite ready to pledge myself to give up all possibilities connected with my New-England home.”
It was spoken with such sweet ingenuousness that I was only charmed. The simple sincerity of the confession seemed to me much better than the flippant jest and pert talk with which I had heard such subjects treated while making my observations upon what my city-acquaintances had assured me was good society. Is it not Sterling who exclaims that a luxurious and polished life without a true sense of the beautiful and the great is more barren and sad to see than that of the ignorant and the brutalized? And if this be true, how shall we imagine a greater satisfaction than to find the fresh truth of Nature set in a polished and graceful form? For since it is through form that we take cognizance of all we love and all we believe, it is well that the sign and idea should merge, and come complete and whole to govern us aright.
I should have no objection to meditating after this manner for a page or two, as well as further hinting what important nothings sparkled upon Doctor Dastick’s piazza that pleasant summer night. But as I must curtail this biographical fragment in some part or other, it seems best to do it about that portion where I may trust that the experience of every reader will supply the deficiency.
How harshly sounded the creaking of the furniture, and how strangely commercial and matter-of-fact the voices of the people that announced the conclusion of the lecture! Mrs. Hunesley managed to get out among the first, and was heartily glad to see my newly acquired friend, calling her, “My dear Kate,”–which I thought was a very pretty name,–and saying that she had not expected her quite so soon.
I looked into the parlor and saw the Prowley party tumbling over chairs, and scaling settees, in their haste to meet the cooling breezes of the piazza. But when they finally accomplished their purpose, and I was advancing with inquiries and congratulations, I started at seeing the surprise depicted in the countenance of Miss Hurribattle, as she gazed in the direction where I stood.
“Why, Aunt Patience!” exclaimed a voice at my side.
“Why, Kate Hurribattle!” was the response.
“How in the name of wonder did you get to Foxden?”
“How under the sun did _you_ get to Foxden?”
“Why _I_ am here naturally enough as the guest of my friend Colonel Prowley.”
“And _I_ am here naturally enough as the guest of my friend Mrs. Hunesley.”
Now if I had dramatized the little event I have been trying to relate, I should have reached the precise point where the auditor would button up his coat, put on his hat, let his patent spring-seat go up with a click, and begin to leave the theatre with all expedition. What would it matter to him that I had prepared a circumstantial account of how all petty objections were got over, or that I had elaborated a peculiarly felicitous _tag_ which Colonel Prowley would speak at a few backs as they disappeared into the lobby? The auditor referred to has got an inkling of how things are to end, and can guess out the particulars as he hurries off to his business. And here will be observed our decided advantage in having made sure of the Moral by a vigorous assertion of the same at the commencement of this narrative; for, thus relieved of the necessity of a final flutter into the empyrean of ethics, we may part company in a few easy sentences.
Although the circumstances I have set down, from being awkwardly packed in a small compass, may not appear to fit into each other with all the exactness of a dissecting-map, I am sure, that, as they really occurred spread over a necessary time, they seemed natural and simple enough. Mrs. Hunesley, Doctor Dastick’s favorite niece, was the schoolmate of Miss Kate Hurribattle, and what more likely than that she should invite her friend to pass a few weeks with her at her summer-home in the country? And could there be a greater necessity than that, meeting daily as we did through those lovely August weeks, she should become–in short, that I should marry Miss Hurribattle?
And when this foolish little romance, which had taken nebulous outline in the fancy of Colonel Prowley, suddenly fell at his feet a serious indubitability, the dear, delighted old gentleman was the first to declare, that, as our engagement had existed for the last seventy years, it certainly did not seem worth while to wait much longer. At all events, we did not wait longer than the following Thanksgiving; since which period my experience leads me to declare, that, if the Miss Hurribattle of my great-great-uncle’s day was at all comparable to the member of her family I met at Foxden, my respected relative made a great mistake in living a bachelor.
RESIGNATION.
You know how a little child of three or four years old kicks and howls, if it do not get its own way. You know how quietly a grown-up man takes it, when ordinary things fall out otherwise than he wished. A letter, a newspaper, a magazine, does not arrive by the post on the morning on which it had been particularly wished for, and counted on with certainty. The day proves rainy, when a fine day was specially desirable. The grown-up man is disappointed; but he soon gets reconciled to the existing state of facts. He did not much expect that things would turn out as he wished them. Yes: there is nothing like the habit of being disappointed, to make a man resigned when disappointment comes, and to enable him to take it quietly. And a habit of practical resignation grows upon most men, as they advance through life.
You have often seen a poor beggar, most probably an old man, with some lingering remains of respectability in his faded appearance, half ask an alms of a passer-by; and you have seen him, at a word of repulse, or even on finding no notice taken of his request, meekly turn away: too beaten and sick at heart for energy; drilled into a dreary resignation by the long custom of finding everything go against him in this world. You may have known a poor cripple, who sits all day by the side of the pavement of a certain street, with a little bundle of tracts in his hand, watching those who pass by, in the hope that they may give him something. I wonder, indeed, how the police suffer him to be there: for, though ostensibly selling the tracts, he is really begging. Hundreds of times in the long day, he must see people approaching, and hope that they may spare him a halfpenny, and find ninety-nine out of each hundred pass without noticing him. It must be a hard school of Resignation. Disappointments without number have subdued that poor creature into bearing one disappointment more with scarce an appreciable stir of heart. But, on the other hand, kings, great nobles, and the like, have been known, even to the close of life, to violently curse and swear, if things went against them; going the length of stamping and blaspheming even at rain and wind, and branches of trees and plashes of mud, which were of course guiltless of any design of giving offence to these eminent individuals. There was a great monarch, who, when any little cross-accident befell him, was wont to fling himself upon the floor, and there to kick and scream and tear his hair. And around him, meanwhile, stood his awe-stricken attendants: all doubtless ready to assure him that there was something noble and graceful in his kicking and screaming, and that no human being had ever before with such dignity and magnanimity torn his hair. My friend Mr. Smith tells me that in his early youth he had a (very slight) acquaintance with a great prince, of elevated rank and of vast estates. That great prince came very early to his greatness; and no one had ever ventured, since he could remember, to tell him he had ever said or done wrong. Accordingly, the prince had never learned to control himself, nor grown accustomed to bear quietly what he did not like. And when any one, in conversation, related to him something which he disapproved, he used to start from his chair, and rush up and down the apartment, furiously flapping his hands together, till he had thus blown off the steam produced by the irritation of his nervous system. That prince was a good man: and so aware was he of his infirmity, that, when in these fits of passion, he never suffered himself to say a single word: being aware that he might say what he would afterwards regret. And though he could not wholly restrain himself, the entire wrath he felt passed off in flapping. And after flapping for a few minutes, he sat down again, a reasonable man once more. All honor to him! For my friend Smith tells me that that prince was surrounded by toadies, who were ready to praise everything he might do, even to his flapping. And in particular, there was one humble retainer, who, whenever his master flapped, was wont to hold up his hands in an ecstasy of admiration, exclaiming, “It is the flapping of a god, and not of a man!”
Now all this lack of Resignation on the part of princes and kings comes of the fact, that they are so far like children that they have not become accustomed to be resisted, and to be obliged to forego what they would like. Resignation comes by the habit of being disappointed, and of finding things go against you. It is, in the case of ordinary human beings, just what they expect. Of course, you remember the adage, “Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed.” I have a good deal to say about that adage. Reasonableness of expectation is a great and good thing: despondency is a thing to be discouraged and put down as far as may be. But meanwhile let me say, that the corollary drawn from that dismal beatitude seems to me unfounded in fact. I should say just the contrary. I should say, “Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he will very likely be disappointed.” You know, my reader, whether things do not generally happen the opposite way from that which you expected. Did you ever try to keep off an evil you dreaded by interposing this buffer? Did you ever think you might perhaps prevent a trouble from coming by constantly anticipating it,–keeping, meanwhile, an under-thought that things rarely happen as you anticipate them, and thus that your anticipation of the thing might possibly keep it away? Of course you have; for you are a human being. And in all common cases, a watch might as well think to keep a skilful watchmaker in ignorance of the way in which its movements are produced, as a human being think to prevent another human being from knowing exactly how he will think and feel in given circumstances. We have watched the working of our own watches far too closely and long, my friends, to have the least difficulty in understanding the great principles upon which the watches of other men go. I cannot look inside your breast, my reader, and see the machinery that is working there: I mean the machinery of thought and feeling. But I know exactly how it works, nevertheless; for I have long watched a machinery precisely like it.
There are a great many people in this world who feel that things are all wrong, that they have missed stays in life, that they are beaten,–and yet who don’t much mind. They are indurated by long use. They do not try to disguise from themselves the facts. There are some men who diligently try to disguise the facts, and who in some measure succeed in doing so. I have known a self-sufficient and disagreeable clergyman who had a church in a large city. Five-sixths of the seats in the church were quite empty; yet the clergyman often talked of what a good congregation he had, with a confidence which would have deceived any one who had not seen it. I have known a church where it was agony to any one with an ear to listen to the noise produced when the people were singing; yet the clergyman often talked of what splendid music he had. I have known an entirely briefless barrister, whose friends gave out that the sole reason why he had no briefs was that he did not want any. I have known students who did not get the prizes for which they competed, but who declared that the reason of their failure was, that, though they competed for the prizes, they did not wish to get them. I have known a fast young woman, after many engagements made and broken, marry as the last resort a brainless and penniless blackguard; yet all her family talk in big terms of what a delightful connection she was making. Now, where all that self-deception is genuine, let us be glad to see it; and let us not, like Mr. Snarling, take a spiteful pleasure in undeceiving those who are so happy to be deceived. In most cases, indeed, such trickery deceives nobody. But where it truly deceives those who practise it, even if it deceive nobody else, you see there is no true Resignation. A man who has made a mess of life has no need to be resigned, if he fancies he has succeeded splendidly. But I look with great interest, and often with deep respect, at the man or woman who feels that life has been a failure,–a failure, that is, as regards _this_ world,–and yet who is quite resigned. Yes: whether it be the un-soured old maid, sweet-tempered, sympathetic in others’ joys, God’s kind angel in the house of sorrow,–or the unappreciated genius, quiet, subdued, pleased to meet even one who understands him amid a community which does not,–or the kind-hearted clever man to whom eminent success has come too late, when those were gone whom it would have made happy: I reverence and love, more than I can express, the beautiful natures I have known thus subdued and resigned.
Yes: human beings get indurated. When you come to know well the history of a great many people, you will find that it is wonderful what they have passed through. Most people have suffered a very great deal, since they came into this world. Yet in their appearance there is no particular trace of it all. You would not guess, from looking at them, how hard and how various their lot has been. I once knew a woman, rather more than middle-aged. I knew her well, and saw her almost every day, for several years, before I learned that the homely Scotchwoman had seen distant lands, and had passed through very strange ups and downs, before she settled into the quiet, orderly life in which I knew her. Yet when spoken to kindly, by one who expressed surprise that all these trials had left so little trace, the inward feeling, commonly suppressed, burst bitterly out, and she exclaimed, “It’s a wonder that I’m living at all!” And it is a wonder that a great many people are living, and looking so cheerful and so well as they do, when you think what fiery passion, what crushing sorrow, what terrible losses, what bitter disappointments, what hard and protracted work they have gone through. Doubtless, great good comes of it. All wisdom, all experience, comes of suffering. I should not care much for the counsel of the man whose life had been one long sunshiny holiday. There is greater depth in the philosophy of Mr. Dickens than a great portion of his readers discern. You are ready to smile at the singular way in which Captain Cuttle commended his friend Jack Bunsby as a man of extraordinary wisdom, whose advice on any point was of inestimable value. “Here’s a man,” said Captain Cuttle, “who has been more beaten about the head than any other living man!” I hail the words as the recognition of a great principle. To Mr. Bunsby it befell in a literal sense; but we have all been (in a moral sense) a good deal beaten about both the head and the heart before we grew good for much. Out of the travail of his nature, out of the sorrowful history of his past life, the poet or the moralist draws the deep thought and feeling which find so straight a way to the hearts of other men. Do you think Mr. Tennyson would ever have been the great poet he is, if he had not passed through that season of great grief which has left its noble record in “In Memoriam”? And a youthful preacher, of vivid imagination and keen feeling, little fettered by anything in the nature of good taste, may by strong statements and a fiery manner draw a mob of unthinking hearers: but thoughtful men and women will not find anything in all _that_, that awakens the response of their inner nature in its truest depths; they must have religious instruction into which real experience has been transfused; and the worth of the instruction will be in direct proportion to the amount of real experience which is embodied in it. And after all, it is better to be wise and good than to be gay and happy, if we must choose between the two things; and it is worth while to be severely beaten about the head, if _that_ is the condition on which alone we can gain true wisdom. True wisdom is cheap at almost any price. But it does not follow at all that you will be happy (in the vulgar sense) in direct proportion as you are wise. I suppose most middle-aged people, when they receive the ordinary kind wish at New-Year’s time of a Happy New-Year, feel that _happy_ is not quite the word; and feel that, too, though well aware that they have abundant reason for gratitude to a kind Providence. It is not _here_ that we shall ever be happy,–that is, completely and perfectly happy. Something will always be coming to worry and distress. And a hundred sad possibilities hang over us: some of them only too certainly and quickly drawing near. Yet people are content, in a kind of way. They have learnt the great lesson of Resignation.
* * * * *
There are many worthy people who would be quite fevered and flurried by good fortune, if it were to come to any very great degree. It would injure their heart. As for bad fortune, they can stand it nicely, they have been accustomed to it so long. I have known a very hard-wrought man, who had passed, rather early in life, through very heavy and protracted trials. I have heard him say, that, if any malicious enemy wished to kill him, the course would be to make sure that tidings of some signal piece of prosperity should arrive by post on each of six or seven successive days. It would quite unhinge and unsettle him, he said. His heart would go: his nervous system would break down. People to whom pieces of good-luck come rare and small have a great curiosity to know how a man feels when he is suddenly told that he has drawn one of the greatest prizes in the lottery of life. The kind of feeling, of course, will depend entirely on the kind of man. Yet very great prizes, in the way of dignity and duty, do for the most part fall to men who in some measure deserve them, or who at least are not conspicuously undeserving of them and unfit for them. So that it is almost impossible that the great news should elicit merely some unworthy explosion of gratified self-conceit. The feeling would in almost every case be deeper and worthier. One would like to be sitting at breakfast with a truly good man, when the letter from the Prime-Minister comes in, offering him the Archbishopric of Canterbury. One would like to see how he would take it. Quietly, I have no doubt. Long preparation has fitted the man who reaches that position for taking it quietly. A recent Chancellor publicly stated how _he_ felt, when offered the Great Seal. His first feeling, that good man said, was of gratification that he had fairly reached the highest reward of the profession to which he had given his life; but the feeling which speedily supplanted _that_ was an overwhelming sense of his responsibility and a grave doubt as to his qualifications. I have always believed, and sometimes said, that good fortune–not so great or so sudden as to injure one’s nerves or heart, but kindly and equable–has a most wholesome effect upon human character. I believe that the happier a man is, the better and kinder he will be. The greater part of unamiability, ill-temper, impatience, bitterness, and uncharitableness comes out of unhappiness. It is because a man is so miserable that he is such a sour, suspicious, fractious, petted creature. I was amused, this morning, to read in the newspaper an account of a very small incident which befell the new Primate of England on his journey back to London, after being enthroned at Canterbury. The reporter of that small incident takes occasion to record that the Archbishop had quite charmed his travelling-companions in the railway-carriage by the geniality and kindliness of his manner. I have no doubt he did. I am sure he is a truly good Christian man. But think of what a splendid training for producing geniality and kindliness he has been going through for a great number of years! Think of the moral influences which have been bearing on him for the last few weeks! We should all be kindly and genial, if we had the same chance of being so. But if Dr. Longley had a living of a hundred pounds a year, a fretful, ailing wife, a number of half-fed and half-educated little children, a dirty, miserable house, a bleak country round, and a set of wrong-headed and insolent parishioners to keep straight, I venture to say he would have looked, and been, a very different man in that railway-carriage running up to London. Instead of the genial smiles that delighted his fellow-travellers, (according to the newspaper-story,) his face would have been sour, and his speech would have been snappish; he would have leaned back in the corner of a second-class carriage, sadly calculating the cost of his journey, and how part of it might be saved by going without any dinner. Oh, if I found a four-leaved shamrock, I would undertake to make a mighty deal of certain people I know! I would put an end to their weary schemings to make the ends meet. I would cut off all those wretched cares which jar miserably on the shaken nerves. I know the burst of thankfulness and joy that would come, if some dismal load, never to be cast off, were taken away. And I would take it off. I would clear up the horrible muddle. I would make them happy: and in doing _that_, I know that I should make them good.
* * * * *
But I have sought the four-leaved shamrock for a long time, and never have found it; and so I am growing subdued to the conviction that I never shall. Let us go back to the matter of Resignation, and think a little longer about _that_.
Resignation, in any human being, means that things are not as you would wish, and yet that you are content.
Who has all he wishes? There are many houses in this world in which Resignation is the best thing that can be felt any more. The bitter blow has fallen; the break has been made; the empty chair is left (perhaps a very little chair); and never more, while Time goes on, can things be as they were fondly wished and hoped. Resignation would need to be cultivated by human beings; for all round us there is a multitude of things very different from what we would wish. Not in your house, not in your family, not in your street, not in your parish, not in your country, and least of all in yourself, can you have things as you would wish. And you have your choice of two alternatives. You must either fret yourself into a nervous fever, or you must cultivate the habit of Resignation. And very often Resignation does not mean that you are at all reconciled to a thing, but just that you feel you can do nothing to mend it. Some friend, to whom you are really attached, and whom you often see, vexes and worries you by some silly and disagreeable habit,–some habit which it is impossible you should ever like, or ever even overlook; yet you try to make up your mind to it, because it cannot be helped, and you would rather submit to it than lose your friend. You hate the east-wind: it withers and pinches you, in body and soul: yet you cannot live in a certain beautiful city without feeling the east-wind many days in the year. And that city’s advantages and attractions are so many and great that no sane man with sound lungs would abandon the city merely to escape the east-wind. Yet, though resigned to the east-wind, you are anything but reconciled to it.
Resignation is not always a good thing. Sometimes it is a very bad thing. You should never be resigned to things continuing wrong, when you may rise and set them right. I dare say, in the Romish Church, there were good men before Luther who were keenly alive to the errors and evils that had crept into it, but who, in despair of making things better, tried sadly to fix their thoughts upon other subjects: who took to illuminating missals, or constructing systems of logic, or cultivating vegetables in the garden of the monastery, or improving the music in the chapel: quietly resigned to evils they judged irremediable. Great reformers have not been resigned men. Luther was not resigned; Howard was not resigned; Fowell Buxton was not resigned; George Stephenson was not resigned. And there is hardly a nobler sight than that of a man who determines that he will NOT make up his mind to the continuance of some great evil: who determines that he will give his life to battling with that evil to the last: who determines that either that evil shall extinguish him, or he shall extinguish it. I reverence the strong, sanguine mind, that resolves to work a revolution to better things, and that is not afraid to hope it _can_ work a revolution. And perhaps, my reader, we should both reverence it all the more that we find in ourselves very little like it. It is a curious thing, and a sad thing, to remark in how many people there is too much resignation. It kills out energy. It is a weak, fretful, unhappy thing. People are reconciled, in a sad sort of way, to the fashion in which things go on. You have seen a poor, slatternly mother, in a way-side cottage, who has observed her little children playing in the road before it, in the way of passing carriages, angrily ordering the little things to come away from their dangerous and dirty play; yet, when the children disobey her, and remain where they were, just saying no more, making no farther effort. You have known a master tell his man-servant to do something about stable or garden, yet, when the servant does not do it, taking no notice: seeing that he has been disobeyed, yet wearily resigned, feeling that there is no use in always fighting. And I do not speak of the not unfrequent cases in which the master, after giving his orders, comes to discover that it is best they should not be carried out, and is very glad to see them disregarded: I mean when he is dissatisfied that what he has directed is not done, and wishes that it were done, and feels worried by the whole affair, yet is so devoid of energy as to rest in a fretful resignation. Sometimes there is a sort of sense as if one had discharged his conscience by making a weak effort in the direction of doing a thing, an effort which had not the slightest chance of being successful. When I was a little boy, many years since, I used to think this; and I was led to thinking it by remarking a singular characteristic in the conduct of a school-companion. In those days, if you were chasing some other boy who had injured or offended you, with the design of retaliation, if you found you could not catch him, by reason of his superior speed, you would have recourse to the following expedient. If your companion was within a little space of you, though a space you felt you could not make less, you would suddenly stick out one of your feet, which would hook round his, and he, stumbling over it, would fall. I trust I am not suggesting a mischievous and dangerous trick to any boy of the present generation. Indeed, I have the firmest belief that existing boys know all we used to know, and possibly more. All this is by way of rendering intelligible what I have to say of my old companion. He was not a good runner. And when another boy gave him a sudden flick with a knotted handkerchief, or the like, he had little chance of catching that other boy. Yet I have often seen him, when chasing another, before finally abandoning the pursuit, stick out his foot in the regular way, though the boy he was chasing was yards beyond his reach. Often did the present writer meditate on that phenomenon, in the days of his boyhood. It appeared curious that it should afford some comfort to the evaded pursuer, to make an offer at upsetting the escaping youth,–an offer which could not possibly be successful. But very often, in after-life, have I beheld in the conduct of grown-up men and women the moral likeness of that futile sticking-out of the foot. I have beheld human beings who lived in houses always untidy and disorderly, or whose affairs were in a horrible confusion and entanglement, who now and then seemed roused to a a feeling that this would not do, who querulously bemoaned their miserable lot, and made some faint and futile attempt to set things right, attempts which never had a chance to succeed, and which ended in nothing. Yet it seemed somehow to pacify the querulous heart. I have known a clergyman, in a parish with a bad population, seem suddenly to waken up to a conviction that he must do something to mend matters, and set agoing some weak little machinery, which could produce no appreciable result, and which came to a stop in a few weeks. Yet that faint offer appeared to discharge the claims of conscience, and after it the clergyman remained long time in a comatose state of unhealthy Resignation. But it is a miserable and a wrong kind of Resignation which dwells in that man who sinks down, beaten and hopeless, in the presence of a recognized evil. Such a man may be in a sense resigned, but, he cannot possibly be content.
If you should ever, when you have reached middle age, turn over the diary or the letters you wrote in the hopeful though foolish days when you were eighteen or twenty, you will be aware how quietly and gradually the lesson of Resignation has been taught you. You would have got into a terrible state of excitement, if any one had told you then that you would have to forego your most cherished hopes and wishes of that time; and it would have tried you even more severely to be assured that in not many years you would not care a single straw for the things and the persons who were then uppermost in your mind and heart. What an entirely new set of friends and interests is that which now surrounds you! and how completely the old ones are gone: gone, like the sunsets you remember in the summers of your childhood; gone, like the primroses that grew in the woods where you wandered as a boy! Said my friend Smith to me, a few days ago: “You remember Miss Jones, and all about that? I met her yesterday, after ten years. She is a fat, middle-aged, ordinary-looking woman. What a terrific fool I was!” Smith spoke to me in the confidence of friendship; yet I think he was a little mortified at the heartiness with which I agreed with him on the subject of his former folly. He had got over it completely; and in seeing that he was (at a certain period) a fool, he had come to discern that of which his friends had always been aware. Of course, early interests do not always die out. You remember Dr. Chalmers, and the ridiculous exhibition about the wretched little likeness of an early sweetheart, not seen for forty years, and long since in her grave. You remember the singular way in which he signified his remembrance of her, in his famous and honored age. I don’t mean the crying, nor the walking up and down the garden-walk calling her by fine names. I mean the taking out his card: not his _carte_; you could understand _that_: but his visiting-card bearing his name, and sticking it behind the portrait with two wafers. Probably it pleased him to do so; and assuredly it did harm to no one else. And we have all heard of the like things. Early affections are sometimes, doubtless, cherished in the memory of the old. But still, more material interests come in, and the old affection is crowded out of its old place in the heart. And so those comparatively fanciful disappointments sit lightly. The romance is gone. The mid-day sun beats down, and _there_ lies the dusty way. When the cantankerous and unamiable mother of Christopher North stopped his marriage with a person at least as respectable as herself, on the ground that the person was not good enough, we are told that the future professor nearly went mad, and that he never quite got over it. But really, judging from his writings and his biography, he bore up under it, after a little, wonderfully well.
But looking back to the days which the old yellow letters bring back, you will think to yourself, Where are the hopes and anticipations of that time? You expected to be a great man, no doubt. Well, you know you are not. You are a small man, and never will be anything else; yet you are quite resigned. If there be an argument which stirs me to indignation at its futility, and to wonder that any mortal ever regarded it as of the slightest force, it is that which is set out in the famous soliloquy in “Cato,” as to the Immortality of the Soul. Will any sane man say, that, if in this world you wish for a thing very much, and anticipate it very clearly and confidently, you are therefore sure to get it? If that were so, many a little schoolboy would end by driving his carriage and four, who ends by driving no carriage at all. I have heard of a man whose private papers were found after his death all written over with his signature as he expected it would be when he became Lord Chancellor. Let us say his peerage was to be as Lord Smith. There it was, SMITH, C., SMITH, C., written in every conceivable fashion, so that the signature, when needed, might be easy and imposing. That man had very vividly anticipated the woolsack, the gold robe, and all the rest. It need hardly be said, he attained none of these. The famous argument, you know of course, is, that man has a great longing to be immortal, and that therefore he is sure to be immortal. Rubbish! It is not true that any longing after immortality exists in the heart of a hundredth portion of the race. And if it were true, it would prove immortality no more than the manifold signatures of SMITH, C., proved that Smith was indeed to be Chancellor. No: we cling to the doctrine of a Future Life; we could not live without it; but we believe it, not because of undefined longings within ourselves, not because of reviving plants and flowers, not because of the chrysalis and the butterfly,–but because “our Saviour, Jesus Christ, hath abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.”
There is something very curious, and very touching, in thinking how clear and distinct, and how often recurring, were our early anticipations of things that were never to be. In this world, the fact is for the most part the opposite of what it should be to give force to Plato’s (or Cato’s) argument: the thing you vividly anticipate is the thing that is least likely to come. The thing you don’t much care for, the thing you don’t expect, is the likeliest. And even if the event prove what you anticipated, the circumstances, and the feeling of it, will be quite different from what you anticipated. A certain little girl three years old was told that in a little while she was to go with her parents to a certain city, a hundred miles off,–a city which may be called Altenburg as well as anything else. It was a great delight to her to anticipate that journey, and to anticipate it very circumstantially. It was a delight to her to sit down at evening on her father’s knee, and to tell him all about how it would be in going to Altenburg. It was always the same thing. Always, first, how sandwiches would be made,–how they would all get into the carriage, (which would come round to the door,) and drive away to a certain railway-station,–how they would get their tickets, and the train would come up, and they would all get into a carriage together, and lean back in corners, and eat the sandwiches, and look out of the windows, and so on. But when the journey was actually made, every single circumstance in the little girl’s anticipations proved wrong. Of course, they were not intentionally made wrong. Her parents would have carried out to the letter, if they could, what the little thing had so clearly pictured and so often repeated. But it proved to be needful to go by an entirely different way and in an entirely different fashion. All those little details, dwelt on so much, and with so much interest, were things never to be. It is even so with the anticipations of larger and older children. How distinctly, how fully, my friend, we have pictured out to our minds a mode of life, a home and the country round it, and the multitude of little things which make up the habitude of being, which we long since resigned ourselves to knowing could never prove realities! No doubt, it is all right and well. Even Saint Paul, with all his gift of prophecy, was not allowed to foresee what was to happen to himself. You know how he wrote that he would do a certain thing, “so soon as I shall see how it will go with me.”
But our times are in the Best Hand. And the one thing about our lot, my reader, that we may think of with perfect contentment, is that they are so. I know nothing more admirable in spirit, and few things more charmingly expressed, than that little poem by Mrs. Waring which sets out that comfortable thought. You know it, of course. You should have it in your memory; and let it be one of the first things your children learn by heart. It may well come next after, “O God of Bethel”: it breathes the self-same tone. And let me close these thoughts with one of its verses:–
“There are briers besetting every path, Which call for patient care:
There is a cross in every lot,
And an earnest need for prayer:
But a lowly heart that leans on Thee Is happy anywhere!”
THE FLAG.
There’s a flag hangs over my threshold, whose folds are more dear to me Than the blood that thrills in my bosom its earnest of liberty; And dear are the stars it harbors in its sunny field of blue As the hope of a further heaven that lights all our dim lives through.
But now should my guests be merry, the house is in holiday guise, Looking out through its burnished windows like a score of welcoming eyes. Come hither, my brothers who wander in saintliness and in sin! Come hither, ye pilgrims of Nature! my heart doth invite you in.
My wine is not of the choicest, yet bears it an honest brand; And the bread that I bid you lighten I break with no sparing hand; But pause, ere you pass to taste it, one act must accomplished be: Salute the flag in its virtue, before ye sit down with me.
The flag of our stately battles, not struggles of wrath and greed: Its stripes were a holy lesson, its spangles a deathless creed; ‘T was red with the blood of freemen, and white with the fear of the foe, And the stars that fight in their courses ‘gainst tyrants its symbols know.
Come hither, thou son of my mother! we were reared in the self-same arms;
Thou hast many a pleasant gesture, thy mind hath its gifts and charms; But my heart is as stern to question as mine eyes are of sorrows full: Salute the flag in its virtue, or pass on where others rule.
Thou lord of a thousand acres, with heaps of uncounted gold, The steeds of thy stall are haughty, thy lackeys cunning and bold: I envy no jot of thy splendor, I rail at thy follies none: Salute the flag in its virtue, or leave my poor house alone.
Fair lady with silken trappings, high waving thy stainless plume, We welcome thee to our numbers, a flower of costliest bloom: Let a hundred maids live widowed to furnish thy bridal bed; But pause where the flag doth question, and bend thy triumphant head.
Take down now your flaunting banner, for a scout comes breathless and pale,
With the terror of death upon him; of failure is all his tale: “They have fled while the flag waved o’er them! they’ve turned to the foe their back!
They are scattered, pursued, and slaughtered! the fields are all rout and wrack!”
Pass hence, then, the friends I gathered, a goodly company! All ye that have manhood in you, go, perish for Liberty! But I and the babes God gave me will wait with uplifted hearts, With the firm smile ready to kindle, and the will to perform our parts.
When the last true heart lies bloodless, when the fierce and the false have won,
I’ll press in turn to my bosom each daughter and either son; Bid them loose the flag from its bearings, and we’ll lay us down to rest With the glory of home about us, and its freedom locked in our breast.
WET-WEATHER WORK.
BY A FARMER.
I.
It is raining; and being in-doors, I look out from my library-window, across a quiet country-road, so near that I could toss my pen into the middle of it.
A thatched stile is opposite, flanked by a straggling hedge of Osage-orange; and from the stile the ground falls away in green and gradual slope to a great plateau of measured and fenced fields, checkered, a month since, with bluish lines of Swedes, with the ragged purple of mangels, and the feathery emerald-green of carrots. There are umber-colored patches of fresh-turned furrows; here and there the mossy, luxurious verdure of new-springing rye; gray stubble; the ragged brown of discolored, frost-bitten rag-weed; next, a line of tree-tops, thickening as they drop to the near bed of a river, and beyond the river-basin showing again, with tufts of hemlock among naked oaks and maples; then roofs, cupolas; ambitious lookouts of suburban houses, spires, belfries, turrets: all these commingling in a long line of white, brown, and gray, which in sunny weather is backed by purple hills, and flanked one way by a shining streak of water, and the other by a stretch of low, wooded mountains that turn from purple to blue, and so blend with the northern sky.
Is the picture clear? A road; a farm-flat of party-colored checkers; a near wood, that conceals the sunken meadow of a river; a farther wood, that skirts a town,–that seems to overgrow the town, so that only a confused line of roofs, belfries, spires, towers, rise above the wood; and these tallest spires and turrets lying in relief against a purple hill-side, that is as far beyond the town as the town is beyond my window; and the purple hill-side trending southward to a lake-like gleam of water, where a light-house shines upon a point; and northward, as I said, these same purple hills bearing away to paler purple, and then to blue, and then to haze.
Thus much is seen, when I look directly eastward; but by an oblique glance southward (always from my library-window) the checkered farm-land is repeated in long perspective: here and there is a farm-house with its clustered out-buildings; here and there a blotch of wood, or of orcharding; here and there a bright sheen of winter-grain; and the level ends only where a slight fringe of tree-tops, and the iron cordon of a railway that leaps over a marshy creek upon trestle-work, separate it from Long Island Sound.
To the north, under such oblique glance as can be caught, the farm-lands in smaller inclosures stretch half a mile to the skirts of a quiet village. A few tall chimneys smoke there lazily, and below them you see as many quick and repeated puffs of white steam. Two white spires and a tower are in bold relief against the precipitous basaltic cliff, at whose foot the village seems to nestle. Yet the mountain is not wholly precipitous; for the columnar masses been fretted away by a thousand frosts, making a sloping _debris_ below, and leaving above the iron-yellow scars of fresh cleavage, the older blotches of gray, and the still older stain of lichens. Nor is the summit bald, but tufted with dwarf cedars and oaks, which, as they file away on either flank, mingle with a heavier growth of hickories and chest-nuts. A few stunted kalmias and hemlock-spruces have found foothold in the clefts upon the face of the rock, showing a tawny green, that blends prettily with the scars, lichens, and weather-stains of the cliff; all which show under a sunset light richly and changefully as the breast of a dove.
But just now there is no glow of sunset; raining still. Indeed, I do not know why I should have described at such length a mere landscape, (than which I know few fairer,) unless because of a rainy day it is always in my eye, and that now, having invited a few outsiders to such entertainment as may belong to my wet farm-days, I should present to them at once my oldest acquaintance,–the view from my library-window.
But as yet it is only coarsely outlined. We may some day return to it with a fond particularity; for let me warn the reader that I have that love of such scenes, nay, for the very verdure of the lawn, that I could put an ink-mark for every blade of the fresh-springing grass, and yet feel that the tale of its beauty, and of its emerald wealth, were not half told.
This day we spend in-doors, and busy ourselves with the whims, doctrines, and economics of a few
OLD-TIME FARMERS.
The shelves where they rest in vellum and in dust are only an arm’s-length from the window; so that I can relieve the stiff classicism of Flaxman’s rendering of the “Works and Days,” or the tedious iteration of Columella and Crescenzio, by a glance outside into the rain-cloud, under which lies always the checkered illustration of the farming of to-day, and beyond which the spires stand in sentinel.
Hesiod is currently reckoned one of the oldest farm-writers; but there is not enough in his homely poem (“Works and Days”) out of which to conjure a farm-system. He gives good advice, indeed, about the weather, about ploughing when the ground is not too wet, about the proper timber to put to a plough-beam, about building a house, and taking a bride. But, on the other hand, he gives very bad advice, where, as in Book II., (line 244,) he recommends to stint the oxen in winter, and (line 285) to put three parts of water to the Biblian wine.
Mr. Gladstone notes the fact that Homer talks only in a grandiose way of rural life and employments, as if there were no small landholders in his day; but Hesiod, who must have lived within a century of Homer, with his modest homeliness, does not confirm this view. He tells us a farmer should keep two ploughs, and be cautious how he lends either of them. His household stipulations, too, are most moderate, whether on the score of the bride, the maid, or the “forty-year-old” ploughman; and for guardianship of the premises the proprietor is recommended to keep “a sharp-toothed cur.”
This reminds us how Ulysses, on his return from voyaging, found seated round his good bailiff Eumaeus four savage watch-dogs, who straightway (and here Homer must have nodded) attack their old master, and are driven off only by a good pelting of stones.
This Eumaeus, by the way, may be regarded as the Homeric representative farmer, as well as bailiff and swineherd,–the great original of Gurth, who might have prepared a supper for Cedric the Saxon very much as Eumaeus extemporized one upon his Greek farm for Ulysses. Pope shall tell of this bit of cookery in rhyme that has a ring of the Rappahannock:–
“His vest succinct then girding round his waist, Forth rushed the swain with hospitable haste, Straight to the lodgements of his herd he run, Where the fat porkers slept beneath the sun; Of two his cutlass launched the spouting blood; These quartered, singed, and fixed on forks of wood, All hasty on the hissing coals he threw; And, smoking, back the tasteful viands drew, Broachers, and all.”
This is roast pig: nothing more elegant or digestible. For the credit of Greek farmers, I am sorry that Eumaeus has nothing better to offer his landlord,–the most abominable dish, Charles Lamb and his pleasant fable to the contrary notwithstanding, that was ever set before a Christian.
To return to Hesiod, we suspect that he was only a small farmer–if he had ever farmed at all–in the foggy latitude of Boeotia, and knew nothing of the sunny wealth in the south of the peninsula, or of such princely estates as Eumaeus managed in the Ionian seas. Flaxman has certainly not given him the look of a large proprietor in his outlines: his toilet is severely scant, and the old gentleman appears to have lost two of his fingers in a chaff-cutter. As for Perses, who is represented as listening to the sage,[A] his dress is in the extreme of classic scantiness,–being, in fact, a mere night-shirt, and a tight fit at that.
[Footnote A: Flaxman’s _Illustrations of “Works and Days,”_ Plate I.]
But we dismiss Hesiod, the first of the heathen farm-writers, with a loving thought of his pretty Pandora, whom the goddesses so bedecked, whom Jove looks on (in Flaxman’s picture) with such sharp approval, and whose attributes the poet has compacted into one resonant line, daintily rendered by Cooke,–
“Thus the sex began
A lovely mischief to the soul of man.”
I next beg to pull from his place on the shelf, and to present to the reader, my friend General Xenophon, a most graceful writer, a capital huntsman, an able strategist, an experienced farmer, and, if we may believe Laertius, “handsome beyond expression.”
It is refreshing to find such qualities united in one man at any time, and doubly refreshing to find them in a person so far removed from the charities of today that the malcontents cannot pull his character in pieces. To be sure, he was guilty of a few acts of pillage in the course of his Persian campaign; but he tells the story of it in his “Anabasis” with a brave front: his purse was low, and needed replenishment; there is no cover put up, of disorderly sutlers or camp-followers.
The farming reputation of the General rests upon his “Economics” and his horse-treatise ([Greek: Hippikae]).
Economy has come to have a contorted meaning in our day, as if it were only–saving. Its true gist is better expressed by the word _management_; and in that old-fashioned sense it forms a significant title for Xenophon’s book: management of the household, management of flocks, of servants, of land, of property in general.
At the very outset we find this bit of practical wisdom, which is put into the mouth of Socrates, who is replying to Critobulus:–“Those things should be called goods that are beneficial to the master. Neither can those lands be called goods which by a man’s unskilful management put him to more expense than he receives profit by them; nor may those lands be called goods which do not bring a good farmer such a profit as may give him a good living.”
Thereafter (sec. vii.) he introduces the good Ischomachus, who, it appears, has a thrifty wife at home, and from that source flow in a great many capital hints upon domestic management. The apartments, the exposure, the cleanliness, the order, are all considered in such an admirably practical, common-sense way as would make the old Greek a good lecturer to the sewing-circles of our time. And when the wife of the wise Ischomachus, in an unfortunate moment, puts on _rouge_ and cosmetics, the grave husband meets her with this complimentary rebuke:–“Can there be anything in Nature more complete than yourself?”
“The science of husbandry,” he says, and it might be said of the science in most times, “is extremely profitable to those who understand it; but it brings the greatest trouble and misery upon those farmers who undertake it without knowledge.” (sec. xv.)
Where Xenophon comes to speak of the details of farm-labor, of ploughings and fallowings, there is all that precision and particularity of mention, added to a shrewd sagacity, which one might look for in the columns of the “Country Gentleman.” He even describes how a field should be thrown into narrow lands, in order to promote a more effectual surface-drainage. In the midst of it, however, we come upon a stereorary maxim, which is, to say the least, of doubtful worth:–“Nor is there any sort of earth which will not make very rich manure, by being laid a due time in standing water, till it is fully impregnated with the virtue of the water.” His British translator, Professor Bradley, does, indeed, give a little note of corroborative testimony. But I would not advise any active farmer, on the authority either of General Xenophon or of Professor Bradley, to transport his surface-soil very largely to the nearest frog-pond, in the hope of finding it transmuted into manure. The absorptive and retentive capacity of soils is, to be sure, the bone just now of very particular contention; but whatever that capacity may be, it certainly needs something more palpable than the virtue of standing water for its profitable development.
Here, again, is very neat evidence of how much simple good sense has to do with husbandry: Socrates, who is supposed to have no particular knowledge of the craft, says to his interlocutor,–“You have satisfied me that I am not ignorant in husbandry; and yet I never had any master to instruct me in it.”
“It is not,” says Xenophon, “difference in knowledge or opportunities of knowledge that makes some farmers rich and others poor; but that which makes some poor and some rich is that the former are negligent and lazy, the latter industrious and thrifty.”
Next, we have this masculine _ergo_:–“Therefore we may know that those who will not learn such sciences as they might get their living by, or do not fall into husbandry, are either downright fools, or else propose to get their living by robbery or by begging.” (sec. xx.)
This is a good clean cut at politicians, office-holders, and other such beggar craft, through more than a score of centuries,–clean as classicism can make it: the Attic euphony in it, and all the aroma of age.
Once more, and it is the last of the “Oeconomica,” we give this charming bit of New-Englandism:–“I remember my father had an excellent rule,” (_Ischomachus loquitur_,) “which he advised me to follow: that, if ever I bought any land, I should by no means purchase that which had been already well-improved, but should choose such as had never been tilled, either through neglect of the owner, or for want of capacity to do it; for he observed, that, if I were to purchase improved grounds, I must pay a high price for them, and then I could not propose to advance their value, and must also lose the pleasure of improving them myself, or of seeing them thrive better by my endeavors.”
When Xenophon wrote his rural treatises, (including the [Greek: Kunaegetikos],) he was living in that delightful region of country which lies westward of the mountains of Arcadia, looking toward the Ionian Sea. Here, too, he wrote the story of his retreat, and his wanderings among the mountains of Armenia; here he talked with his friends, and made other such _symposia_ as he has given us a taste of at the house of Callias the Athenian; here he ranged over the whole country-side with his horses and dogs: a stalwart and lithe old gentleman, without a doubt; able to mount a horse or to manage one, with the supplest of the grooms; and with a keen eye, as his book shows, for the good points in horse-flesh. A man might make a worse mistake than to buy a horse after Xenophon’s instructions, to-day. A spavin or a wind-gall did not escape the old gentleman’s eye, and he never bought a horse without proving his wind and handling him well about the mouth and ears. His grooms were taught their duties with nice speciality: the mane and tail to be thoroughly washed; the food and bed to be properly and regularly prepared; and treatment to be always gentle and kind.
Exception may perhaps be taken to his doctrine in regard to stall-floors. Moist ones, he says, injure the hoof: “Better to have stones inserted in the ground close to one another, equal in size to their hoofs; for such stalls consolidate the hoofs of those standing on them, beside strengthening the hollow of the foot.”
After certain directions for rough riding and leaping, he advises hunting through thickets, if wild animals are to be found. Otherwise, the following pleasant diversion is named, which I beg to suggest to sub-lieutenants in training for dragoon-service:–“It is a useful exercise for two horsemen to agree between themselves, that one shall retire through all sorts of rough places, and as he flees, is to turn about from time to time and present his spear; and the other shall pursue, having javelins blunted with balls, and a spear of the same description, and whenever he comes within javelin-throw, he is to hurl the blunted weapon at the party retreating, and whenever he comes within spear-reach, he is to strike him with it.”
Putting aside his horsemanship, in which he must have been nearly perfect, there was very much that was grand about the old Greek,–very much that makes us strangely love the man, who, when his soldiers lay benumbed under the snows on the heights of Armenia, threw off his general’s coat, or blanket, or what not, and set himself resolutely to wood-chopping and to cheering them. The farmer knew how.
Such men win battles. He has his joke, too, with Cheirisophus, the Lacedaemonian, about the thieving propensity of his townspeople, and invites him, in virtue of it, to _steal_ a difficult march upon the enemy. And Cheirisophus grimly retorts upon Xenophon, that Athenians are said to be great experts in stealing the public money, especially the high officers. This sounds home-like! When I come upon such things, I forget the parasangs and the Taochians and the dead Cyrus, and seem to be reading out of American newspapers.
It is quite out of the question to claim Theocritus as a farm-writer; and yet in all old literature there is not to be found such a lively bevy of heifers, and wanton kids, and “butting rams,” and stalwart herdsmen, who milk the cows “upon the sly,” as in the “Idyls” of the musical Sicilian.
There is no doubt but Theocritus knew the country to a charm: he knew all its roughnesses, and the thorns that scratched the bare legs of the goatherds; he knew the lank heifers, that fed, “like grasshoppers,” only on dew; he knew what clatter the brooks made, tumbling headlong adown the rocks,–
[Greek: apo tus petras kataleibetai ypsothen ydor]
he knew, moreover, all the charms and coyness of the country-nymphs, giving even a rural twist to his praises of the courtly Helen:–
“In shape, in height, in stately presence fair,
Straight as a furrow gliding from the share.”[B]
[Footnote B: Elton’s translation, I think. I do not vouch for its correctness.]
A man must have had an eye for good ploughing and a lithe figure, as well as a keen scent for the odor of fresh-turned earth, to make such a comparison as that!
Theocritus was no French sentimentalist; he would have protested against the tame elegancies of the Roman Bucolics; and the _sospiri ardenti_ and _miserelli aman_ of Guarini would have driven him mad. He is as brisk as the wind upon a breezy down. His cow-tenders are swart and bare-legged, and love with a vengeance. There is no miserable tooting upon flutes, but an uproarious song that shakes the woods; and if it comes to a matter of kissing, there are no “reluctant lips,” but a smack that makes the vales resound.
It is no Boucher we have here, nor Watteau: cosmetics and rosettes are far away; tunics are short, and cheeks are nut-brown. It is Teniers, rather:–boors, indeed; but they are live boors, and not manikin shepherds.
I shall call out another Sicilian here, named Moschus, were it only for his picture of a fine, sturdy bullock: it occurs in his “Rape of Europa”:–
“With yellow hue his sleekened body beams; His forehead with a snowy circle gleams; Horns, equal-bending, from his brow emerge, And to a moonlight crescent orbing verge.”
Nothing can be finer than the way in which this “milky steer,” with Europa on his back, goes sailing over the brine, his “feet all oars.” Meantime, she, the pretty truant,
“Grasps with one hand his curved projecting horn, And with the other closely drawn compressed The fluttering foldings of her purple vest, Whene’er its fringed hem was dashed with dew Of the salt sea-foam that in circles flew: Wide o’er Europa’s shoulders to the gale The ruffled robe heaved swelling, like a sail.”
Moschus is as rich as the Veronese at Venice; and his picture is truer to the premium standard. The painting shows a pampered animal, with over-red blotches on his white hide, and is by half too fat to breast such “salt sea-foam” as flashes on the Idyl of Moschus.
Another poet, Aratus of Cilicia, whose very name has a smack of tillage, has left us a book about the weather [Greek: Dosaemeia] which is quite as good to mark down a hay-day by as the later meteorologies of Professor Espy or Judge Butler.
Besides which, our friend Aratus holds the abiding honor of having been quoted by St. Paul, in his speech to the Athenians on Mars Hill:–
“For in Him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said: ‘For we are also His offspring.'”
And Aratus, (after Elton,)–
“On thee our being hangs; in thee we move; All are thy offspring, and the seed of Jove.”
Scattered through the lesser Greek poets, and up and down the Anthology, are charming bits of rurality, redolent of the fields and of field-life, with which it would be easy to fill up the measure of this rainy day, and beat off the Grecian couplets to the tinkle of the eave-drops. Up and down, the cicada chirps; the locust, “encourager of sleep,” sings his drowsy song; boozy Anacreon flings grapes; the purple violets and the daffodils crown the perfumed head of Heliodora; and the reverent Simonides likens our life to the grass.
Nor will I part company with these, or close up the Greek ranks of farmers, (in which I must not forget the great schoolmaster, Theophrastus,) until I cull a sample of the Anthology, and plant it for a guidon at the head of the column,–a little bannerol of music, touching upon our topic, as daintily as the bees touch the flowering tips of the wild thyme.
It is by Zonas the Sardian:–
[Greek: Ai o agete nxouthai oimblaeides akra melissai, _K.T.L.,]
and the rendering by Mr. Hay:–
“Ye nimble honey-making bees, the flowers are in their prime; Come now and taste the little buds of sweetly breathing thyme, Of tender poppies all so fair, or bits of raisin sweet, Or down that decks the apple tribe, or fragrant violet; Come, nibble on,–your vessels store with honey while you can, In order that the hive-protecting, bee-preserving Pan May have a tasting for himself, and that the hand so rude, That cuts away the comb, may leave yourselves some little food.”
Leaving now this murmur of the bees upon the banks of the Pactolus, will slip over-seas to Tusculum, where Cato was born, who was the oldest of the Roman writers upon agriculture; and thence into the Sabine territory, where, upon an estate of his father’s, in the midst of the beautiful country lying northward of the Monte Gennaro, (the Lucretilis of Horace,) he learned the art of good farming.
In what this art consisted in his day, he tells us in short, crackling speech;–“_Primum_, bene arare; _secundum_, arare; _tertium_, stercorare.” For the rest, he says, choose good seed, sow thickly, and pull all the weeds. Nothing more would be needed to grow as good a crop upon the checkered plateau under my window as ever fattened among the Sabine Hills.
Has the art come to a stand-still, then; and shall we take to reading Cato on fair days, as well as rainy?
There has been advance, without doubt; but all the advance in the world would not take away the edge from truths, stated as Cato knew how to state them. There is very much of what is called Agricultural Science, nowadays, which is–rubbish. Science is sound, and agriculture always an honest art; but the mixture, not uncommonly, is bad,–no fair marriage, but a monstrous concubinage, with a monstrous progeny of muddy treatises and disquisitions which confuse more than they instruct. In contrast with such, it is no wonder that the observations of such a man as Cato, whose energies had been kept alive by service in the field, and whose tongue had been educated in the Roman Senate, should carry weight with them. The grand truths on which successful agriculture rests, and which simple experience long ago demonstrated, cannot be kept out of view, nor can they be dwarfed by any imposition of learning. Science may explain them, or illustrate or extend; but it cannot shake their preponderating influence upon the crop of the year. As respects many other arts, the initial truths may be lost sight of, and overlaid by the mass of succeeding developments,–not falsified, but so belittled as practically to be counted for nothing. In this respect, agriculture is exceptional. The old story is always the safe story: you must plough and plough again; and manure; and sow good seed, and enough; and pull the weeds; and as sure as the rain falls, the crop will come.
Many nice additions to this method of treatment, which my fine-farming friends will suggest, are anticipated by the old Roman, if we look far enough into his book. Thus, he knew the uses of a harrow; he knew the wisdom of ploughing in a green crop; he had steeps for his seed; he knew how to drain off the surface-water,–nay, there is very much in his account of the proper preparation of ground for olive-trees, or vine-setting, which looks like a mastery of the principles that govern the modern system of drainage.[C]
[Footnote C: XLIII. “Sulcos, si locus aquosus erit, alveatos esse oportet,” etc.]
Of what particular service recent investigations in science have been to the practical farmer, and what positive and available aid, beyond what could be derived from a careful study of the Roman masters, they put into the hands of an intelligent worker, who is tilling ground simply for pecuniary advantage, I shall hope to inquire and discourse upon, some other day: when that day comes, we will fling out the banner of the nineteenth century, and give a gun to Liebig, and Johnson, and the rest.
Meantime, as a farmer who endeavors to keep posted in all the devices for pushing lands which have an awkward habit of yielding poor crops into the better habit of yielding large ones, I will not attempt to conceal the chagrin with which I find this curmudgeon of a Roman Senator, living two centuries before Christ, and northward of Monte Gennaro, who never heard of “Hovey’s Root-Cutter,” or of the law of primaries, laying down rules[D] of culture so clear, so apt, so full, that I, who have the advantages of two thousand years, find nothing in them to laugh at, unless it be a few oblations to the gods;[E] and this, considering that I am just now burning a little incense (Havana) to the nymph Volutia, is uncalled for.
[Footnote D: This mention, of course, excludes the Senator’s _formulae_ for unguents, aperients, cattle-nostrums, and pickled pork.]
[Footnote E: CXXXIV. Cato, _De Re Rustica_.]
And if Senator Cato were to wake up to-morrow, in the white house that stares through the rain yonder, and were to open his little musty vellum of slipshod maxims, and, in faith of it, start a rival farm in the bean line, or in vine-growing,–keeping clear of the newspapers,–I make no doubt but he would prove as thrifty a neighbor as my good friend the Deacon.
We nineteenth-century men, at work among our cabbages, clipping off the purslane and the twitch-grass, are disposed to assume a very complacent attitude, as we lean upon our hoe-handles,–as if we were doing tall things in the way of illustrating physiology and the cognate sciences. But the truth is, old Laertes, near three thousand years ago, in his slouch cap and greasy beard, was hoeing up in the same way his purslane and twitch-grass, in his bean-patch on the hills of Ithaca. The difference between us, so far as the crop and the tools go, is, after all, ignominiously small. _He_ dreaded the weevil in his beans, and _we_ the club-foot in our cabbages; _we_ have the “Herald,” and _he_ had none; _we_ have “Plantation-Bitters,” and _he_ had his jug of the Biblian wine.
M. Varro, another Roman farmer, lies between the same covers “De Re Rustica” with Cato, and seems to have had more literary tact, though less of blunt sagacity. Yet he challenges at once our confidence by telling us so frankly the occasion of his writing upon such a subject. Life, he says, is a bubble,–and the life of an old man a bubble about to break. He is eighty, and must pack his luggage to go out of this world. (“_Annus octogesimus admonet me, ut sarcinas colligam antequam proficiscar e vita_.”) Therefore he, writes down for his wife, Fundania, the rules by which she may manage the farm.
And a very respectably old lady she must have been, to deal with the _villici_ and the _coloni_, if her age bore suitable relation to that of her husband. The ripe maturity of many of the rural writers I have introduced cannot fail to strike one. Thus, Xenophon gained a strength in his Elian fields that carried him into the nineties; Cato lived to be over eighty; and now we have Varro, writing his book out by Tusculum at eighty, and surviving to counsel with Fundania ten years more. Pliny, too, (the elder,) who, if not a farmer, had his country-seats, and left very much to establish our acquaintance with the Roman rural life, was a hale, much-enduring man, of such soldierly habits and large abstemiousness as to warrant a good fourscore,–if he had not fallen under that murderous cloud of ashes from Mount Vesuvius, in the year 79.
The poets, doubtless, burnt out earlier, as they usually do. Virgil, whom I shall come to speak of presently, certainly did: he died at fifty-one. Tibullus, whose opening Idyl is as pretty a bit of gasconade about living in a cottage in the country, upon love and a few vegetables, as a maiden could wish for, did not reach the fifties; and Martial, whose “Faustine Villa,” if nothing else, entitles him to rural oblation, fell short of the sixties.
Varro indulges in some sharp sneers at those who had written on the same subject before him. This was natural enough in a man of his pursuits: he had written four hundred books!
Of Columella we know scarcely more than that he lived somewhere about the time of Tiberius, that he was a man of wealth, that he travelled extensively through Gaul, Italy, and Greece, observing intelligently different methods of culture, and that he has given the fullest existing compend of ancient agriculture. In his chapter upon Gardening he warms into hexameters; but the rest is stately and euphonious prose. In his opening chapter, he does not forego such praises of the farmer’s life as sound like a lawyer’s address before a county-society on a fair-day. Cincinnatus and his plough come in for it; and Fabricius and Curius Dentatus; with which names, luckily, our orators cannot whet their periods, since Columella’s mention of them is about all we know of their farming.
He falls into the way, moreover, of lamenting, as people obstinately continue to do, the “good old times,” when men were better than “now,” and when the reasonable delights of the garden and the fields engrossed them to the neglect of the circus and the theatres. But when he opens upon his subject proper, it is in grandiose, Spanish style, (he was a native of Cadiz,) with a maxim broad enough to cover all possible conditions:–“_Qui studium agricolationi dederit, sciat haec sibi advocanda: prudentiam rei, facultatem impendendi voluntatem agendi_.” Or, as Tremellius says,–“That man will master the business, _qui et colere sciet, et poterit, et volet_.”
This is comprehensive, if not encouraging. That “_facultatem impendendi_” is a tremendous bolster to farming as to anything else; it is only another shape of the “_poterit_,” and the “_poterit”_ only a scholarly rendering of pounds and pence. As if Tremellius had said,–That man will make his way at farming who understands the business, who has the money to apply to it, and who is willing to bleed freely.
With a kindred sagacity this shrewd Roman advises a man to slip upon his farm often, in order that his steward may keep sharply at his work; he even suggests that the landlord make a feint of coming, when he has no intention thereto, that he may gain a day’s alertness from the bailiff. The book is of course a measure of the advances made in farming during the two hundred years elapsed since Cato’s time; but those advances were not great. There was advance in power to systematize facts, advance in literary aptitude, but no very noticeable gain in methods of culture. Columella gives the results of wider observation, and of more persistent study; but, for aught I can see, a man could get a crop of lentils as well with Cato as with Columbia; a man would house his flocks and servants as well out of the one as the other; in short, a man would grow into the “_facultatem impendendi_” as swiftly under the teachings of the Senator as of the later writer of the reign of Tiberius.
It is but dull work to follow those teachings; here and there I warm into a little sympathy, as I catch sight, in his Latin dress, of our old friend _Curculio;_ here and there I sniff a fruit that seems familiar,–as the _fraga_, or a _morum;_ and here and there comes blushing into the crabbed text the sweet name of some home-flower,–a lily, a narcissus, or a rose. The chief value of the work of Columella, however, lies in its clear showing-forth of the relative importance given to different crops, under Roman culture, and to the raising of cattle, poultry, fish, etc.; as compared with crops. Knowing this, we know very much that will help us toward an estimate of the domestic life of the Romans. We learn, with surprise, how little they regarded their oxen, save as working-animals,–whether the milk-white steers of Clitumnus, or the dun Campanian cattle, whose descendants show their long-horned stateliness to this day in the Roman forum. The sheep, too, whether of Tarentum or of Canusium, were regarded as of value chiefly for their wool and milk; and it is surely amazing, that men who could appreciate the iambics of Horace and the eloquence of Cicero should have shown so little fancy for a fat saddle of mutton or for a mottled sirloin of beef.
I change from Columella to Virgil, and from Virgil back to some pleasant Idyl of Tibullus, and from Tibullus to the pretty prate of Horace about the Sabine Hills; I stroll through Pliny’s villa, eying the clipped box-trees; I hear the rattle in the tennis-court; I watch the tall Roman girls–
“Grandes virgines proborum colonorum”–
marching along with their wicker-baskets filled with curds and fresh-plucked thrushes, until there comes over me a confusion of times and places.
–The sound of the battle of to-day dies; the fresh blood-stains fade; and I seem to wake upon the heights of Tusculum, in the days of Tiberius. The farm-flat below is a miniature Campagna, along which I see stretching straight to the city the shining pavement of the Via Tusculana. The spires yonder melt into mist, and in place of them I see the marble house-walls of which Augustus boasted. As yet the grander monuments of the Empire are not built; but there is a blotch of cliff which may be the Tarpeian Rock, and beside it a huge hulk of building on the Capitoline Hill, where sat the Roman Senate. A little hitherward are the gay turrets of the villa of Maecenas, and of the princely houses on the Palatine Hill, and in the foreground the stately tomb of Cecilia Metella. I see the barriers of a hippodrome, (where now howling jockeys make the twilight hideous); a _gestatio_, with its lines of cherry-trees, is before me, and the velvety lavender-green of olive-orchards covers the hills behind. Vines grow upon the slope eastward,–
“Neve tibi ad solem vergant vineta cadentem,”–
twining around, and flinging off a great wealth of tendrils from their supporting-poles (_pedamenta_). The figs begin to show the purple bloom of fruitage, and the _villicus_, who has just now come in from the _atriolum_, reports a good crop, and asks if it would not be well to apply a few loads of marl (_tofacea_) to the summer fallow, which Cato is just now breaking up with the Campanian steers, for barley.
Scipio, a stanch Numidian, has gone to market with three asses loaded with cabbages and asparagus. Villicus tells me that the poultry in the fattening-coops (as close-shut as the Strasburg geese)[F] are doing well, and he has added a _soupcon_ of sweetening to their barley-gruel. The young doves have their legs faithfully broken, (“_obteras crura_”) and are placidly fattening on their stumps. The thrush-house is properly darkened, only enough light entering to show the food to some three or four thousand birds, which are in course of cramming for the market. The _cochlearium_ has a good stock of snails and mussels; and the little dormice are growing into fine condition for an approaching Imperial banquet.
[Footnote F: “Locus ad hanc rem desideratur maxime calidus, et minimi luminis, in quo singulae caveis angustioribus vel sportis inclusae pendeant aves, sed ita coarctatae, _ne versari posslnt_.”–Columella, Lib. VIII. cap. vii.]
Villicus reports the clip of the Tarentine sheep unusually fine, and free from burrs. The new must is all a-foam in the _vinaria;_ and around the inner cellar (_gaudendem est!_) there is a tier of urns, as large as school-boys, brimming with ripe Falernian.
If it were not stormy, I might order out the farm-chariot, or _curriculum_, which is, after all, but a low, dumpy kind of horse-cart, and take a drive over the lava pavement of the Via Tusculana, to learn what news is astir, and what the citizens talk of in the forum. Is all quiet upon the Rhine? How is it possibly with Germanicus? And what of that story of the arrest of Seneca? It could hardly have happened, they say, in the good old days of the Republic.
And with this mention, as with the sound of a gun, the Roman pastoral dream is broken. The Campagna, the olive-orchards, the _columbarium_, fall back to their old places in the blurred type of Columella. The Campanian steers are unyoked, and stabled in the text of Varro. The turrets of the villa of Maecenas, and of the palaces of Sylla and the Caesars, give place to the spires of a New-England town,–southward of which I see through the mist a solitary flag flying over a soldiers’ hospital. It reminds of nearer and deadlier perils than ever environed the Roman Republic,–perils out of which if the wisdom and courage of the people do not find a way, some new Caesar will point it with the sword.
Looking northward, I see there is a bight of blue in the sky; and a lee set of dark-gray and purple clouds is folding down over the eastern horizon,–against which the spires and the flag show clearer than ever. It means that the rain has stopped; and the rain having stopped, my in-door work is done.
* * * * *
GOLDEN WEDDING.
The reader whose eye is arrested by my title will doubtless anticipate a romance on that ever-old, ever-new theme of a certain god with a torch leading two souls bound together by iron concealed in flower-wreaths, until, alas! life seems ordinary enough to be symbolized by _tin_,–of the tin-wedding entering into the refiner’s fire, and, by sure transmutation, rising from the baser metal to the paler, but purer silver,–of the subtile alchemy of years, which, in human life’s great crucible,
“Transmute, so potent are the spells they know Into pure gold the silver of to-day.”
Perhaps, reader, you are not altogether to be disappointed; and yet, for the present, it is only a glass of sparkling wine I wish you to take with me. You will please read on that delicate strip of paper around the bottle’s neck the name in gilt,–“Golden Wedding.” At once you grow transcendental, and suppose that some German vine-dresser in Catawba-land–by the way, Gerritt Smith’s gardener is a nephew of Schiller!–was dreaming of the marriage of the Sun with the Vine, his darling plant, in whose juice linger and sparkle the light and joy of many faded days. But no, it was named from a real Golden Wedding.
Let me take you–as the clairvoyants say–to a large, sooty, toiling city in the West. From street to street you shall go, and see but little to excite your admiration, unless you are a constant believer that _work is worship_. But here, in the centre of the city, is a noble old mansion with its beautiful park around it, which a traveller who saw it once compared to a pearl on the breast of a blacksmith. Here it was that the Golden Wedding took place.
Who that was there can ever forget it? In my own memory that throng of the worthy, the beautiful, the gay of a great city will stand as the one fulfilment which Fate has given me of many Oriental promissory dreams, most of which she has failed to honor. In that great company you might have traced all the circles of that city’s growth, as you may trace a tree’s history in its rings. That lady there was the first white baby born here, where now over two hundred thousand human beings reside. Here are the pioneers who filled the first log-huts on the city’s site, until they overflowed through the roofs. And here is an inner circle of children, and an outer one of grandchildren, about the two who are the heart of this beautiful celebration. Can that lovely, erect, blooming lady be a bride of fifty years? Looking at her, one would say it is a great and unnecessary mistake of ours to grow old. But more closely must we look at that quaint old man by her side. Lately he has passed away; but every day of his long life left a trace worthy to be noted well. His eighty years and twenty-five days of life comprise an epitome of the history and growth of a great community. Not so would you at first interpret that plain old man; though, to a knowing eye, that eye, clear with looking at the duty that lies nearest, that mouth, telling of patient, unimpulsive energy, that broadness about the brow, would be guaranties of a marked life.
And now for my story, which you must let me tell in a rambling way; for any systematic biography of that man would be like putting one of his own Catawba-vines into your herbarium.
I introduce you to a fair-haired, handsome youth, on the deck of a small steamboat, which is bearing him to his fortune in the great West. He is penniless. His father was wealthy; but in the war he was a Tory, and, in the confiscation of his property, his sin was visited upon his son. But he was not the boy to repine, with youth and the great West before him. And now as from the steamer’s deck he sees a fine landscape with a few log-houses on it, he believes that it is one day to be a great city, and concludes to stop there. So he is put ashore with his trunk.
He has already determined to study law. He goes to the one judge who resides there, and is taken as a student into his office. More log-houses are built; a court-house is erected; and presently that institution at sight of which the shipwrecked Englishman fell on his knees and thanked God he was in a Christian land–the gallows–made its appearance. So the young man had a fair practice.
The records of the West, if they are ever written, will testify how often whimsical Fortune thrusts her favors on men against their will. This very judge with whom our youth studied law became environed with pecuniary difficulties, and wished once to satisfy a claim of a few hundred dollars by deeding away a sheep-pasture of a few acres, which was of no sort of use to him. But when he went to get his wife’s signature to the conveyance, she burst into tears; she knew, she said, that the pasture was worthless; but she had in her childhood heard there the tinkling of the bells of her father’s sheep; it was very foolish, she knew, but now that they had all passed away, the bells over in the pasture tinkled on in her memory, and she hated to give it up. The kind husband would not insist, but went sadly to his work. It was not long before the sheep-pasture was worth a million dollars! Sentiment, you see, is not always an unproductive article.
But this case was scarcely so curious as that which presently thrust a goodly capital on the hands of our young law-student. His first case in the court was that of a horse-thief, whom he induced a jury to acquit. When he came to his client for a fee, the scapegrace whispered that he had nothing on earth wherewith to pay the fee except two old whiskey-stills and–_a horse_. When he heard this last word, the lawyer’s conscience gave him a twinge. After a moment’s reflection, he said,–“You will need the horse; and you had best make him take you as far as possible from this region of country. I must be satisfied with the whiskey-stills.” It was not for a long time that he thought even to inquire about the stills. When he did so, he found them in possession of a man who implored him not to take them away, and promised to pay something for them. Finding that he could not do this, he begged our hero to accept as payment for them a few acres of barren land, which, with great reluctance, he agreed to do. Erelong the tide of emigration set westward, and this land is to-day worth two million dollars!
But his subsequent life showed that the man’s fortune was not luck; for by economy, not by hoarding,–by foresight, and a generous trust to all laborers who wished to lease lands, his wealth grew to nearly fifteen million dollars.
When he found that he had enough to live comfortably upon, he retired from the bar, and devoted himself to horticulture. He found that the region in which he lived was adapted to the growth of the vine, and began his experiments, which, during his life, extended to the culture of more than forty varieties. He laid before the community, from time to time, a report of his successes, he called on all to come and taste the wines he made, until the tidings went over the earth, and from Germany, France, Italy, came vine-dressers and wine-makers, who covered every hill-side for miles around him with vintages.
Those who came from afar to inquire into this new branch of industry, for which he had opened the way, were surprised to meet the millionnaire, the Catawba-Prince, in his plain garb and with his humble habits.
How many stories I could tell you of this unintentional, odd homeliness of manner and life, from which he never departed, and which those around him found it impossible to depart from, even in respect to the style of the coffin in which he was laid, and the procession which followed him to the beautiful cemetery! His dress was always that of a man of the humblest fortunes; and Dame Gossip says that he was so fond of his old coat, that, when a change became absolutely necessary, his daughters were obliged to prepare the new one, and substitute it for the old whilst he was asleep, so that in the morning he should put it on unconsciously, or, if he discovered the change; must wear the new or none. The same dame has it that a youth, who afterward became his son-in-law, having caught sight somewhere of one of the old man’s daughters, desired to know her, and that, in the park, which was open to all, he met the old gentleman, whom he supposed to be the gardener, and offered him a bribe, if he would bring the lady out among the roses. The old man accepted the bribe, and returned with the lady, whom, with a sly twinkle of the eye, he introduced as “my daughter” to the blushing youth. And again it is told, that once, on a very warm day, the old man, having to wait for a friend, sat down on a stone just outside of his own gate, took off his hat, and, closing his eyes, dozed a little. When he got up, he found a silver quarter in his hat. Whether it was put there by some one who really thought he was an object of charity, or by a wag, the old man appreciated the joke, and, with a smile, put it into the pocket out of which had to come forty thousand dollars for annual taxes. These stories may or may not be true; but in some sense such stories have a certain truth, whether invented or not. They can live and circulate only in a community where they are characteristic of the person of whom they are told. Generous men are not pursued by stories of parsimony; mean men never hear even untrue stories of their generosity.
And this last remark leads me to speak of the relation in which the wealthiest man of the West stood to the throngs of the poor and the suffering who surrounded him.
If, in the city, you had gone to the President of the Boorioboola-Gha Sewing-Circle, or to the Tract-Society Rooms, or to the clergy, and inquired whether the city’s richest man was charitable, you would have received an ominous shrug in reply. Vainly have they gone to him for any such charities. Vainly did they go to him for some “poor, but worthy and Christian woman.”
“I will give nothing,” he replied; “there are enough who will give to her; what I have to give shall go to the _unworthy_ poor, whom none will help,–the Devil’s poor, Sir,–those whom Christians leave to the Devil.”
Many a minister has been sorely puzzled by the receipt of a fifty-dollar bill “for the relief of the depraved.” His office was constantly thronged with outcasts, who were generally relieved by small sums. In his relations with these people, his simplicity and eccentricity were noted by all who knew him. Among many stories which I know to be true, I select the following.
Some six or eight years ago the winter was very cold; the river was frozen, and all the “wharf-rats” were thrown out of work. A near relative of the old gentleman came to the city, and passed the night at his house. After tea he sauntered to the office to take a quiet cigar. To his surprise, he found it filled with a crowd–more than fifty–of brawny, beastly-looking men. The presence of the childlike old man, his face beaming with shrewdness and kindly humor, seemed alone to keep them from being a mob. His manner to them said,–“You poor wretches, I know how reckless you are; yet I am not sure but I should be as bad, had I been exposed to the same bad influences.” These houseless vagrants had been coming every night, while the river was frozen, to get a dime for a night’s lodging.
The young man had been forced by the unpleasantness of the crowd to go and enjoy his cigar outside. As he sat there, the ugly crowd filed out quietly, each with his dime, (the clerk distributing,) till the last man. He seemed to feel very ill-used, and was scarcely clear of the door-way before he gave vent to his indignation:–“I’ll be d—-d, if I don’t let Old —- know that I won’t be put off with a five-cent piece and a three-cent piece! Let me ketch him out, and I’ll mash his,” etc., etc.
Glowing with righteous indignation, and glad of the opportunity, the young relative rushed in and exclaimed,–
“Mr. —-! I have had many occasions to remonstrate with you on your indiscriminate charities, your encouragement of beggary and vice. The wretch who went out last is breathing threats of personal violence against you, because he has been put off with a five-cent piece and a three-cent piece!”
How was the indignant remonstrant mortified, when the old man simply turned his head to the clerk and said,–
“Mark, why did you not give that man his dime?”
“I had given out all the dimes, Sir, and I gave him all I had left.”
“See that he gets his extra two cents the next time he comes. I have no doubt I should have been mad, if I had been in his place.”
A forlorn-looking man once came and asked for help.
“I am afraid to give you money. I think I know how you will spend it.”
Of course the man protested that strong drink was an abomination unto him,–that what his nature most craved was “pure, fresh milk.”
The old man, with a look in which it would be hard to say whether shrewdness or credulity predominated, at once hastened to the milk-cellar and returned with a glass of milk; the fellow swallowed the dose with an eager reluctance quite comical to behold, but which excited no movement in the muscles of the old gentleman’s face.
On a raw, wet winter’s day, a loafer applied for a pair of shoes. He had on an old, shambling pair, out at both toes. The old Wine-Prince was sitting with a pair of slippers on, and had his own shoes warming at the fire.
“Well,” said he to the applicant, “you do look rather badly off, for such a cold, wet day; here, see if these shoes will fit you,” handing his own.
The fellow tried them on and pronounced them a complete fit, and went on his way rejoicing. The clerk was amused, half an hour after, to see the old gentleman searching for his shoes and wondering what had become of them. He was reminded that he had given them to the beggar. On further inquiry, he found that he had no other pair in the house.
The following significant story was told me by the son of the old man. I present it in nearly his own words.
“Adjoining me in the country lives an old German who nearly seventy years ago was _sold_ in New York for his passage. A confectioner of Baltimore bought him for seven years’ service, and he went with his master to fulfil his obligation. When his time was out, he turned his face towards the setting sun, and started to seek his fortune. On arriving in Pittsburg, having no money, he engaged to ‘work his way’ down the river on a flat-boat. He stopped at the little village, as our city then was, and opened a shop. He was skilful, and succeeded. He came to my father, and bought, on ten years’ credit, a place in the country, where, in course of time, he built a house, and, with my father’s assistance, planted a vineyard. He then gave up all other business but that of the vine-dresser.
“One day, in the autumn, a few years ago, I overtook the old man on horseback, on his way to town. After wishing me a cheery good-morning, he said,–
“‘I am on my way to town, to sell your father my wine.’
“‘He will be glad to get it; he is buying wine, and yours is made so carefully that he will be glad to have it.’
“‘I mean to sell it to him for fifty cents a gallon.’
“‘Oh,’ said I, ‘don’t offer it at that. I know he is paying double that sum.’
“‘Nevertheless, I mean to sell it to him for half a dollar.’
“I looked inquiringly.
“‘Well, Sir, I was but a boy when I left Germany; but I was old enough to remember that a man, after a hard day’s work, could go to a wine-house, and for two cents could get a tumblerful. It did him good, and he went home to his family fresher and brighter for his wine. He was never drunk, and never wasted his earnings to appease a diseased appetite. I want to see that state of things brought about here. Our poor people drink whiskey. I want them to have cheap wine in its place. Fifty cents a gallon will pay me well this year for my capital and labor, and next year I think I can sell it for forty cents.’
“‘But, my friend, see how this will work. You will sell your wine to Mr. —- for fifty cents; and he will send it to his wine-cellar, and they will bottle it and sell it for all they can get.’
“‘That’s _their_ lookout,’ said the Teuton; ‘I shall have done my duty.’
“It was rather hard to get an advantage of my father, but I thought now I had him. On reaching the city, I sought him out, and told the story with all its circumstances.
“‘Now, Sir, in presence of the example of this old German,–sold in New York for his passage, faithfully fulfilling the years of his servitude, working his way to a small competency by savings and industry,–will you dare to let the world hear of you, a rich man, making a profit on wine?’
“The old man’s eye dropped an instant, then he said,–
“‘My son, Heaven knows I do not wish to make money out of wine. I have given much time and much money for the last fifty years to make this doubtful experiment successful. I have paid high prices for wine, and used all other means in my power to make it remunerative,–to induce others to plant vineyards. If I should now take your suggestion and bring wine down to a low price, I should ruin the enterprise. But let the extended cultivation of the grape be once firmly established, and then competition will bring it low enough.’
“‘Well,’ said I, ‘that may be good worldly wisdom; but I like the spirit of the old Dutchman better, after all.’
“‘There I agree with you; for once, you are right.'”
A most careful accountant has shown that his contributions to grape-culture amounted to one-fourth of his whole fortune: a clear loss to him, but not to the public.
Though the lips of Christendom repeat, Sunday after Sunday, the warning that the left hand should not know what the right hand doeth, yet it is very apt to judge of a man’s liberality by the paragraphs concerning him in the newspapers. The old gentleman once gave his city several acres of land for an observatory which was to be erected; and there is no doubt that he had reason to conclude, as have others, that it was the worst, as it was the most public, charity of his life. That his private charities were numerous and without self-crediting, the present writer _happens_ to know. Once, after going through the great wine-cellar where millions were coined, I went through the barracks in the upper portion of the same building, where a wretched tenantry of the Devil’s poor lived in squalor. Each of these families was required to pay room-rent to the millionnaire. As I passed along, I found one man and woman in wrathful distress. They must pay their rent, or be turned out of their rooms. The rent was two or three dollars. I said,–
“The old gentleman will not turn you out.”
“You do not know him; he will be sure to, if we do not pay him every cent.”
I determined to search him out and represent the case. I could not find him; but before I concluded my search, I found that the poor people had been compelled to sell a table and some chairs to pay the rent. The next day I saw them again, and found them heartily abusing the old man as “a stingy brute,” who would “sell the chairs from under them.” Yet I observed that they had _a new table and three new chairs_. When I asked them how they came by them, they said they had been sent by an unknown hand, which they supposed to be mine. A thought struck me, and after some trouble I ferreted out the fact, that, although the rich old man had, for reasons connected with the good order of the barracks, always exacted every cent of the rent from each tenant, whatever the consequences, he had many times, as in this case, secretly returned more than it had cost them to pay it. They were left to believe him a hard man, and often attributed his benefits to societies and persons whose charity would have been stifled by the whiskey-stench of their rooms.
Thus, then, went on his life, until the day when the Golden Wedding was to be celebrated. That year, the sons, with the vine-dressers, the bottlers, corkers, and all, gathered together and said,–
“Come, now! let us this year make a wine that shall be like the nectar for a true man’s soul!”
So, with one accord, they gathered the richest grapes, and selected from them; then they made the wine-press clean and sweet, and cast the grapes therein. One great hiss,–a spurt of gold flushed with rubies,–and all that is acrid is left, all that is rich and sweet is borne away, to be labelled “GOLDEN WEDDING.”
And now, as I taste it, it seems to me flavored beyond all earthly wine, as if it were the expression of an humble and faithful man, who had a legitimate object, which he obtained by steadfastness. The wine-makers maintain, that wine, though long confined in bottles, sympathizes still with the vines from which it was pressed; and when the season of the flowering of vines comes, it is always agitated anew. Surely the Catawba must ever sparkle afresh, when in it, as now, we pledge the memory of the brave and wise pioneer whose life climbed to its maturity along with the purple clusters which so had garnered the frost and sunshine of a life as well as of the seasons.
THE SILURIAN BEACH.
With what interest do we look upon any relic of early human history! The monument that tells of a civilization whose hieroglyphic records we cannot even decipher, the slightest trace of a nation that vanished and left no sign of its life except the rough tools and utensils buried in the old site of its towns or villages, arouses our imagination and excites our curiosity. Men gaze with awe at the inscription on an ancient Egyptian or Assyrian stone; they hold with reverential touch the yellow parchment-roll whose dim, defaced characters record the meagre learning of a buried nationality; and the announcement, that for centuries the tropical forests of Central America have hidden within their tangled growth the ruined homes and temples of a past race, stirs the civilized world with a strange, deep wonder.
To me it seems that to look on the first land that was ever lifted above the waste of waters, to follow the shore where the earliest animals and plants were created when the thought of God first expressed itself in organic forms, to hold in one’s hand a bit of stone from an old sea-beach, hardened into rock thousands of centuries ago, and studded with the beings that once crept upon its surface or were stranded there by some retreating wave, is even of deeper interest to men than the relics of their own race, for these things tell more directly of the thoughts and creative acts of God.
Standing in the neighborhood of Whitehall, near Lake George, one may look along such a sea-shore, and see it stretching westward and sloping gently southward as far as the eye can reach. It must have had a very gradual slope, and the waters must have been very shallow; for at that time no great mountains had been uplifted, and deep oceans are always the concomitants of lofty heights. We do not, however, judge of this by inference merely; we have an evidence of the shallowness of the sea in those days in the character of the shells found in the Silurian deposits, which shows that they belonged in shoal waters.
Indeed, the fossil remains of all times tell us almost as much of the physical condition of the world at different epochs as they do of its animal and vegetable population. When Robinson Crusoe first caught sight of the footprint on the sand, he saw in it more than the mere footprint, for it spoke to him of the presence of men on his desert island. We walk on the old geological shores, like Crusoe along his beach, and the footprints we find there tell us, too, more than we actually see in them. The crust of our earth is a great cemetery where the rocks are tombstones on which the buried dead have written their own epitaphs. They tell us not only who they were and when and where they lived, but much also of the circumstances under which they lived. We ascertain the prevalence of certain physical conditions at special epochs by the presence of animals and plants whose existence and maintenance required such a state of things, more than by any positive knowledge respecting it. Where we find the remains of quadrupeds corresponding to our ruminating animals, we infer not only land, but grassy meadows also, and an extensive vegetation; where we find none but marine animals, we know the ocean must have covered the earth; the remains of large reptiles, representing, though in gigantic size, the half aquatic, half terrestrial reptiles of our own period, indicate to us the existence of spreading marshes still soaked by the retreating waters; while the traces of such animals as live now in sand and shoal waters, or in mud, speak to us of shelving sandy beaches and of mud-flats. The eye of the Trilobite tells us that the sun shone on the old beach where he lived; for there is nothing in Nature without a purpose, and when so complicated an organ was made to receive the light, there must have been light to enter it. The immense vegetable deposits in the Carboniferous period announce the introduction of an extensive terrestrial vegetation; and the impressions left by the wood and leaves of the trees show that these first forests must have grown in a damp soil and a moist atmosphere. In short, all the remains of animals and plants hidden in the rocks have something to tell of the climatic conditions and the general circumstances under which they lived, and the study of fossils is to the naturalist a thermometer by which he reads the variations of temperature in past times, a plummet by which he sounds the depths of the ancient oceans,–a register, in fact, of all the important physical changes the earth has undergone.
But although the animals of the early geological deposits indicate shallow seas by their similarity to our shoal-water animals, it must not be supposed that they are by any means the same. On the contrary, the old shells, crustacea, corals, etc., represent types which have existed in all times with the same essential structural elements, but under different specific forms in the several geological periods. And here it may not be amiss to say something of what are called by naturalists _representative types_.
The statement that different sets of animals and plants have characterized the successive epochs is often understood as indicating a difference of another kind than that which distinguishes animals now living in different parts of the world. This is a mistake. There are so-called representative types all over the globe, united to each other by structural relations and separated by specific differences of the same kind as those that unite and separate animals of different geological periods. Take, for instance, mud-flats or sandy shores in the same latitudes of Europe and America; we find living on each animals of the same structural character and of the same general appearance, but with certain specific differences, as of color, size, external appendages, etc. They represent each other on the two continents. The American wolves, foxes, bears, rabbits, are not the same as the European, but those of one continent are as true to their respective types as those of the other; under a somewhat different aspect they represent the same groups of animals. In certain latitudes, or under conditions of nearer proximity, these differences may be less marked. It is well known that there is a great monotony of type, not only among animals and plants, but in the human races also, throughout the Arctic regions; and the animals characteristic of the high North reappear under such identical forms in the neighborhood of the snow-fields in lofty mountains, that to trace the difference between the ptarmigans, rabbits, and other gnawing animals of the Alps, for instance, and those of the Arctics, is among the most difficult problems of modern science.
And so is it also with the animated world of past ages; in similar deposits of sand, mud, or lime, in adjoining regions of the same geological age, identical remains of animals and plants may be found, while at greater distances, but under similar circumstances, representative species may occur. In very remote regions, however, whether the circumstances be similar or dissimilar, the general aspect of the organic world differs greatly, remoteness in space being thus in some measure an indication of the degree of affinity between different faunae. In deposits of different geological periods immediately following each other we sometimes find remains of animals and plants so closely allied to those of earlier or later periods that at first sight the specific differences are hardly discernible. The difficulty of solving these questions, and of appreciating correctly the differences and similarities between such closely allied organisms, explains the antagonistic views of many naturalists respecting the range of existence of animals, during longer or shorter geological periods; and the superficial way in which discussions concerning the transition of species are carried on is mainly owing to an ignorance of the conditions above alluded to. My own personal observation and experience in these matters have led me to the conviction that every geological period has had its own representatives, and that no single species has been repeated in successive ages.
The laws regulating the geographical distribution of animals and their combination into distinct or zoological provinces called faunae with definite limits are very imperfectly understood as yet; but so closely are all things linked together from the beginning till to-day that I am convinced we shall never find the clue to their meaning till we carry on our investigations in the past and the present simultaneously. The same principle according to which animal and vegetable life is distributed over the surface of the earth now prevailed in the earliest geological periods. The geological deposits of all times have had their characteristic faunae under various zones, their zoological provinces presenting special combinations of animal and vegetable life over certain regions, and their representative types reproducing in different countries, but under similar latitudes, the same groups with specific differences.
Of course, the nearer we approach the beginning of organic life, the less marked do we find the differences to be, and for a very obvious reason. The inequalities of the earth’s surface, her mountain-barriers protecting whole continents from the Arctic winds, her open plains exposing others to the full force of the polar blasts, her snug valleys and her lofty heights, her table-lands and rolling prairies, her river-systems and her dry deserts, her cold ocean-currents pouring down from the high North on some of her shores, while warm ones from tropical seas carry their softer influence to others,–in short, all the contrasts in the external configuration of the globe, with the physical conditions attendant upon them, are naturally accompanied by a corresponding variety in animal and vegetable life.
But in the Silurian age, when there were no elevations higher than the Canadian hills, when water covered the face of the earth with the exception of a few isolated portions lifted above the almost universal ocean, how monotonous must have been the conditions of life! And what should we expect to find on those first shores? If we are walking on a sea-beach to-day, we do not look for animals that haunt the forests or roam over the open plains, or for those that live in sheltered valleys or in inland regions or on mountain-heights. We look for Shells, for Mussels and Barnacles, for Crabs, for Shrimps, for Marine Worms, for Star-Fishes and Sea-Urchins, and we may find here and there a fish stranded on the sand or tangled in the sea-weed. Let us remember, then, that, in the Silurian period, the world, so far as it was raised above the ocean, was a beach, and let us seek there for such creatures as God has made to live on sea-shores, and not belittle the Creative work, or say that He first scattered the seeds of life in meagre or stinted measure, because we do not find air-breathing animals when there was no fitting atmosphere to feed their lungs, insects with no terrestrial plants to live upon, reptiles without marshes, birds without trees, cattle without grass, all things, in short, without the essential conditions for their existence.
What we do find–and these, as I shall endeavor to show my readers, in such profusion that it would seem as if God, in the joy of creation, had compensated Himself for a less variety of forms in the greater richness of the early types–is an immense number of beings belonging to the four primary divisions of the Animal Kingdom, but only to those classes whose representatives are marine, whose home then, as now, was either in the sea or along its shores. In other words, the first organic creation expressed in its totality the structural conception since carried out in such wonderful variety of details, and purposely limited then, because the world, which was to be the home of the higher animals, was not yet made ready to receive them.
I am fully aware that the intimate relations between the organic and physical world are interpreted by many as indicating the absence, rather than the presence, of an intelligent Creator. They argue, that the dependence of animals on material laws gives us the clue to their origin as well as to their maintenance. Were this influence as absolute and unvarying as the purely mechanical action of physical circumstances must necessarily be, this inference might have some pretence to logical probability,–though it seems to me unnecessary, under any circumstances, to resort to climatic influences or the action of any physical laws to explain the thoughtful distribution of the organic and inorganic world, so evidently intended to secure for all beings what best suits their nature and their needs. But the truth is, that, while these harmonious relations underlie the whole creation in such a manner as to indicate a great central plan, of which all things are a part, there is at the same time a freedom, an arbitrary element in the mode of carrying it out, which seems to point to the exercise of an individual will; for, side by side with facts, apparently the direct result of physical laws, are other facts, the nature of which shows a complete independence of external influences.
Take, for instance, the similarity above alluded to between the fauna of the Arctics and that of the Alps, certainly showing a direct relation between climatic conditions and animal and vegetable life. Yet even there, where the shades of specific difference between many animals and plants of the same class are so slight as to battle the keenest investigators, we have representative types both in the Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms as distinct and peculiar as those of widely removed and strongly contrasted climatic conditions. Shall we attribute the similarities and the differences alike to physical causes? Compare, for example, the Reindeer of the Arctics with the Ibex and the Chamois, representing the same group in the Alps. Even on mountain-heights of similar altitudes, where not only climate, but other physical conditions would suggest a recurrence of identical animals, we do not find the