a speck, for revolutions and great emergencies, you know,–so that we should not submit to be trodden quite flat by the first heavy-heeled aggressor that came along. You can tell a portrait from an ideal head, I suppose, and a true story from one spun out of the writer’s invention. See whether this sounds true or not.
Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin sent out two fine blood-horses, Barefoot and Scrab by name, to Massachusetts, something before the time I am talking of. With them came a Yorkshire groom, a stocky little fellow, in velvet breeches, who made that mysterious hissing noise, traditionary in English stables, when he rubbed down the silken-skinned racers, in great perfection. After the soldiers had come from the muster-field, and some of the companies were on the village-common, there was still some skirmishing between a few individuals who had not had the fight taken out of them. The little Yorkshire groom thought he must serve out somebody. So he threw himself into an approved scientific attitude, and, in brief, emphatic language, expressed his urgent anxiety to accommodate any classical young gentleman who chose to consider himself a candidate for his attentions. I don’t suppose there were many of the college boys that would have been a match for him in the art which Englishmen know so much more of than Americans, for the most part. However, one of the Sophomores, a very quiet, peaceable fellow, just stepped out of the crowd, and, running straight at the groom, as he stood there, sparring away, struck him with the sole of his foot, a straight blow, as if it had been with his fist,–and knocked him heels over head and senseless, so that he had to be carried off from the field. This ugly way of hitting is the great trick of the French _savate,_ which is not commonly thought able to stand its ground against English pugilistic science.–These are old recollections, with not much to recommend them, except, perhaps, a dash of life, which may be worth a little something.
The young Marylander brought them all up, you may remember. He recalled to my mind those two splendid pieces of vitality I told you of. Both have been long dead. How often we see these great red flaring flambeaux of life blown out, as it were, by a puff of wind,–and the little, single-wicked night-lamp of being, which some white-faced and attenuated invalid shades with trembling fingers, flickering on while they go out one after another, until its glimmer is all that is left to us of the generation it belonged to!
I told you that I was perfectly sure, beforehand, we should find some pleasing girlish or womanly shape to fill the blank at our table and match the dark-haired youth at the upper corner.
There she sits, at the very opposite corner, just as far off as accident could put her from this handsome fellow, by whose side she ought, of course, to be sitting. One of the “positive” blondes, as my friend, you may remember, used to call them. Tawny-haired, amber-eyed, full-throated, skin as white as a blanched almond. Looks dreamy to me, not self-conscious, though a black ribbon round her neck sets it off as a Marie-Antoinette’s diamond-necklace could not do. So in her dress, there is a harmony of tints that looks as if an artist had run his eye over her and given a hint or two like the finishing touch to a picture. I can’t help being struck with her, for she is at once rounded and fine in feature, looks calm, as blondes are apt to, and as if she might run wild, if she were trifled with.–It is just as I knew it would be,–and anybody can see that our young Marylander will be dead in love with her in a week.
Then if that little man would only turn out immensely rich and have the good-nature to die and leave them all his money, it would be as nice as a three-volume novel.
Little Boston is in a flurry, I suspect, with the excitement of having such a charming neighbor next him. I judge so mainly by his silence and by a certain rapt and serious look on his face, as if he were thinking of something that had happened, or that might happen, or that ought to happen,–or how beautiful her young life looked, or how hardly Nature had dealt with him, or something which struck him silent, at any rate. I made several conversational openings for him, but he did not fire up as he often does. I even went so far as to indulge in a fling at the State House, which, as we all know, is in truth a very imposing structure, covering less ground than St. Peter’s, but of similar general effect. The little man looked up, but did not reply to my taunt. He said to the young lady, however, that the State House was the Parthenon of our Acropolis, which seemed to please her, for she smiled, and he reddened a little,–so I thought. I don’t think it right to watch persons who are the subjects of special infirmity,–but we all do it.
I see that they have crowded the chairs a little at that end of the table, to make room for another new-comer of the lady sort. A well-mounted, middle-aged preparation, wearing her hair without a cap,–pretty wide in the parting, though,–contours vaguely hinted,–features very quiet,–says little as yet, but seems to keep her eye on the young lady, as if having some responsibility for her.–
* * * * *
My record is a blank for some days after this. In the mean time I have contrived to make out the person and the story of our young lady, who, according to appearances, ought to furnish us a heroine for a boarding-house romance before a year is out. It is very curious that she should prove connected with a person many of us have heard of. Yet, curious as it is, I have been a hundred times struck with the circumstance that the most remote facts are constantly striking each other; just as vessels starting from ports thousands of miles apart pass close to each other in the naked breadth of the ocean, nay, sometimes even touch, in the dark, with a crack of timbers, a gurgling of water, a cry of startled sleepers,–a cry mysteriously echoed in warning dreams, as the wife of some Gloucester fisherman, some coasting skipper, wakes with a shriek, calls the name of her husband, and sinks back to uneasy slumbers upon her lonely pillow,–a widow.
Oh, these mysterious meetings! Leaving all the vague, waste, endless spaces of the washing desert, the ocean-steamer and the fishing-smack sail straight towards each other as if they ran in grooves ploughed for them in the waters from the beginning of creation! Not only things and events, but our own thoughts, are so full of these surprises, that, if there were a reader in my parish who did not recognize the familiar occurrence of what I am now going to mention, I should think it a case for the missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of Intelligence among the Comfortable Classes.
There are about as many twins in the births of thought as of children. For the first time in your lives you learn some fact or come across some idea. Within an hour, a day, a week, that same fact or idea strikes you from another quarter. It seems as if it had passed into space and bounded back upon you as an echo from the blank wall that shuts in the world of thought. Yet no possible connection exists between the two channels by which the thought or the fact arrived. Let me give an infinitesimal illustration.
One of the Boys mentioned, the other evening, in the course of a very pleasant poem he read us, a little trick of the Commons table-boarders, which I, nourished at the parental board, had never heard of. Young fellows being always hungry—-Allow me to stop dead-short, in order to utter an aphorism which has been forming itself in one of the blank interior spaces of my intelligence, like a crystal in the cavity of a geode.
* * * * *
_Aphorism by the Professor._
In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food of different kinds at short intervals. If young, it will eat anything at any hour of the day or night. If old, it observes stated periods, and you might as well attempt to regulate the time of high-water to suit a fishing-party as to change these periods.
The crucial experiment is this. Offer a bulky and boggy bun to the suspected individual just ten minutes before dinner. If this is eagerly accepted and devoured, the fact of youth is established. If the subject of the question changes color and expresses surprise and incredulity, as if you could not possibly be in earnest, the fact of maturity is no less clear.
* * * * *
—-Excuse me,–I return to my story of the Commons-table.–Young fellows being always hungry, and tea and dry toast being the meagre fare of the evening meal, it was a trick of some of the Boys to impale a slice of meat upon a fork, at dinner-time, and stick the fork holding it beneath the table, so that they could get it at tea-time. The dragons that guarded this table of the Hesperides found out the trick at last, and kept a sharp look-out for missing forks;–they knew where to find one, if it was not in its place.–Now the odd thing was, that, after waiting so many years to hear of this college trick, I should hear it mentioned _a second time_ within the same twenty-four hours by a college youth of the present generation. Strange, but true. And so it has happened to me and to every person, often and often, to be hit in rapid succession by these twinned facts or thoughts, as if they were linked like chain-shot.
I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it as an unexplained marvel. I think, however, I will turn over a furrow of subsoil in it. The explanation is, of course, that in a great many thoughts there most be a few coincidences, and these instantly arrest our attention. Now we shall probably never have the least idea of the enormous number of impressions which pass through our consciousness, until in some future life we see the photographic record of our thoughts and the stereoscopic picture of our actions. There go more pieces to make up a conscious life or a living body than you think for. Why, some of you were surprised when a friend of mine told you there were fifty-eight separate pieces in a fiddle. How many “swimming glands”–solid, organized, regularly formed, rounded disks, taking an active part in all your vital processes, part and parcel, each one of them, of your corporeal being–do you suppose are whirled along, like pebbles in a stream, with the blood which warms your frame and colors your cheeks?–A noted German physiologist spread out a minute drop of blood, under the microscope, in narrow streaks, and counted the globules, and then made a calculation. The counting by the micrometer took him _a week_.–You have, my full-grown friend, of these little couriers in crimson or scarlet livery, running on your vital errands day and night as long as you live, sixty-five billions, five hundred and seventy thousand millions. Errors excepted.–Did I hear some gentleman say, “Doubted?”–I am the Professor. I sit in my chair with a petard under it that will blow me through the skylight of my lecture-room, if I do not know what I am talking about and whom I am quoting.
Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads, and saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you had been waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is it possible that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of all that I have been saying, and its bearing on what is now to come? Listen, then. The number of these living elements in our bodies illustrates the incalculable multitude of our thoughts; the number of our thoughts accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of; these coincidences in the world of thought illustrate those which we constantly observe in the world of outward events, of which the presence of the young girl now at our table, and proving to be the daughter of an old acquaintance some of us may remember, is the special example which led me through this labyrinth of reflections, and finally lands me at the commencement of this young girl’s story, which, as I said, I have found the time and felt the interest to learn something of, and which I think I can tell without wronging the unconscious subject of my brief delineation.
* * * * *
IRIS.
You remember, perhaps, in some papers published awhile ago, an odd poem written by an old Latin tutor? He brought up at the verb _amo_, I love, as all of us do, and by and by Nature opened her great living dictionary for him at the word _filia_, a daughter. The poor man was greatly perplexed in choosing a name for her. _Lucretia_ and _Virginia_ were the first that he thought of; but then came up those pictured stories of Titus Livius, which he could never read without crying, though he had read them a hundred times.
–Lucretia sending for her husband and her father, each to bring one friend with him, and awaiting them in her chamber. To them her wrongs briefly. Let them see to the wretch, she will take care of herself. Then the hidden knife flashes out and sinks into her heart. She slides from her seat, and falls dying. “Her husband and her father cry aloud.”–No,–not Lucretia.
–Virginius,–a brown old soldier, father of a nice girl. She engaged to a very promising young man. Decemvir Appius takes a violent fancy to her,–must have her at any rate. Hires a lawyer to present the arguments in favor of the view that she was another man’s daughter.
There used to be lawyers in Rome that would do such things.–All right. There are two sides to everything. _Audi alteram partem_. The legal gentleman has no opinion,–he only states the evidence.–A doubtful case. Let the young lady be under the protection of the Honorable Decemvir until it can be looked up thoroughly.–Father thinks it best, on the whole, to give in. Will explain the matter, if the young lady and her maid will step this way. _That_ is the explanation,–a stab with a butcher’s knife, snatched from a stall, meant for other lambs than this poor bleeding Virginia!
The old man thought over the story. Then he must have one look at the original. So he took down the first volume and read it over. When he came to that part where it tells how the young gentleman she was engaged to and a friend of his took up the poor girl’s bloodless shape and carried it through the street, and how all the women followed, wailing, and asking if that was what their daughters were coming to,–if that was what they were to get for being good girls,–he melted down into his accustomed tears of pity and grief, and, through them all, of delight at the charming Latin of the narrative. But it was impossible to call his child Virginia. He could never look at her without thinking she had a knife sticking in her bosom.
_Dido_ would be a good name, and a fresh one. She was a queen, and the founder of a great city. Her story had been immortalized by the greatest of poets,–for the old Latin tutor clove to “Virgilius Maro,” as he called him, 93 closely as ever Dante, did in his memorable journey. So he took down his Virgil,–it was the smooth-leafed, open-lettered quarto of Baskerville,–and began reading the loves and mishaps of Dido. It wouldn’t do. A lady who had not learned discretion by experience, and came to an evil end. He shook his head, as he sadly repeated,
“–misera ante diem, subitoque accensa furore”;
but when he came to the lines,
“Ergo Iris croceis per coelum roscida pennis Mille trahens varios adverso Sole colores,”
he jumped up with a great exclamation, which the particular recording angel who heard it pretended not to understand, or it might have gone hard with the Latin tutor some time or other.
“_Iris_ shall be her name!”–he said. So her name was Iris.
–The natural end of a tutor is to perish by starvation. It is only a question of time, just as with the burning of college libraries. These all burn up sooner or later, provided they are not housed in brick or stone and iron. I don’t mean that you will see in the registry of deaths that this or that particular tutor died of well-marked, uncomplicated starvation. They _may_, even, in extreme cases, be carried off by a thin, watery kind of apoplexy, which sounds very well in the returns, but means little to those who know that it is only debility settling on the head. Generally, however, they fade and waste away under various pretexts,–calling it dyspepsia, consumption, and so on, to put a decent appearance upon the case and keep up the credit of the family and the institution where they have passed through the successive stages of inanition.
In some cases it takes a great many years to kill a tutor by the process in question. You see, they do get food and clothes and fuel, in appreciable quantities, such as they are. You will even notice rows of books in their rooms, and a picture or two,–things that look as if they had surplus money; but these superfluities are the _water of crystallization_ to scholars, and you can never get them away till the poor fellows effloresce into dust. Do not be deceived. The tutor breakfasts on coffee made of beans, edulcerated with milk watered to the verge of transparency; his mutton is tough and elastic, up to the moment when it becomes tired out and tasteless; his coal is a sullen, sulphurous anthracite, which rusts into ashes, rather than burns, in the shallow grate; his flimsy broadcloth is too thin for winter and too thick for summer. The greedy lungs of fifty hot-blooded boys suck the oxygen from the air he breathes in his recitation-room. In short, he undergoes a process of gentle and gradual starvation.
–The mother of little Iris was not called Electra, like hers of the old story, neither was her grandfather Oceanus. Her blood-name, which she gave away with her heart to the Latin tutor, was a plain old English one, and her water-name was Hannah, beautiful as recalling the mother of Samuel, and admirable as reading equally well from the initial letter forwards and from the terminal letter backwards. The poor lady, seated with her companion at the chess-board of matrimony, had but just pushed forward her one little white pawn upon an empty square, when the Black Knight, that cares nothing for castles or kings or queens, swooped down upon her and swept her from the larger board of life.
The old Latin tutor put a modest blue stone at the head of his late companion, with her name and age and _Eheu!_ upon it,–a smaller one at her feet, with initials; and left her by herself, to be rained and snowed on,–which is a hard thing to do for those whom we have cherished tenderly.
About the time that the lichens, falling on the stone, like drops of water, had spread into fair, round rosettes, the tutor had starved into a slight cough. Then he began to draw the buckle of his black pantaloons a little tighter, and took in another reef in his never-ample waistcoat. His temples got a little hollow, and the contrasts of color in his cheeks more vivid than of old. After a while his walks fatigued him, and he was tired and breathed hard after going up a flight or two of stairs. Then came on other marks of inward trouble and general waste, which he spoke of to his physician as peculiar, and doubtless owing to accidental causes; to all which the doctor listened with deference, as if it had not been the old story that one in five or six of mankind in temperate climates tells, or has told for him, as if it were something new. As the doctor went out, he said to himself,–“On the rail at last. Accommodation train. A good many stops, but will get to the station by and by.” So the doctor wrote a recipe with the astrological sign of Jupiter before it, (just as your own physician does, inestimable reader, as you will see, if you look at his next prescription,) and departed, saying he would look in occasionally. After this, the Latin tutor began the usual course of “getting better,” until he got so much better that his face was very sharp, and when he smiled, three crescent lines showed at each side of his lips, and when he spoke, it was in a muffled whisper, and the white of his eye glistened as pearly as the purest porcelain,–so much better, that he hoped–by spring–he—-might be able–to–attend—-to his class again.–But he was recommended not to expose himself, and so kept his chamber, and occasionally, not having anything to do, his bed. The unmarried sister with whom he lived took care of him; and the child, now old enough to be manageable, and even useful in trifling offices, sat in the chamber, or played about.
Things could not go on so forever, of course. One morning his face was sunken and his hands very, very cold. He was “better,” he whispered, but sadly and faintly. After a while he grew restless and seemed a little wandering. His mind ran on his classics, and fell back on the Latin grammar.
“Iris!” he said,–“_filiola mea!_”-The child knew this meant _my dear little daughter_ as well as if it had been English.–“Rainbow!”–for he would translate her name at times, “come to me,–_veni_”-and his lips went on automatically, and murmured, “_vel venito!_”–The child came and sat by his bedside and took his hand, which she could not warm, but which shot its rays of cold all through her slender frame. But there she sat, looking steadily at him. Presently he opened his lips feebly, and whispered, “_Moribundus._” She did not know what that meant, but she saw that there was something new and sad. So she began to cry; but presently remembering an old book that seemed to comfort him at times, got up and brought a Bible in the Latin version, called the Vulgate. “Open it,” he said,–“I will read,–_segnius irritant_,–don’t put the light out,–ah! _haeret lateri_,–I am going,–_vale, vale, vale_, good-bye, good-bye,–the Lord take care of my child!–_Domine, audi_–_vel audito!_” His face whitened suddenly, and he lay still, with open eyes and mouth. He had taken his last degree.
—-Little Miss Iris could not be said to begin life with a very brilliant rainbow over her, in a worldly point of view. A limited wardrobe of man’s attire, such as poor tutors wear,–a few good books, especially classics,–a print or two, and a plaster model of the Pantheon, with some pieces of furniture which had seen service,–these, and a child’s heart full of tearful recollections and strange doubts and questions, alternating with the cheap pleasures which are the anodynes of childish grief; such were the treasures she inherited.–No,–I forgot. With that kindly sentiment which all of us feel for old men’s first children,–frost-flowers of the early winter season,–the old tutor’s students had remembered him at a time when he was laughing and crying with his new parental emotions, and running to the side of the plain crib in which his _alter ego_, as he used to say, was swinging, to hang over the little heap of stirring clothes, from which looked the minute, red, downy, still, round face, with unfixed eyes and working lips,–in that unearthly gravity which has never yet been broken by a smile, and which gives to the earliest moon-year or two of an infant’s life the character of a _first old age_, to counterpoise that _second childhood_ which there is one chance in a dozen it may reach by and by. The boys had remembered the old man and young father at that tender period of his hard, dry life. There came to him a fair, silver goblet, embossed with classical figures, and bearing on a shield the graven words, _Ex dono pupillorum_. The handle on its side showed what use the boys had meant it for; and a kind letter in it, written with the best of feeling, in the worst of Latin, pointed delicately to its destination. Out of this silver vessel, after a long, desperate, strangling cry, which marked her first great lesson in the realities of life, the child took the blue milk, such as poor tutors and their children get, tempered with water, and sweetened a little, so as to bring it nearer the standard established by the touching indulgence and partiality of Nature,–who has mingled an extra allowance of sugar in the blameless food of the child at its mother’s heart, as compared with that of its infant brothers and sisters of the bovine race.
But a willow will grow in baked sand wet with rain-water. An air-plant will grow by feeding on the winds. Nay, those huge forests that overspread great continents have built themselves up mainly from the air-currents with which they are always battling. The oak is but a foliated atmospheric crystal deposited from the aerial ocean that holds the future vegetable world in solution. The storm that tears its leaves has paid tribute to its strength, and it breasts the tornado clad in the spoils of a hundred hurricanes.
Poor little Iris! What had she in common with the great oak in the shadow of which we are losing sight of her?–She lived and grew like that,–this was all. The blue milk ran into her veins and filled them with thin, pure blood. Her skin was fair, with a faint tinge, such as the white rosebud shows before it opens. The doctor who had attended her father was afraid her aunt would hardly be able to “raise” her,–“delicate child,”–hoped she was not consumptive,–thought there was a fair chance she would take after her father.
A very forlorn-looking person, dressed, in black, with a white neckcloth, sent her a memoir of a child who died at the age of two years and eleven months, after having fully indorsed all the doctrines of the particular persuasion to which he not only belonged himself, but thought it very shameful that everybody else did not belong. What with foreboding looks and dreary deathbed stories, it was a wonder the child made out to live through it. It saddened her early years, of course,–it distressed her tender soul with thoughts which, as they cannot be fully taken in, should be sparingly used as instruments of torture to break down the natural cheerfulness of a healthy child, or, what is infinitely worse, to cheat a dying one out of the kind illusions with which the Father of All has strewed its downward path.
The child would have died, no doubt, and, if properly managed, might have added another to the long catalogue of wasting children who have been as cruelly played upon by spiritual physiologists, often with the best intentions, as ever the subject of a rare disease by the curious students of science.
Fortunately for her, however, a wise instinct had guided the late Latin tutor in the selection of the partner of his life, and the future mother of his child. The deceased tutoress was a tranquil, smooth woman, easily nourished, as such people are,–a quality which is inestimable in a tutor’s wife,–and so it happened that the daughter inherited enough vitality from the mother to live through childhood and infancy and fight her way towards womanhood, in spite of the tendencies she derived from her other parent.
—-Two and two do not always make four, in this matter of hereditary descent of qualities. Sometimes they make three, and sometimes five. It seems as if the parental traits at one time showed separate, at another blended,–that occasionally the force of two natures is represented in the derivative one by a diagonal of greater value than either original line of living movement,–that sometimes there is a loss of vitality hardly to be accounted for, and again a forward impulse of variable intensity in some new and unforeseen direction.
So it was with this child. She had glanced off from her parental probabilities at an unexpected angle. Instead of taking to classical learning like her father, or sliding quietly into household duties like her mother, she broke out early in efforts that pointed in the direction of Art. As soon as she could hold a pencil she began to sketch outlines of objects round her with a certain air and spirit. Very extraordinary horses, but their legs looked as if they could move. Birds unknown to Audubon, yet flying, as it were, with a rush. Men with impossible legs, which did yet seem to have a vital connection with their most improbable bodies. By-and-by the doctor, on his beast,–an old man with a face looking as if Time had kneaded it like dough with his knuckles, with a rhubarb tint and flavor pervading himself and his sorrel horse and all their appurtenances. A dreadful old man! Be sure she did not forget those saddlebags that held the detestable bottles out of which he used to shake those loathsome powders which, to virgin childish palates that find heaven in strawberries and peaches, are—-Well, I suppose I had better stop. Only she wished she was dead sometimes when she heard him coming. On the next leaf would figure the gentleman with the black coat and white cravat, as he looked when he came and entertained her with stories concerning the death of various little children about her age, to encourage her, as that wicked Mr. Arouet said about shooting Admiral Byng. Then she would take her pencil and with a few scratches there would be the outline of a child, in which you might notice how one sudden sweep gave the chubby cheek, and two dots darted at the paper looked like real eyes.
By-and-by she went to school, and caricatured the schoolmaster on the leaves of her grammars and geographies, and drew the faces of her companions, and, from time to time, heads and figures from her fancy, with large eyes, far apart, like those of Raffaelle’s mothers and children, sometimes with wild floating hair, and then with wings and heads thrown back in ecstasy. This was about twelve, as the dates of these drawings show, and, therefore, three or four years before she came among us. Soon after this time, the ideal figures began to take the place of portraits and caricatures, and a new feature appeared in her drawing-books in the form of fragments of verse and short poems.
It was dull work, of course, for such a young girl to live with an old spinster and go to a village school. Her books bore testimony to this; for there was a look of sadness in the faces she drew, and a sense of weariness and longing for some imaginary conditions of blessedness or other, which began to be painful. She might have gone through this flowering of the soul, and, casting her petals, subsided into a sober, human berry, but for the intervention of friendly assistance and counsel.
In the town where she lived was a lady of honorable condition, somewhat past middle age, who was possessed of pretty ample means, of cultivated tastes, of excellent principles, of exemplary character, and of more than common accomplishments. The gentleman in black broadcloth and white neckerchief only echoed the common voice about her, when he called her, after enjoying, beneath her hospitable roof, an excellent cup of tea, with certain elegancies and luxuries he was unaccustomed to, “The Model of all the Virtues.”
She deserved this title as well as almost any woman. She did really bristle with moral excellences. Mention any good thing she had not done; I should like to see you try! There was no handle of weakness to take hold of her by: she was as unseizable, except in her totality, as a billiard-ball; and on the broad, green, terrestrial table, where she had been knocked about, like all of us, by the cue of Fortune, she glanced from every human contact, and “caramed” from one relation to another, and rebounded from the stuffed cushion of temptation, with such exact and perfect angular movements, that the Enemy’s corps of Reporters had long given up taking notes of her conduct, as there was no chance for their master.
What an admirable person for the patroness and directress of a slightly self-willed child, with the lightning zigzag line of genius running like a glittering vein through the marble whiteness of her virgin nature! One of the lady-patroness’s peculiar virtues was calmness. She was resolute and strenuous, but still. You could depend on her for every duty; she was as true as steel. She was kind-hearted and serviceable in all the relations of life. She had more sense, more knowledge, more conversation, as well as more goodness, than all the partners you have waltzed with this winter put together.
Yet no man was known to have loved her, or even to have offered himself to her in marriage. It was a great wonder. I am very anxious to vindicate my character as a philosopher and an observer of Nature by accounting for this apparently extraordinary fact.
You may remember certain persons who have the misfortune of presenting to the friends whom they meet a cold, damp hand. There are states of mind in which a contact of this kind has a depressing effect on the vital powers that makes us insensible to all the virtues and graces of the proprietor of one of these life-absorbing organs. When they touch us, virtue passes out of us, and we feel as if our electricity had been drained by a powerful negative battery, carried about by an overgrown human torpedo.
“The Model of all the Virtues” had a pair of searching eyes as clear as Wenham ice; but they were slower to melt than that fickle jewelry. Her features disordered themselves slightly at times in a surface-smile, but never broke loose from their corners and indulged in the riotous tumult of a laugh–which, I take it, is the mob-law of the features,–and propriety the magistrate who reads the riot-act. She carried the brimming cup of her inestimable virtues with a cautious, steady hand, and an eye always on them, to see that they did not spill. Then she was an admirable judge of character. Her mind was a perfect laboratory of tests and reagents; every syllable you put into breath went into her intellectual eudiometer, and all your thoughts were recorded on litmus-paper. I think there has rarely been a more admirable woman. Of course, Miss Iris was immensely and passionately attached to her.—-Well,–these are two highly oxygenated adverbs,–grateful,– suppose we say,–yes,–grateful, dutiful, obedient to her wishes for the most part,–perhaps not quite up to the concert pitch of such a perfect orchestra of the virtues.
We must have a weak spot or two in a character before we can love it much. People that do not laugh or cry, or take more of anything than is good for them, or use anything but dictionary-words, are admirable subjects for biographies. But we don’t always care most for those flat-pattern flowers that press best in the herbarium.
This immaculate woman,–why couldn’t she have a fault or two? Isn’t there any old whisper which will tarnish that wearisome aureole of saintly perfection? Doesn’t she carry a lamp of opium in her pocket? Isn’t her cologne-bottle replenished oftener than its legitimate use would require? It would be such a comfort!
Not for the world would a young creature like Iris have let such words escape her, or such thoughts pass through her mind. Whether at the bottom of her soul lies any uneasy consciousness of an oppressive presence, it is hard to say, until we know more about her. Iris sits between the little man and the “Model of all the Virtues,” as the black-coated gentleman called her.–I will watch them all.
—-Here I stop for the present. What the Professor said has had to make way this time for what he saw and heard.
* * * * *
—-And now you may read these lines, which were written for gentle souls who love music, and read in even tones, and, perhaps, with something like a smile upon the reader’s lips, at a meeting where these musical friends had gathered. Whether they were written with smiles or not, you can guess better after you have read them.
THE OPENING OF THE PIANO.
In the little southern parlor of the house you may have seen
With the gambrel-roof, and the gable looking westward to the green,
At the side toward the sunset, with the window on its right,
Stood the London-made piano I am dreaming of to-night.
Ah me! how I remember the evening when it came!
What a cry of eager voices, what a group of cheeks in flame,
When the wondrous box was opened that had come from over seas,
With its smell of mastic-varnish and its flash of ivory keys!
Then the children all grew fretful in the restlessness of joy,
For the boy would push his sister, and the sister crowd the boy,
Till the father asked for quiet in his grave paternal way,
But the mother hushed the tumult with the words, “Now, Mary, play.”
For the dear soul knew that music was a very sovereign balm;
She had sprinkled it over Sorrow and seen its brow grow calm,
In the days of slender harpsichords with tapping tinkling quills,
Or carolling to her spinet with its thin metallic thrills.
So Mary, the household minstrel, who always loved to please,
Sat down to the new “Clementi,” and struck the glittering keys.
Hushed were the children’s voices, and every eye grew dim,
As, floating from lip and finger, arose the “Vesper Hymn.”
–Catharine, child of a neighbor, curly and rosy-red,
(Wedded since, and a widow–something like ten years dead,)
Hearing a gush of music such as none before,
Steals from her mother’s chamber and peeps at the open door.
Just as the “Jubilate” in threaded whisper dies,
–“Open it! open it, lady!” the little maiden cries
(For she thought ’twas a singing creature caged in a box she heard,)
“Open it! open it, lady! and let me see the _bird!_”
THE UTAH EXPEDITION;
ITS CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES.
If General Henry Knox, of Revolutionary memory, the first Secretary of War of the Republic, had dreamed that the successor to his portfolio, after an interval of seventy years, would recommend to Congress the purchase of a thousand camels for military purposes, he would have attributed the fancy to excited nerves or a too hearty dinner. Had he dreamed, further, that the grotesque mounted corps was to be employed in regions two thousand miles beyond the frontier of the Anglo-Saxon pioneer of 1789, to guard travel to an actual El Dorado, the vision would have appeared still more extraordinary. And its absurdity would have seemed complete, if he had fancied the high road of this travel as leading through a community essentially Oriental in its social and political life, which was nevertheless ripening into a State of the American Union. Yet if General Knox could be roused from his grave at Thomaston, he would see the dream realized. On the Pacific lies El Dorado; among the fastnesses of the Rocky Mountains there is a community which blends the voluptuousness of Bagdad with the economy of Cape Cod; and within two years a regiment of camel-riders will be scouring the Great American Plains after Cheyennes, Navajoes, and Camanches.
The propagation of the religion of which Joseph Smith was the prophet has just begun to attract the notice its extraordinary success, deserves. So long as the head of the Mormon Church was considered a kind of Mahometan Sam Slick, and his associates a crazy rabble, it was vain to expect that the whole sect could be treated with more attention than any of the curiosities in a popular museum. But a juster appreciation of the constitution of the Mormon community begins to prevail, and with it comes a conviction that questions are involved in its relations to the parent government which are not exceeded in importance by any that have ever been agitated at Washington. Brigham Young no longer seems to the American public a religious mountebank, only one grade removed from the man Orr, who claimed to be the veritable Angel Gabriel, and was killed in a popular commotion which he had himself excited in Dutch Guiana. On the contrary, he begins to appear as a man of great native strength and scope of mind, who understands the phases of human character and knows how to avail himself of the knowledge, and who has acquired spiritual dominion over one hundred and fifty thousand souls, combined with absolute temporal supremacy over fifty thousand of the number.
The situation of the Mormon community in Utah has been peculiarly adapted, heretofore, to the eccentricities of its inhabitants. Isolated from Christendom on the east and west by plains incapable of settlement for generations to come, and encompassed by mountain-ranges, the line of whose summits runs above the boundary of eternal snow, it was independent of the influences of Christian civilization. No missionary of any Christian sect ever attempted to propagate his doctrines in Utah,–nor, perhaps, would any such propagation have been tolerated, had it been attempted. The Mormon religion was free to run its own course and develop whatever elements it possessed of good and evil. When Brigham Young and his followers from Nauvoo descended the Wahsatch range in the summer of 1847, and took up their abode around the Great Salt Lake, the avowed creed of the Church was different from that proclaimed to-day. The secret doctrines entertained by its leaders were perhaps the same as at present, but the religion of the people was a species of mysticism which it is not impossible to conceive might commend itself even to a refined mind. The existence of polygamy was officially denied by the highest ecclesiastical authority, although we know to-day that the denial was a shameless lie, and that Joseph Smith, during his lifetime, had a plurality of wives, and at his death bequeathed them to his successor, who already possessed a harem of his own. Property was almost equally distributed among the people, the leaders being as poor as their disciples. In this respect at that time they were accustomed exultantly to compare their condition with that of the early Christians.
Ten year’s passed, and the change was extraordinary. The doctrines of Mormonism, if plainly stated, are no longer such as can commend themselves to a mind not perverted nor naturally prurient. Polygamy is inculcated as a religious duty, without which dignity in the Celestial Kingdom is impossible, and even salvation hardly to be obtained. Property is distributed unjustly, the bulk of real and personal estate in the Territory being vested in the Church and its directors, between whom and the mass of the population there exists a difference in social welfare as wide as between the Russian nobleman and his serf. In brief, the Mormons no longer claim to be a Christian sect, but assert, and truly, that their religion is as distinct from Christianity as that is from Mahometanism. Many of the doctrines whispered in 1847 only to those who had been admitted to the penetralia of the Nauvoo Temple are proclaimed unblushingly in 1857 from the pulpit in the Tabernacle at Salt Lake City. A system of polytheism has been ingrafted on the creed, according to which there are grades among the Gods, there being no Supreme Ruler of all, but the primeval Adam of Genesis being the deity highest in spiritual rank, and Christ, Mahomet, Joseph Smith, and, finally, Brigham Young, partaking also of divinity. The business of these deities in the Celestial Kingdom is the propagation of souls to people bodies begotten on earth, and the sexual relation is made to permeate every portion of the creed as thoroughly as it pervaded the religions of ancient Egypt and India. In the Endowment House at Salt Lake City, secret rites are practised of a character similar to the mysteries of the Nile, and presided over by Young and Kimball, two Vermont Yankees, with all the solemnity of priests of Isis and Osiris. In these rites, which are symbolical of the mystery of procreation, both sexes participate, clad in loose flowing robes of white linen, with cleansed bodies and anointed hair. Since the revelation of the processes of the Endowment, which was first fully made by a young apostate named John Hyde, other dissenters, real and pretended, have attempted to impose on the public exaggerated accounts of these ceremonies; but in justice to the Mormon Church it ought to be said, that there is no foundation for the reports that they are such as would outrage decency. To be sure, an assemblage of members of both sexes, clad in white shifts, with oiled and dishevelled hair, in a room fitted up in resemblance of a garden, to witness a performance of the allegory of Adam and Eve in Eden, which is conducted so as to be sensually symbolic, is not suggestive of refined ideas; but it is necessary to take into consideration the character both of performers and witnesses, which is not distinguished in any way by delicacy. According to their standard of morality and taste, the rites of the Endowment are devoid of immodesty.
In their political bearing, however, they are more important, and justly liable to the severest censure. It is established beyond question, that the initiated, clad in the preposterous costume before described, take an oath, in the presence of their Spiritual Head, to cherish eternal enmity towards the government of the United States until it shall have avenged the death of their prophet, Joseph Smith. And this ceremony is not a mere empty form of words. It is an oath, the spirit of which the Endowed carry into their daily life and all their relations with the Gentile world. In it lies the root of the evasion, and finally subversion, of Federal authority which occasioned the recent military expedition to Utah.
When the Territory was organized in 1850, the government at Washington, acting on an imperfect knowledge of the nature of Mormonism, conferred the office of Governor upon Brigham Young. For this act Mr. Fillmore has been unjustly censured. It appeared to him, at the time, a proper, as well as politic, appointment. But before the succession of General Pierce to the Presidency, its evil results became apparent, in the expulsion of civil officers from the Territory and the subversion of all law. A feeble, and of course unsuccessful, attempt was then made to supplant Young with Lieutenant-Colonel Steptoe, a meritorious, but too amiable officer of the regular army,–the same whose defeat by the Cayuses, Spokans, and Coeur d’Alenes, last May, occasioned the Indian war in Washington Territory. During the summer of 1855, he led a battalion overland, wintering in Salt Lake City. It was at his option, at any time during his sojourn, to have claimed the supreme executive authority. He did not do so, but even headed a recommendation to President Pierce for the reappointment of Brigham Young. This was the result of his winter’s residence, during which he and some of his fellow-officers were feasted to their stomachs’ content, and entirely careless concerning the political condition of the Territory. Late in the spring, he marched away to California, after having expressed to the President that it was “his unqualified opinion, based on personal acquaintance, that Brigham Young is [was] the most suitable person for the office of Governor.” Brigham’s views of the winter’s proceedings, on the other hand, were expressed in a sermon preached in the Tabernacle, the Sunday after the departure of the Lieutenant-Colonel, in which he repeated his declaration of three years previous:–
“I am, and will be, governor, and no power can hinder it, until the Lord Almighty says, ‘Brigham, you need not be governor any longer.'” And he added,–“I do not know what I shall say next winter, if such men make their appearance here as some last winter. I know what I think I shall say; if they play the same game again, let the women be ever so bad, so help me God, we will slay them.”
Most of the other civil officers who were commissioned about the same time with Colonel Steptoe arrived the August after he had departed. Within eighteen months their lot was the same as that of their predecessors. In April, 1857, before the snow had begun to melt on the mountains, all of them, in a party led by Surveyor-General Burr, were on their way to the States, happy in having escaped with life. During the previous February, the United States District Court had been broken up in Salt Lake City. A mob had invaded the courtroom, armed with pistols and bludgeons, a knife was drawn on the judge in his private room, and he was ordered to adjourn his court _sine die_, and yielded. Indian-Agent Hurt was the only Gentile official who remained in the Territory.
In the mean while, however, a change of national administration had taken place, and General Pierce had been succeeded by Mr. Buchanan. For nearly three years the country had been convulsed by an agitation of the Slavery question, originating with Senator Douglas, which culminated in the Presidential election of 1856. The Utah question, grave though it was, was forgotten in the excitement concerning Kansas, or remembered only by the Republican party, as enabling them to stigmatize more pungently the political theories of the Illinois Senator, by coupling polygamy and slavery, “twin relics of barbarism,” in the resolution of their Philadelphia Platform against Squatter Sovereignty. In the lull which succeeded the election, Mr. Buchanan had leisure, at Wheatland, to draft a programme for his incoming administration. His paramount idea was to gag the North and induce her to forget that she had been robbed of her birthright, by forcing on the attention of the country other questions of absorbing interest. One of the most obvious of these was supplied by the condition of affairs in Utah. It had been satisfactorily established, that the Mormons, acting under the influence of leaders to whom they seemed to have surrendered their judgment, refused to be controlled by any other authority; that they had been often advised to obedience, and these friendly counsels had been answered with defiance; that officers of the Federal Government had been driven from the Territory for no offence except an effort to do their sworn duty, while others had been prevented from going there by threats of assassination; that judges had been interrupted in the performance of their functions, and the records of their courts seized, and either destroyed or concealed; and, finally, that many other acts of unlawful violence had been perpetrated, and the right to repeat them openly claimed by the leading inhabitants, with at least the silent acquiescence of nearly all the rest of the population. In view of these facts, Mr. Buchanan determined to supersede Brigham Young in the office of Governor, and to send to Utah a strong military force to sustain the new appointee in the exercise of his authority.
The rumors of the impending expedition reached the Mormons at the very moment they were prepared to apply to Congress for admission as a State. A Constitution had been framed by a Convention assembled without the sanction of an enabling act, and was intrusted to George A, Smith and John Taylor, two of the Twelve Apostles of the Church, for presentation to Congress. These men, both of them of more than ordinary ability, helped to present the Mormon side of the question to the country through the newspapers, during the winter of 1856-7. The essence of their vindication was, that the character of some of the Federal officers who had been sent to Utah was objectionable in the extreme; but, granting the truth of all their statements on this subject, they supplied no excuse for the utter subversion of Federal authority in the Territory. Their narrative, however, formed a most spicy chapter in the annals of official scandal. The three United States judges, Kinney, Drummond, and Stiles, were presented to the public stripped of all judicial sanctity;–Kinney, the Chief Justice, as the keeper of a grocery-store, dance-room, and boarding-house, enforcing the bills for food and lodging against his brethren of the law by expulsion from the bar in case of non-payment, and so tenacious of life, that, before departing from the Territory, he solicited and received from Brigham Young a patriarchal blessing; Drummond, as an amorous horse-jockey, who had taken to Utah, as his mistress, a drab from Washington, and seated her beside him once upon the bench of the court; Stiles as himself a Mormon, so far as the possession of two wives could make him one. From the early days of Joseph Smith, his disciple’s have never minced their language, and they expended their whole vocabulary now on such themes as have been cited, proving, to the satisfaction of everybody, that, in respect to the judiciary, they had indeed had just cause for complaint. The mission of Smith and Taylor failed, as might have been expected,–the Chairman of the Committee on Territories, Mr. Grow, of Pennsylvania, refusing even to present their Constitution to the House,–and they prepared to return to Utah.
A month or two later, Mr. Buchanan was inaugurated, and preparations for the Utah Expedition were immediately ordered. In the first place, an opinion was solicited from General Scott as to the feasibility of the undertaking until the next year. That distinguished soldier gave a decision adverse to the immediate dispatch of the expedition. He considered that the arrangements necessary to be made were so extensive, and the distances from which the regiments must be concentrated so great, that the wiser plan was to consume the year in getting everything in readiness for the troops to march from the frontier early in the spring of 1858. It would have been well, had his advice prevailed; but it was overruled, and the preparations for the expedition were commenced. The troops detailed for the service were the Fifth Infantry, then busy fighting Billy Bowlegs among the everglades of Florida,–the Tenth Infantry, which was stationed at the forts in Upper Minnesota,–the Second Dragoons, which was among the forces assembled at Fort Leavenworth, to be used, if necessary, in Kansas, at the requisition of Governor Walker,–and Phelps’s light-artillery battery, the same which so distinguished itself at Buena Vista, under the command of Captain Washington. An ordnance-battery, also, was organized for the purposes of the expedition. Brevet Brigadier-General Harney was assigned to the command-in-chief, an officer of a rude force of character, amounting often to brutality, and careless as to those details of military duty which savor more of the accountant’s inkstand than of the drum and fife, but ambitious, active, and well acquainted with the character of the service for which he was detailed. He was, at the time, in command in Kansas, subject in a measure to the will of Governor Walker.
The whole number of troops under orders for the expedition was hardly twenty-five hundred, but from this total no estimate can be predicated of the enormous quantities of commissary stores and munitions of war necessary to be dispatched to sustain it. It was thought advisable to send a supply for eighteen months, so that the trains exceeded in magnitude those which would accompany an army of twenty thousand in ordinary operations on the European continent, where _depots_ could be established along the line of march. To appreciate such preparations, it is necessary to understand the character of the country to be traversed between the Missouri River and the Great Salt Lake.
The route selected for the march was along the emigrant road across the Plains, first defined fifty years ago by trappers and _voyageurs_ following the trail by which the buffalo crossed the mountains, described by Lieutenant-Colonel Fremont, in the reports of his earlier explorations, and subsequently adopted by all the overland emigration across the continent. It is, perhaps, the most remarkable natural road in the world. The hand of man could hardly add an improvement to the highway along which, from the Missouri to the Great Basin, Nature has presented not a single obstacle to the progress of the heaviest loaded teams. From the frontier, at Fort Leavenworth, it sweeps over a broad rolling prairie to the Platte, a river shallow, but of great width, whose course is as straight as an arrow. Pursuing the river-bottom more than three hundred miles, to the Black Hills, steep mounds dotted with dark pines and cedars, it enters the broad belt of mountainous country which terminates in the rim of the Basin. Following thence the North Fork of the Platte, and its tributary, the Sweetwater,–so named by an old French trapper, who had the misfortune to upset a load of sugar into the stream,–it emerges from the Black Hills into scenery of a different character. On the northern bank of the Sweetwater are the Rattlesnake Mountains, huge excrescences of rock, blistering out of an arid plain; on the southern bank, the hills which bear the name of the river, and are only exaggerations of the bluff’s along the Platte. The dividing ridge between the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific is reached in the South Pass, at the foot of a spur of the Wind River range, a group of gigantic mountains, whose peaks reach three thousand feet above the line of perpetual snow. There the emigrant strikes his tent in the morning on the banks of a rivulet which finds its way, through the Platte, Missouri, and Mississippi, into the Gulf of Mexico,–and pitches it, at his next camp, upon a little creek which trickles into Green River, and at last, through the Colorado, into the Gulf of California. Not far distant spring the fountains of the Columbia. A level table-land extends to the fords of Green River, a clear and rapid stream, whose entire course has never yet been mapped by an intelligent explorer. Here the road becomes entangled again among mountains, and winds its way over steep ridges, across foaming torrents, and through canons so narrow that only noonday sunshine penetrates their depths, until it emerges, through a rocky gate in the great barrier of the Wahsatch range, upon the bench above Salt Lake City, twelve hundred miles from Fort Leavenworth. The view at this point, from the mouth of Emigration Canon, is enchanting. The sun, sinking through a cloudless western sky, silvers the long line of the lake, which is visible twenty miles away. Beyond the city the River Jordan winds quietly through the plain. Below the gazer are roofs and cupolas, shady streets, neat gardens, and fields of ripening grain. The mountains, which bound the horizon on every side, except where a wavering stream of heated air shows the beginning of the Great Desert, are tinged with a soft purple haze, in anticipation of the sunset, but every patch of green grass on their slopes glows through it like an emerald, while along the summits runs an undulating thread of snow.
Throughout this vast line of road, the only white inhabitants are the garrisons of the military posts, the keepers of mail-stations, and _voyageurs_ and mountaineers, whose cabins may be found in every locality favorable to Indian trade. These last are a singular race of men, fast disappearing, like the Indian and the buffalo, their neighbors. Most of them are of French extraction, and some have died without having learned to speak a word of English. Their wealth consists in cattle and horses, and little stocks of goods which they purchase from the sutlers at the forts or the merchants at Salt Lake City. Some of the more considerable among them have the means of sending to the States for an annual supply of blankets, beads, vermilion, and other stuff for Indian traffic; but the most are thriftless, and all are living in concubinage or marriage with squaws, and surrounded by troops of unwashed, screeching half-breeds. Once in from three to six years, they will make a journey to St. Louis, and gamble away so much of their savings since the last visit as has escaped being wasted over greasy card-tables during the long winter-evenings among the mountains. The Indian tribes along the way are numerous and formidable, the road passing through country occupied by Pawnees, Cheyennes, Sioux, Arapahoes, Crows, Snakes, and Utahs. With the Cheyennes war had been waged by the United States for more than two years, which interfered seriously with the expedition; for, during the month of June, a war-party from that tribe intercepted and dispersed the herd of beef-cattle intended for the use of the army.
The natural characteristics of the entire route are as unpromising as those of its inhabitants. At the distance of about two hundred miles from the Missouri frontier the soil becomes so pervaded by sand, that only scientific agriculture can render it available. Along the Platte there is no fuel. Not a tree is visible, except the thin fringe of cottonwoods on the margin of the river, all of which upon the south bank, where the road runs, were hewed down and burned at every convenient camp, during the great California emigration. When the Rocky Mountains are entered, the only vegetation found is bunch-grass, so called because it grows in tufts,–and the _artemisia_, or wild sage, an odorous shrub, which sometimes attains the magnitude of a tree, with a fibrous trunk as thick as a man’s thigh, but is ordinarily a bush about two feet in height. The bunch-grass, grown at such an elevation, possesses extraordinary nutritive properties, even in midwinter. About the middle of January a new growth is developed underneath the snow, forcing off the old dry blade that ripened and shed its seed the previous summer. From Fort Kearney to Fort Laramie, almost the only fuel to be obtained is the dung of buffalo and oxen, called, in the vocabulary of the region, “chips,”–the _argal_ of the Tartar deserts. Among the mountains the sage is the chief material of the traveller’s fire. It burns with a lively, ruddy flame, and gives out an intense heat. In the settlements of Utah all the wood consumed is hauled from the canons, which are usually lined with pines, firs, and cedars, while the broadsides of the mountains are nothing but terraces of volcanic rock. The price of wood in Salt Lake City is from twelve to twenty dollars a cord.
From this brief review of the natural features of the country, some idea may be formed of the intensity of the religious enthusiasm which has induced fifty thousand Mormon converts to traverse it, many of them on foot and trundling handcarts, to seek a home among the valleys of Utah, in a region hardly more propitious; and some idea, also, of the difficulties which were to attend the march of the army.
During the spring of 1857, the preparations for the expedition were hurried forward, and in June the whole force was collected at Fort Leavenworth. All Western Missouri was in a ferment. The river foamed with steamboats freighted with military stores, and the levee at Leavenworth City was covered all summer long with the frames of wagons. Between the 18th and the 24th of July, all the detachments of the little army were on the march, except a battalion of two companies of infantry, which had been unable to join their regiment at the time it moved from Minnesota, and the Second Dragoons, which Governor Walker retained in Kansas to overawe the uneasy people of the town of Lawrence. General Harney also tarried in Kansas, intending to wait until after the October election there, at which disturbances were anticipated that it might be necessary to quell by force.
At Washington, movements of equal importance were taking place. The Postmaster-General, in June, annulled the contract held by certain Mormons for the transportation of the monthly mall to Utah, ostensibly on account of non-performance of the service within the stipulated time, but really because he was satisfied that the mails were violated, either _en route_ or after arrival at Salt Lake City. The office of Governor of the Territory was offered by the President to various persons, and finally accepted, July 11th, by Alfred Cumming, a brother of the Cumming of Georgia who fought multitudinous duels with McDuffie of South Carolina, all of which both parties survived. Mr. Cumming had been a sutler during the Mexican War, and more recently a Superintendent of Indian Affairs on the Upper Missouri. He was reputed to be a gentleman of education, ambition, and executive ability. The office of Chief Justice was conferred on Judge D.R. Eckels, of Indiana, a person well fitted for the position by the circumstances of his early life, of the utmost determination, and whose judicial integrity was above suspicion.
The news of the stoppage of the mail reached Salt Lake Valley July 24th, an eventful anniversary in the history of Mormonism. It was on the 24th of July, 1847, that Brigham Young entered the Valley from the East, and the day had always afterwards been kept as a holiday of the Church. On this occasion, the celebration was held in Cottonwood Canon, one of the wildest and grandest gorges among the Wahsatch Mountains, opening at the foot of the Twin Peaks, about twenty miles southeast from Salt Lake City. Thither more than twenty-five hundred people had flocked from the city on the previous day, and prepared to hold their festival under bowers built of fragrant pines and cedars around a little lake far up among the mountains. During the afternoon of the 24th, while they were engaged in music, dancing, and every manner of lively sport, two dusty messengers rode up the canon, bringing from the States the news of the stoppage of the mail and of the approaching march of the troops. This mode of announcement was probably preconcerted with Brigham Young, who was undoubtedly aware of the facts on the preceding day. A scene of the maddest confusion ensued, which was heightened by the inflammatory speeches of the Mormon leaders. Young reminded the fanatical throng, that, ten years ago that very day, he had said, “Give us ten years of peace and we will ask no odds of the United States”; and he added, that the ten years had passed, and now they asked no odds,–that they constituted henceforth a free and independent state, to be known no longer as Utah, but by their own Mormon name of Deseret. Kimball, the second in authority in the Church, called on the people to adhere to Brigham, as their “prophet, seer, and revelator, priest, governor, and king.” The sun set on the first overt act in the rebellion. The fanatics, wending their way back to the city, across the broad plain, in the moonlight, were ready to follow wherever Brigham Young might choose to lead.
On the succeeding Sundays the spirit of rebellion was breathed from the pulpit in language yet more intemperate, and often profane and obscene. Military preparations were made with the greatest bustle; and the Nauvoo Legion–under which name, transplanted from Illinois, the militia were organized–was drilled daily in the streets of the city. The martial fervor ran so high that even the boys paraded with wooden spears and guns, and the little ragamuffins were inspected and patted on the head by venerable and veritable Fathers of the Church.
In total ignorance that the standard of rebellion had already been raised, General Harney, in the beginning of August, detached Captain Van Vliet, the Quarter-master on his staff, to proceed rapidly to Utah to make arrangements for the reception of the army in the Valley. He passed the troops in the vicinity of Fort Laramie. About thirty miles west of Green River he was met by a party of Mormons, who escorted him, accompanied only by his servant, to the city. There he was politely treated, but informed that his mission would be fruitless, for the Mormon people were determined to resist the ingress of the troops. At a meeting in the Tabernacle, at which the Captain was present on the platform, when Brigham Young called on the audience for an expression of opinion, every hand was raised in favor of the policy of resistance, and in expression of willingness, if it should become necessary, to abandon harvest and homestead, retreat with the women to the mountains, and wage there a war of extermination. They took pains to conduct the Captain through the well-kept gardens and blooming fields, to show him their household comforts, the herds of cattle, the stacks of hay and grain, and all their public improvements, in order to present a contrast between such plenty and prosperity and such a scene of desolation as they depicted. Profoundly impressed by the devotion of the people to their leaders, he started on his return, accompanied by Mr. Bernhisel, the Mormon delegate to Congress. Two days after he left the city, a proclamation was issued by Young, in his capacity of Governor, in which the army was denounced as a mob and forbidden to enter the Territory, and the people of Utah were summoned to arms to repel its advance.
When this document reached the troops, they had already crossed the Territorial line, and were prepared for its reception by the report of Captain Van Vliet as he passed them on his return to the States. Their position was embarrassing. In the absence of General Harney, each separate detachment constituted an independent command. The senior officer present was Colonel Alexander, of the Tenth Infantry, a thorough soldier in the minutiae of his profession, and distinguished by gallantry during the Mexican War. He resolved, very properly, in view of his seniority, to assume the command-in-chief until General Harney should arrive from the East. On the 27th of September, before the proclamation was received, the first division of the army crossed Green River, having accomplished a march of a thousand miles in little more than two months. That same night it hastened forwards thirty miles to Ham’s Fork,–a confluent of Black’s Fork, which empties into Green River,–where several supply-trains were gathered, upon which there was danger that the Mormons would make an attack. The other divisions followed within the week, and the whole force was concentrated. On the night of October 5th, after the last division had crossed the river, two supply-trains, of twenty-five wagons each, were captured and burned just on the bank of the stream, by a party of mounted Mormons led by a man named Lot Smith, and the next morning another train was destroyed by the same party, twenty miles farther east, on the Big Sandy, in Oregon Territory. The teamsters were disarmed and dismissed, and the cattle stolen. No blood was shed; not a shot fired. Immediately upon the news of this attack reaching Ham’s Fork, Colonel Alexander, who had then assumed the command-in-chief, dispatched Captain Marcy, of the Fifth Infantry, with four hundred men, to afford assistance to the trains, and punish the aggressors, if possible. But when the Captain reached Green River, all that was visible near the little French trading-post was two broad, black rings on the ground, bestrewn with iron chains and bolts, where the wagons had been burned in _corral_. He was able to do nothing except to send orders to the other trains on the road to halt, concentrate, and await the escort of Brevet Colonel Smith, of the Tenth Infantry, who had started from the frontier in August with the two companies mentioned as having been left behind in Minnesota, and by rapid marches had already reached the Sweetwater. The condition of affairs at this moment was indeed critical. By the folly of Governor Walker’s movements in Kansas the expedition was deprived of its mounted force, and consisted entirely of infantry and artillery. The Mormon marauding parties, on the contrary, which it now became evident were hovering on every side, were all well mounted and tolerably well armed. The loss of three trains more would reduce the troops to the verge of starvation before spring, in case of inability to reach Salt Lake Valley. Nothing was heard from General Harney, and in his absence no one possessed instructions adequate to the emergency.
To understand the movements which followed, it is necessary to describe briefly the topography of the country between Green River and the Great Salt Lake. The entire interval, one hundred and fifty miles in breadth, is filled with groups and chains of mountains, the direct route through which to Salt Lake City lies along water-courses, following them through canons so narrow that little science is necessary to render the natural defences impregnable. In this respect, and in the general character of the scenery, it bears much resemblance to the Tyrol. In the narrowest of these gorges, Echo Canon, twenty-five miles in length, whose walls of rock often approach within a stone’s throw of each other, it became known that the Mormons were erecting breastworks and digging ditches, by means of which they expected to be able to submerge the road to the depth of several feet, for miles. The only known mode of avoiding a passage through this gorge was by a circuitous route, following the eastern slope of the rim of the Great Basin northward, more than a hundred miles, to Soda Springs, at the northern bend of Bear River, the principal tributary of the Salt Lake,–then crossing the rim along the course of the river, and pursuing its valley southward, and that of the Roseaux or Malade, into Salt Lake Valley. The distance of Salt Lake City from the camp on Ham’s Fork was by this route nearly three hundred miles,–while the distance by the road past Fort Bridger, through the canons, was less than one hundred and fifty miles. At that fort, about twenty miles west from the encampment of the army, the Mormon marauding parties had their head-quarters and principal _depot_. It was there that Colonel Alexander was ordered, about this time, by Brigham Young, to surrender his arms to the Mormon Quartermaster-General, on which condition and an agreement to depart eastward early the following spring, he and his troops should be fed during the winter; otherwise, Young added, they would perish from hunger and cold, and rot among the mountains. In his perplexity, Colonel Alexander called a council of war, and, with its approval, resolved to commence a march towards Soda Springs, leaving Fort Bridger unmolested on his left. For more than a fortnight the army toiled along Ham’s Fork, cutting a road through thickets of greasewood and wild sage, incumbered by a train of such unwieldy length that often the advance-guard reached its camp at night before the rear-guard had moved from the camp of the preceding day, and harassed by Mormon marauding parties from the Fort, which hung about the flanks out of the reach of rifle-shot, awaiting opportunities to descend on unprotected wagons and cattle. The absence of dragoons prevented a dispersion of these banditti. Some companies of infantry were, indeed, mounted on mules, and sent to pursue them, but these only excited their derision. The Mormons nicknamed them “jackass cavalry.” Their only exploit was the capture of a Mormon major and his adjutant, on whose person were found orders issued by D.H. Wells, the Commanding General of the Nauvoo Legion, to the various detachments of marauders, directing them to burn the whole country before the army and on its flanks, to keep it from sleep by night surprises, to stampede its animals and set fire to its trains, to blockade the road by felling trees and destroying river-fords, but to take no life. On the 13th of October, eight hundred oxen were cut off from the rear of the army and driven to Salt Lake Valley. Thus the weary column toiled along until it reached the spot where it expected to be joined by Colonel Smith’s battalion, about fifty miles up Ham’s Fork. The very next day snow fell to the depth of more than a foot. Disheartened, vacillating, and perplexed, Colonel Alexander called another council of war, and, acting on its judgment, resolved to retrace his steps. An express reached him that same day, from Colonel Smith, by which he was informed of the approach of Colonel Albert S. Johnston, of the Second Cavalry, who had been detailed to take command of the expedition in the place of General Harney, and now sent orders that the troops should return to Black’s Fork, where he proposed to concentrate the entire army.
During the month of August, it having become evident that General Harney was reluctant to proceed to Utah, anticipating a brighter field for military distinction in Kansas, Colonel Johnston was summoned from Texas to Washington and there ordered to hasten to take command of the expedition. On the 17th of September, he left Fort Leavenworth, and by rapid travel overtook Colonel Smith while he was engaged in collecting the trains which he intended to escort to the main body. On the 27th of October, the column moved forwards. The escort had been reinforced by a squadron of dragoons from Fort Laramie, but its entire strength was less than three hundred men, a number obviously insufficient to defend a line of wagons six miles in length. An attack by the Mormons was expected every day, but none was made; and on the 3d of November, the whole army, with its munitions, supplies, and commander, was concentrated on Black’s Fork. Colonel Alexander had arrived at the place of rendezvous some days previously, being no nearer Salt Lake City November 3d than he had been a month before. The country was covered with snow, winter having fairly set in among the mountains, the last pound of forage was exhausted, and the cattle and mules were little more than animated skeletons.
Colonel Johnston had already determined, while in the South Pass, that it would be impracticable to cross the Wahsatch range until spring, and shaped his arrangements accordingly. He resolved to establish winter-quarters in the vicinity of Fort Bridger, and on the 6th of November the advance towards that post commenced. The day was memorable in the history of the expedition. Sleet poured down upon the column from morning till night. On the previous evening, five hundred cattle had been stampeded by the Mormons, in consequence of which some trains were unable to move at all. After struggling along till nightfall, the regiments camped wherever they could find shelter under bluffs or among willows. That night more than five hundred animals perished from hunger and cold, and the next morning the camp was encircled by their carcasses, coated with a film of ice. It was a scene which could be paralleled only in the retreat of the French from Moscow. Had there been any doubt before concerning the practicability of an immediate advance beyond Fort Bridger, none existed any longer. It was the 16th of November when the vanguard reached that post, which the Mormons had abandoned the week before. Nearly a fortnight had been consumed in accomplishing less than thirty miles.
It is time to return to the States and record what had been transpiring there, in connection with the expedition, while the army was staggering towards its permanent winter-camp. The only one of the newly-appointed civil officials who was present with the troops was Judge Eckels, who had left his home in Indiana immediately after receiving his appointment, and started across the Plains with his own conveyance. Near Fort Laramie he was overtaken by Colonel Smith, whom he accompanied in his progress to the main body. Governor Cumming, in the mean while, dilly-dallied in the East, travelling from St. Louis to Washington and back again, begging for an increase of salary, for a sum of money to be placed at his disposal for secret service, and for transportation, to the Territory,–all which requests, except the last, were denied. Towards the close of September, he arrived at Fort Leavenworth. Governor Walker had, by this time, released his hold on the dragoons, and, notwithstanding the advanced period of the season, they were preparing to march to Utah. The Governor and most of the other civil officers delayed until they started, and travelled in their company. The march was attended with the severest hardships. When they reached the Rocky Mountains, the snow lay from one to three feet deep on the loftier ridges which they were obliged to cross. The struggle with the elements, during the last two hundred miles before gaining Fort Bridger, was desperate. Nearly a third of the horses died from cold, hunger, and fatigue; everything that could be spared was thrown out to lighten the wagons, and the road was strewn with military accoutrements from the Rocky Ridge to Green River. On the 20th of November, Colonel Cooke reached the camp with a command entirely incapacitated for active service.
The place selected by Colonel Johnston for the winter-quarters of the army was on the bank of Black’s Fork, about two miles above Fort Bridger, on a spot sheltered by high bluffs which rise abruptly from the bottom at a distance of five or six hundred yards from the channel of the stream. The banks of the Fork were fringed with willow brush and cottonwood trees, blasted in some places where the Mormons had attempted to deprive the troops of fuel. The trees were fortunately too green to burn, and the fire swept through acres, doing no more damage than to consume the dry leaves and char the bark. The water of the Fork, clear and pure, rippled noisily over a stony bed between two unbroken walls of ice. The civil officers of the Territory fixed their quarters in a little nook in the wood above the military camp. The Colonel, anticipating a change of encampment, determined not to construct quarters of logs or sod for the army. A new species of tent, which had just been introduced, was served out for its winter dwellings. An iron tripod supported a pole from the top of which depended a slender but strong hoop. Attached to this, the canvas sloped to the ground, forming a tent in the shape of a regular cone. The opening at the top caused a draught, by means of which a fire could be kept up beneath the tripod without choking the inmates with smoke. An Indian lodge had evidently been the model of the inventor. Most of the civil officers, however, dug square holes in the ground, over which they built log huts, plastering the cracks with mud. Their little town they named Eckelsville, after the Chief Justice. A _depot_ for all the military stores was established at Fort Bridger, where a strong detachment was encamped. At the time of its occupation, the Fort consisted merely of two stone walls, one twenty, the other about ten feet in height, inclosing quadrangles fifty paces long and forty broad. These walls were built of cobble-stones cemented with mortar. Half-a-dozen cannonballs would have knocked them to pieces, although they constituted a formidable defence against infantry. When the Mormons evacuated the post, they burned all the buildings inside these quadrangles. Colonel Johnston proceeded to set up additional defences for the _depot_, and within a month two lunettes were completed with ditches and _chevaux-de-frise_, in each of which was mounted a piece of artillery.
The work of unloading the trains commenced, and after careful computation the Chief Commissary determined, that, by an abridgment of the ration, diminishing the daily issue of flour, and issuing bacon only once a week, his supplies would last until the first of June. All the beef cattle intended for the use of the army having been intercepted by the Cheyennes, it became necessary to kill those draught oxen for beef, which had survived the march. Shambles were erected, to which the poor half-starved animals were driven by hundreds to be butchered. The flesh was jerked and stored carefully in cabins built for the purpose.
The business of loading the trains had been carelessly performed at Fort Leavenworth. In this respect the quartermaster who superintended the work might have learned a lesson from the experience of the British in the Crimea. But, unwilling to take the trouble to assign to each train a proportionate quantity of all the articles to be transported, he had packed one after another with just such things as lay most conveniently at hand. The consequence was, that in the wagons which were burned were contained all the mechanics’ implements, stationery, and horse-medicines, although the loss of the latter was not to be regretted. The rest of their contents was mostly flour and bacon. Had the Mormons burned the next three trains upon the road, they would have destroyed all the clothing intended for the expedition. As it was, upon searching those trains, only one hundred and fifty pairs of boots and shoes and six hundred pairs of stockings were found provided for an army of two thousand men, and some of the soldiers already had nothing but moccasins to cover their feet, with the thermometer at 16 degrees below zero,–while there were found one thousand leather neck-stocks and three thousand bed-sacks, articles totally useless. “How not to do it” had evidently been the motto of the Quarter-master’s Department. The ample supplies of some articles were rendered unavailable by deficiencies in other articles equally necessary. In some of its arrangements it seemed to have proceeded on the presumption that there would be an armed collision, while in others the probability of such an event was entirely disregarded. One wagon was loaded wholly with boiling-kettles, but there was no brine to boil, and at the close of November not a pound of salt remained in the camp.
One of the first and most important of Colonel Johnston’s duties was to provide for the keeping, during the winter, of the mules and horses which survived. On Black’s Fork there was no grass for their support. It had either been burned by the Mormons or consumed by their cavalry. He decided to send them all to Henry’s Fork, thirty-five miles south of Fort Bridger, where he had at one time designed to encamp with the whole army. The regiment of dragoons was detailed to guard them. A supply of fresh animals for transportation in the spring was his next care. The settlements in New Mexico are less than seven hundred miles distant from Fort Bridger, and to them he resolved to apply. Captain Marcy was the officer selected to lead in the arduous expedition. He had been previously distinguished in the service by a thorough exploration of the Red River of Louisiana. Accompanied by only thirty-five picked men, all volunteers, and by two guides, he started for Taos, November 27th,–an undertaking from which, at that season of the year, the most experienced mountaineers would have shrunk. A party was dispatched at the same time to the Flathead country, in Oregon and Washington Territories, to procure horses to remount the dragoons, and to induce the traders in that region to drive cattle down to Fort Bridger for sale.
On the day of Captain Marcy’s departure, Governor Cumming issued a proclamation, declaring the Territory to be in a state of rebellion, and commanding the traitors to lay down their arms and return to their homes. It announced, also, that proceedings would be instituted against the offenders, in a court to be organized in the county by Judge Eckels, which would supersede the necessity of appointing a military commission for that purpose. This document was sent to Salt Lake City by a Mormon prisoner who was released for the purpose. The Governor sent also, by the same messenger, a letter to Brigham Young, in which there were expressions that indicated a disposition to temporize.
The whole camp, at this time, was a scene of confusion and bustle. Some of the stragglers around the tents were Indians belonging to a band of Pah-Utahs, among whom Dr. Hurt, already mentioned as the only Federal officer who did not abandon the Territory in the spring of 1857, had established a farm upon the banks of the Spanish Fork, which rises among the snows of Mount Nebo, and flows into Lake Utah from the East. Shortly after the issue of Brigham Young’s proclamation of September 15th, the Mormons resolved to take the Doctor prisoner. No official was ever more obnoxious to the Church than he; for by his authority over the tribes he had been able to counteract in great measure the influences by which Young had endeavored to alienate both Snakes and Utahs from the control of the United States. On the 27th of September, two bands of mounted men moved towards the farm from the neighboring towns of Springville and Payson. Warned by the faithful Indians of his danger, the Doctor fled to the mountains, and twenty Pah-Utahs and Uinta-Utahs escorted him to the South Pass, where he joined Colonel Johnston on the 23d of October. It was an act of devotion which has rarely been excelled in Indian history. The sufferings of his naked escort on the journey were severe. They crossed the Green River Mountains, breaking the crust of the snow and leading their animals, being reduced at the time to tallow and roots for their own sustenance. On the advance of the army towards Fort Bridger, they accompanied its march.
Another class of stragglers, and one most dangerous to the peace of the camp, was composed of the thousand teamsters who were discharged from employment on the supply-trains. Many of these men belonged to the scum of the great Western cities,–a class more dangerous, because more intelligent and reckless, than the same class of population in New York. Others had sought to reach California, not anticipating a state of hostilities which would bar their way. Now, thrown out of employment, with slender means, a great number became desperate. Hundreds attempted to return to the States on foot, some of whom died on the way,–and nine-tenths of them would have perished, had they encountered the storms of the preceding winter among the mountains. But the majority hung around the camp. To some of these the Quartermaster was able to furnish work, but he was obviously incapable of affording this assistance to all. Thefts and assaults became frequent, and promised to multiply as the season advanced. To remedy this trouble, Colonel Johnston assumed the responsibility of organizing a volunteer battalion. The term of service for which the men enlisted was nine months. For their pay they were to depend on the action of Congress. The four companies which the battalion comprised selected for their commander an officer from the regular army, Captain Bee, of the Tenth Infantry.
The organization of a District Court, by Judge Eckels, helped quite as essentially to enforce order. Its convicts were received by Colonel Johnston and committed to imprisonment in the guard-tents of the army. The grand jury, impanelled for the purposes of the court, were obliged to take cognizance of the rebellion, and, after thoroughly investigating the facts of the case, they returned bills of indictment against Brigham Young and sixty of his principal associates.
During “the campaign of Ham’s Fork,” as Colonel Alexander’s march up and down that stream was facetiously called by the Mormons, he had been in constant receipt of communications from Young, of a character similar to the letter in which the army was commanded to surrender its arms at Fort Bridger. This correspondence was now abruptly terminated by Colonel Johnston. Two messengers came to the camp from Salt Lake City at the beginning of December, escorted by a party of Mormon militia, and bringing four pack-mules loaded with salt, which a letter from Young offered as a present, with assurances that it was not poisoned. This letter contained, besides, certain threats concerning the treatment of prisoners, and reminded Colonel Johnston that the Mormons also had prisoners in their power, on whom anything which might befall those in camp should be retaliated. The Colonel returned no other answer to this epistle than to dismiss its bearers with their salt, informing them that he could accept no favors from traitors and rebels, and that any communication which they might in future hold with the army must be under a flag of truce, although as to the manner in which they might communicate with the Governor it was not within his province to prescribe. A week or two later, a thousand pounds of salt were forced through to the camp from Fort Laramie, thirty out of the forty-six mules on which it was packed perishing on the way.
Thus the long and dreary winter commenced in the camp of the army of Utah. It mattered not that the rations were abridged, that communication with the States was interrupted, and that every species of duty at such a season, in such a region, was uncommonly severe. Confidence and even gayety were restored to the camp, by the consciousness that it was commanded by an officer whose intelligence was adequate to the difficulties of his position. Every additional hardship was cheerfully endured. As the animals failed, all the wood used in camp was obliged to be drawn a distance of from three to six miles by hand, but there were few gayer spectacles than the long strings of soldiers hurrying the wagons over the crunching snow. They built great pavilions, decorated them with colors and stacks of arms, and danced as merrily on Christmas and New Year’s Eves to the music of the regimental bands, as if they had been in cozy cantonments, instead of in a camp of fluttering canvas, more than seven thousand feet above the level of the sea. In the pavilion of the Fifth Infantry, there drooped over the company the flags which that regiment had carried, ten years before, up the sunny slopes of Chapultepec, and which were torn in a hundred places by the storm of bullets at Molinos del Rey.
Meanwhile, how hearts were beating in the States with anxious apprehension for the safety of kindred and friends, those who felt that anxiety, and not those who were the objects of it, best know.
Perhaps the disposition of the camp would have been more in harmony with the scenery and the season, if the army had dreamed that the administration, which had launched it so recklessly into circumstances of such privation and danger, was about to turn its labors and sufferings into a farce, and to claim the approval of the country for an act of mistaken clemency, which was, in reality, a grave political error.
[To be continued.]
* * * * *
THE MINISTER’S WOOING.
[Continued.]
CHAPTER VIII.
WHICH TREATS OF ROMANCE.
There is no word in the English language more unceremoniously and indefinitely kicked and cuffed about, by what are called sensible people, than the word _romance_. When Mr. Smith or Mr. Stubbs has brought every wheel of life into such range and order that it is one steady, daily grind,–when they themselves have come into the habits and attitudes of the patient donkey, who steps round and round the endlessly turning wheel of some machinery, then they fancy that they have gotten “the victory that overcometh the world.”
All but this dead grind, and the dollars that come through the mill, is by them thrown into one waste “catch-all” and labelled _romance_. Perhaps there was a time in Mr. Smith’s youth,–he remembers it now,–when he read poetry, when his cheek was wet with strange tears, when a little song, ground out by an organ-grinder in the street, had power to set his heart beating and bring a mist before his eyes. Ah, in those days he had a vision!–a pair of soft eyes stirred him strangely; a little weak hand was laid on his manhood, and it shook and trembled; and then came all the humility, the aspiration, the fear, the hope, the high desire, the troubling of the waters by the depending angel of love,–and a little more and Mr. Smith might have become a man, instead of a banker! He thinks of it now, sometimes, as he looks across the fireplace after dinner and sees Mrs. Smith asleep, innocently shaking the bouquet of pink bows and Brussels lace that waves ever her placid red countenance.
Mrs. Smith wasn’t his first love, nor, indeed, any love at all; but they agree reasonably well. And as for poor Nellie,–well, she is dead and buried,–all that was stuff and romance. Mrs. Smith’s money set him up in business, and Mrs. Smith is a capital manager, and he thanks God that he isn’t romantic, and tells Smith Junior not to read poetry or novels, and to stick to realities.
“This is the victory that overcometh the world,”–to learn to be fat and tranquil, to have warm fires and good dinners, to hang your hat on the same peg at the same hour every day, to sleep soundly all night, and never to trouble your head with a thought or imagining beyond.
But there are many people besides Mr. Smith who have gained this victory,–who have strangled their higher nature and buried it, and built over its grave the structure of their life, the better to keep it down.
The fascinating Mrs. T., whose life is a whirl between ball and opera, point lace, diamonds, and schemings of admiration for herself, and of establishments for her daughters,–there was a time, if you will believe me, when that proud, worldly woman was so humbled, under the touch of some mighty power, that she actually thought herself capable of being a poor man’s wife. She thought she could live in a little, mean house on no-matter-what-street, with one servant, and make her own bonnets and mend her own clothes, and sweep the house Mondays, while Betty washed,–all for what? All because she thought that there was a man so noble, so true, so good, so high-minded, that to live with him in poverty, to be guided by him in adversity, to lean on him in every rough place of life, was a something nobler, better, purer, more satisfying, than French laces, opera-boxes, and even Madame Roget’s best gowns.
Unfortunately, this was all romance,–there was no such man. There was, indeed, a person of very common, self-interested aims and worldly nature, whom she had credited at sight with an unlimited draft on all her better nature; and when the hour of discovery came, she awoke from her dream with a start and a laugh, and ever since has despised aspiration, and been busy with the _realities_ of life, and feeds poor little Mary Jane, who sits by her in the opera-box there, with all the fruit which she has picked from the bitter tree of knowledge. There is no end of the epigrams and witticisms which she can throw out, this elegant Mrs. T., on people who marry for love, lead prosy, worky lives, and put on their best cap with pink ribbons for Sunday. “Mary Jane shall never make a fool of herself”; but, even as she speaks, poor Mary Jane’s heart is dying within her at the vanishing of a pair of whiskers from an opposite box,–which whiskers the poor little fool has credited with a _resume_ drawn from her own imaginings of all that is grandest and most heroic, most worshipful in man. By-and-by, when Mrs. T. finds the glamour has fallen on her daughter, she wonders; she has “tried to keep novels out of the girl’s way,–where did she get these notions?”
All prosaic, and all bitter, disenchanted people talk as if poets and novelists _made_ romance. They do,–just as much as craters make volcanoes,–no more. What is romance? whence comes it? Plato spoke to the subject wisely, in his quaint way, some two thousand years ago, when he said, “Man’s soul, in a former state, was winged and soared among the gods; and so it comes to pass, that, in this life, when the soul, by the power of music or poetry, or the sight of beauty, hath her remembrance quickened, forthwith there is a straggling and a pricking pain as of wings trying to come forth,–even as children in teething.” And if an old heathen, two thousand years ago, discoursed thus gravely of the romantic part of our nature, whence comes it that in Christian lands we think in so pagan a way of it, and turn the whole care of it to ballad-makers, romancers, and opera-singers?
Let us look up in fear and reverence and say, “GOD is the great maker of romance. HE, from whose hand came man and woman,–HE, who strung the great harp of Existence with all its wild and wonderful and manifold chords, and attuned them to one another,–HE is the great Poet of life.” Every impulse of beauty, of heroism, and every craving for purer love, fairer perfection, nobler type and style of being than that which closes like a prison-house around us, in the dim, daily walk of life, is God’s breath, God’s impulse, God’s reminder to the soul that there is something higher, sweeter, purer, yet to be attained.
Therefore, man or woman, when thy ideal is shattered,–as shattered a thousand times it must be,–when the vision fades, the rapture burns out, turn not away in skepticism and bitterness, saying, “There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink,” but rather cherish the revelations of those hours as prophecies and foreshadowings of something real and possible, yet to be attained in the manhood, of immortality. The scoffing spirit that laughs at romance is an apple of the Devil’s own handing from the bitter tree of knowledge;–it opens the eyes only to see eternal nakedness.
If ever you have had a romantic, uncalculating friendship,–a boundless worship and belief in some hero of your soul,–if ever you have so loved, that all cold prudence, all selfish worldly considerations have gone down like drift-wood before a river flooded with new rain from heaven, so that you even forgot yourself, and were ready to cast your whole being into the chasm of existence, as an offering before the feet of another, and all for nothing,–if you awoke bitterly betrayed and deceived, still give thanks to God that you have had one glimpse of heaven. The door now shut will open again. Rejoice that the noblest capability of your eternal inheritance has been made known to you; treasure it, as the highest honor of your being, that ever you could so feel,–that so divine a guest ever possessed your soul.
By such experiences are we taught the pathos, the sacredness of life; and if we use them wisely, our eyes will ever after be anointed to see what poems, what romances, what sublime tragedies lie around us in the daily walk of life, “written not with ink, but in fleshly tables of the heart.” The dullest street of the most prosaic town has matter in it for more smiles, more tears, more intense excitement, than ever were written in story or sung in poem; the reality is there, of which the romancer is the second-hand recorder.
So much of a plea we put in boldly, because we foresee grave heads beginning to shake over our history, and doubts rising in reverend and discreet minds whether this history is going to prove anything but a love-story, after all.
We do assure you, right reverend Sir, and you, most discreet Madam, that it is not going to prove anything else; and you will find, if you will follow us, that there is as much romance burning under the snow-banks of cold Puritan preciseness as if Dr. H. had been brought up to attend operas instead of metaphysical preaching, and Mary had been nourished on Byron’s poetry instead of “Edwards on the Affections.”
The innocent credulities, the subtle deceptions, that were quietly at work under the grave, white curls of the Doctor’s wig, were exactly of the kind which have beguiled man in all ages, when near the sovereign presence of her who is born for his destiny;–and as for Mary, what did it avail her that she could say the Assembly’s Catechism from end to end without tripping, and that every habit of her life beat time to practical realities, steadily as the parlor clock? The wildest Italian singer or dancer, nursed on nothing but excitement from her cradle, never was more thoroughly possessed by the awful and solemn mystery of woman’s life than this Puritan girl.
It is quite true, that, the next morning after James’s departure, she rose as usual in the dim gray, and was to be seen opening the kitchen-door just at the moment when the birds were giving the first little drowsy stir and chirp,–and that she went on setting the breakfast-table for the two hired men, who were bound to the fields with the oxen,–and that then she went on skimming cream for the butter, and getting ready to churn, and making up biscuit for the Doctor’s breakfast, when he and they should sit down together at a somewhat later hour; and as she moved about, doing all these things, she sung various scraps of old psalm-tunes; and the good Doctor, who was then busy with his early exercises of devotion, listened, as he heard the voice, now here, now there, and thought about angels and the Millennium. Solemnly and tenderly there floated in at his open study-window, through the breezy lilacs, mixed with low of kine and bleat of sheep and hum of early wakening life, the little silvery ripples of that singing, somewhat mournful in its cadence, as if a gentle soul were striving to hush itself to rest. The words were those of the rough old version of the Psalms then in use:–
“Truly my waiting soul relies
In silence God upon;
Because from him there doth arise All my salvation.”
And then came the busy patter of the little footsteps without, the moving of chairs, the clink of plates, as busy hands were arranging the table; and then again there was a pause, and he thought she seemed to come near to the open window of the adjoining room, for the voice floated in clearer and sadder:–
“O God, to me be merciful,
Be merciful to me!
Because my soul for shelter safe
Betakes itself to thee.
“Yea, in the shadow of thy wings
My refuge have I placed,
Until these sore calamities
Shall quite be overpast.”
The tone of life in New England, so habitually earnest and solemn, breathed itself in the grave and plaintive melodies of the tunes then sung in the churches; and so these words, though in the saddest minor key, did not suggest to the listening ear of the auditor anything more than that pensive religious calm in which he delighted to repose. A contrast indeed they were, in their melancholy earnestness, to the exuberant carollings of a robin, who, apparently attracted by them, perched himself hard by in the lilacs, and struck up such a merry _roulade_ as quite diverted the attention of the fair singer;–in fact, the intoxication breathed in the strain of this little messenger, whom God had feathered and winged and filled to the throat with ignorant joy, came in singular contrast with the sadder notes breathed by that creature of so much higher mould and fairer clay,–that creature born for an immortal life.
But the good Doctor was inly pleased when she sung,–and when she stopped, looked up from his Bible wistfully, as missing something, he knew not what; for he scarce thought how pleasant the little voice was, or knew he had been listening to it,–and yet he was in a manner enchanted by it, so thankful and happy that he exclaimed with fervor, “The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.”
So went the world with him, full of joy and praise, because the voice and the presence wherein lay his unsuspected life were securely near, so certainly and constantly a part of his daily walk that he had not even the trouble to wish for them. But in that other heart how was it?–how with the sweet saint that was talking to herself in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs?
The good child had remembered her mother’s parting words the night before,–“Put your mind upon your duties,”–and had begun her first conscious exercise of thought with a prayer that grace might be given her to do it. But even as she spoke, mingling and interweaving with that golden thread of prayer was another consciousness, a life in another soul, as she prayed that the grace of God might overshadow him, shield him from temptation, and lead him up to heaven; and this prayer so got the start of the other, that, ere she was aware, she had quite forgotten self, and was feeling, living, thinking in that other life.
The first discovery she made, when she looked out into the fragrant orchard, whose perfumes steamed in at her window, and listened to the first chirping of birds among, the old apple-trees, was one that has astonished many a person before her; it was this: she found that all that had made life interesting to her was suddenly gone. She herself had not known, that, for the month past, since James came from sea, she had been living in an enchanted land,–that Newport harbor, and every rock and stone, and every mat of yellow seaweed on the shore, that the two-mile road between the cottage and the white house of Zebedee Marvyn, every mullein-stalk, every juniper-tree, had all had a light and a charm which were suddenly gone. There had not been an hour in the day for the last four weeks that had not had its unsuspected interest,–because he was at the white house, because, possibly, he might be going by, or coming in; nay, even in church, when she stood up to sing, and thought she was thinking only of God, had she not been conscious of that tenor voice that poured itself out by her side? and though afraid to turn her head that way, had she not felt that he was there every moment,–heard every word of the sermon and prayer for him? The very vigilant care which her mother had taken to prevent private interviews had only served to increase the interest by throwing over it the veil of constraint and mystery. Silent looks, involuntary starts, things indicated, not expressed, these are the most, dangerous, the most seductive aliment of thought to a delicate and sensitive nature. If things were said out, they might not be said wisely,–they might repel by their freedom, or disturb by their unfitness; but what is only looked is sent into the soul through the imagination, which makes of it all that the ideal faculties desire.
In a refined and exalted nature, it is very seldom that the feeling of love, when once thoroughly aroused, bears any sort of relation to the reality of the object. It is commonly an enkindling of the whole power of the soul’s love for whatever she considers highest and fairest; it is, in fact, the love of something divine and unearthly, which, by a sort of illusion, connects itself with a personality. Properly speaking, there is but One true, eternal Object of all that the mind conceives, in this trance of its exaltation. Disenchantment must come, of course; and in a love which terminates in happy marriage, there is a tender and gracious process, by which, without shock or violence, the ideal is gradually sunk in the real, which, though found faulty and earthly, is still ever tenderly remembered as it seemed under the morning light of that enchantment.
What Mary loved so passionately, that which came between her and God in every prayer, was not the gay, young, dashing sailor,–sudden in anger, imprudent of speech, and, though generous in heart, yet worldly in plans and schemings,–but her own ideal of a grand and noble man,–such a man as she thought he might become. He stood glorified before her, an image of the strength that overcomes things physical, of the power of command which controls men and circumstances, of the courage which disdains fear, of the honor which cannot lie, of constancy which knows no shadow of turning, of tenderness which protects the weak, and, lastly, of religious loyalty which should lay the golden crown of its perfected manhood at the feet of a Sovereign Lord and Redeemer. This was the man she loved, and with this regal mantle of glories she invested the person called James Marvyn; and all that she saw and felt to be wanting she prayed for with the faith of a believing woman.
Nor was she wrong;–for, as to every leaf and every flower there is an ideal to which the growth of the plant is constantly urging, so is there an ideal to every human being,–a perfect form in which it might appear, were every defect removed and every characteristic excellence stimulated to the highest point. Once in an age, God sends to some of us a friend who loves in us, _not_ a false imagining, an unreal character, but, looking through all the rubbish of our imperfections, loves in us the divine ideal of our nature,–loves, not the man that we are, but the angel that we may be. Such friends seem inspired by a divine gift of prophecy,–like the mother of St. Augustine, who, in the midst of the wayward, reckless youth of her son, beheld him in a vision, standing, clothed in white, a ministering priest at the right hand of God,–as he has stood for long ages since. Could a mysterious foresight unveil to us this resurrection form of the friends with whom we daily walk, compassed about with mortal infirmity, we should follow them with faith and reverence through all the disguises of human faults and weaknesses, “waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God.”
But these wonderful soul-friends, to whom God grants such perception, are the exceptions in life; yet sometimes are we blessed with one who sees through us, as Michel Angelo saw through a block of marble, when he attacked it in a divine fervor, declaring that an angel was imprisoned within it;–and it is often the resolute and delicate hand of such a friend that sets the angel free.
There be soul-artists, who go through this world, looking among their fellows with reverence, as one looks amid the dust and rubbish of old shops for hidden works of Titian and Leonardo, and, finding them, however cracked or torn or painted over with tawdry daubs of pretenders, immediately recognize the divine original, and set themselves to cleanse and restore. Such be God’s real priests, whose ordination and anointing are from the Holy Spirit; and he who hath not this enthusiasm is not ordained of God, though whole synods of bishops laid hands on him.
Many such priests there be among women;–for to this silent ministry their nature calls them, endowed, as it is, with fineness of fibre, and a subtile keenness of perception outrunning slow-footed reason;–and she of whom we write was one of these.
At this very moment, while the crimson wings of morning were casting delicate reflections on tree, and bush, and rock, they were also reddening innumerable waves round a ship that sailed alone, with a wide horizon stretching like an eternity around it; and in the advancing morning stood a young man thoughtfully looking off into the ocean, with a book in his hand,–James Marvyn,–as truly and heartily a creature of this material world as Mary was of the invisible and heavenly.
There are some who seem made to _live;_–life is such a joy to them, their senses are so fully _en rapport_ with all outward things, the world is so keenly appreciable, so much a part of themselves, they are so conscious of power and victory in the government and control of material things, that the moral and invisible life often seems to hang tremulous and unreal in their minds, like the pale, faded moon in the light of a gorgeous sunrise. When brought face to face with the great truths of the invisible world, they stand related to the higher wisdom much like the gorgeous, gay Alcibiades to the divine Socrates, or like the young man in Holy Writ to Him for whose appearing Socrates longed;– they gaze, imperfectly comprehending, and at the call of ambition or riches turn away sorrowing.
So it was with James;–in full tide of worldly energy and ambition, there had been forming over his mind that hard crust, that skepticism of the spiritual and exalted, which men of the world delight to call practical sense; he had been suddenly arrested and humbled by the revelation of a nature so much nobler than his own that he seemed worthless in his own eyes. He had asked for love; but when _such_ love unveiled itself, he felt like the disciple of old in the view of a diviner tenderness,–“Depart from me, for I am a sinful man.”
But it is not often that all the current of a life is reversed in one hour; and now, as James stood on the ship’s deck, with life passing around him, and everything drawing upon the strings of old habits, Mary and her religion recurred to his mind as some fair, sweet, inexplicable vision. Where she stood he saw; but how _he_ was ever to get there seemed as incomprehensible as how a mortal man should pillow his form on sunset clouds.
He held the little Bible in his hand as if it were some amulet charmed by the touch of a superior being; but when he strove to read it, his thoughts wandered, and he shut it, troubled and unsatisfied. Yet there were within him yearnings and cravings, wants never felt before, the beginning of that trouble which must ever precede the soul’s rise to a higher plane of being.
There we leave him. We have shown you now our three different characters, each one in its separate sphere, feeling the force of that strongest and holiest power with which it has pleased our great Author to glorify this mortal life.
CHAPTER IX.
WHICH TREATS OF THINGS SEEN.
As, for example, the breakfast. It is six o’clock,–the hired men and oxen are gone,-the breakfast-table stands before the open kitchen-door, snowy with its fresh cloth, the old silver coffee-pot steaming up a refreshing perfume,–and the Doctor sits on one side, sipping his coffee and looking across the table at Mary, who is innocently pleased at the kindly beaming in his placid blue eyes,–and Aunt Katy Scudder discourses of housekeeping, and fancies something must have disturbed the rising of the cream, as it is not so thick and yellow as wont.
Now the Doctor, it is to be confessed, was apt to fall into a way of looking at people such as pertains to philosophers and scholars generally, that is, as if he were looking through them into the infinite,–in which case, his gaze became so earnest and intent that it would quite embarrass an uninitiated person; but Mary, being used to this style of contemplation, was only quietly amused, and waited till some great thought should loom up before his mental vision,–in which case, she hoped to hear from him.
The good man swallowed his first cup of coffee and spoke:–
“In the Millennium, I suppose, there will be such a fulness and plenty of all the necessaries and conveniences of life, that it will not be necessary for men and women to spend the greater part of their lives in labor in order to procure a living. It will not be necessary for each one to labor more than two or three hours a day,–not more than will conduce to health of body and vigor of mind; and the rest of their time they will spend in reading and conversation, and such exercises as are necessary and proper to improve their minds and make progress in knowledge.”
New England presents probably the only example of a successful commonwealth founded on a theory, as a distinct experiment in the problem of society. It was for this reason that the minds of its great thinkers dwelt so much on the final solution of that problem in this world. The fact of a future Millennium was a favorite doctrine of the great leading theologians of New England, and Dr. H. dwelt upon it with a peculiar partiality. Indeed, it was the solace and refuge of his soul, when oppressed with the discouragements which always attend things actual, to dwell upon and draw out in detail the splendors of this perfect future which was destined to glorify the world.
Nobody, therefore, at the cottage was in the least surprised when there dropped into the flow of their daily life these sparkling bits of ore, which their friend had dug in his explorations of a future Canaan,–in fact, they served to raise the hackneyed present out of the level of mere commonplace.
“But how will it be possible,” inquired Mrs. Scudder, “that so much less work will suffice in those days to do all that is to be done?”
“Because of the great advance of arts and sciences which will take place before those days,” said the Doctor, “whereby everything shall be performed with so much greater ease,–also the great increase of disinterested love, whereby the skill and talents of those who have much shall make up for the weakness of those who have less.
“Yes,” he continued, after a pause,–“all the careful Marthas in those