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The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 78, April, 1864

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Title: The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 78, April, 1864

Author: Various


        
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, VOLUME 13, NO. 78, APRIL, 1864 ***




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Paolucci and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.










THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. XIII.--APRIL, 1864.--NO. LXXVIII.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by TICKNOR AND
FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.

       *       *       *       *       *

FIGHTING FACTS FOR FOGIES.


Young people are often charged with caring little for the past. The
charge is just; and the young are right. If they care little for the
past, then it is certain that it is in debt to them,--as for them the
past cared nothing. It is wonderful, considering how children used to be
treated, that the human race ever succeeded in getting established on
earth. Humanity should have died out, there was so little that was
humane in its bringing up. Because they had contrived to bring a
helpless creature into a world that every one wishes he had never known
at least twenty-four times a day, a father and mother of the very old
school indeed assumed that they had the right to make that creature a
slave, and to hold it in everlasting chains. They had much to say about
the duty of children, and very little about the love of parents. The
sacrificing of children to idols, a not uncommon practice in some
renowned countries of antiquity, the highest-born children being the
favorite victims,--for Moloch's appetite was delicate,--could never have
taken place in any country where the voice of Nature was heeded; and yet
those sacrifices were but so many proofs of the existence of a spirit of
pride, which caused men to offer up their offspring on the domestic
altar. Son and slave were almost the same word with the Romans; and your
genuine old Roman made little ado about cutting off the head of one of
his boys, perhaps for doing something of a praiseworthy nature. Old
Junius Brutus was doubly favored by Fortune, for he was enabled to kill
two of his sons in the name of Patriotism, and thereby to gain a
reputation for virtue that endures to this day,--though, after all, he
was but the first of the brutes. The Romans kept up the paternal rule
for many ages, and theoretically it long survived the Republic. It had
existed in the Kingdom, and it was not unknown to the Empire. We have an
anecdote that shows how strong was the supremacy of _paterfamilias_ at
the beginning of the eighth century, when Young Rome had already made
more than one audacious display of contempt for the Conscript Fathers.
When Pompeius was asked what he would do, if Cæsar should resist the
requirements of the Senate, he answered,--"What if my son should raise
his stick against me?"--meaning to imply, that, in his opinion,
resistance from Cæsar was something too absurd to be thought of. Yet
Cæsar _did_ resist, and triumphed; and, judging from their after-lives,
we should say that the Young Pompeys would have had small hesitation in
raising their sticks against their august governor, had he proved too
disobedient. A few years earlier, according to Sallust, a Roman, one
Fulvius, had caused his son to be put to death, because he had sought to
join Catiline. The old gentleman heard what his son was about, and when
Young Hopeful was arrested and brought before him, he availed himself of
his fatherly privilege, and had him strangled, or disposed of after some
other of those charming fashions which were so common in the model
republic of antiquity. "This imitation of the discipline of the ancient
republic," says Merivale, "excited neither applause nor indignation
among the languid voluptuaries of the Senate." They probably voted
Fulvius a brute, but they no more thought of questioning the legality of
his conduct than they did of imitating it. Law was one thing, opinion
another. If he liked to play Lucius Junius, well and good; but they had
no taste for the part. They felt much as we used to feel in
Fugitive-Slave-Law times: we did not question the law, but we would have
nothing to do with its execution.

Modern fathers have had no such powers as were held by those of Rome,
and if an Englishman of Red-Rose views had killed his son for setting
off to join Edward IV. when he had landed at Ravenspur, no one would
think of praising the act. What was all right in a Roman of the year 1
of the Republic would be considered shocking in a Christian of the
fifteenth century, a time when Christianity had become much diluted from
the inter-mixture of blood. In the next century, poor Lady Jane Grey
spoke of the torments which she had endured at the hands of her parents,
who were of the noblest blood of Europe, in terms that ought to make
every young woman thankful that her lot was not cast in the good old
times. Roger Ascham was her confidant. He had gone to Brodegate, to take
leave of her, and "found her in her chamber alone, reading Phædo
Platonis in Greek, and that with as much delight as some gentlemen would
read a merry tale of Boccace"; and as all the rest of the Greys were
hunting in the park, the schoolmaster inquired why she should lose such
pastime. The lady answered, that the pleasure they were having in the
park was but the shadow of that pleasure she found in Plato. The
conversation proceeding, Ascham inquired how it was that she had come to
know such true pleasure, and she answered,--"I will tell you, and tell
you a truth which perchance ye may marvel at. One of the greatest
benefits God ever gave me is that he sent me so sharp and severe parents
and so gentle a schoolmaster. For when I am in presence either of father
or mother, whether I speak, keep silence, sit, stand, or go, eat, drink,
be merry, or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing, or doing anything else, I
must do it as it were in such weight, number, and measure, even so
perfectly as God made the world, or else I am so sharply taunted, so
cruelly threatened, yea, presently, sometimes with pinches, nips, and
bobs, and other ways, (which I will not name for the honor I bear them,)
so without measure misordered, that I think myself in hell, till time
come that I must go to Mr. Elmer, who teacheth me so gently, so
pleasantly, with such fair allurements to learning, that I think all the
time nothing while I am with him. And when I am called from him, I fall
on weeping, because whatsoever I do else beside learning is full of
grief, trouble, fear, and whole misliking unto me. And thus my book hath
been so much my pleasure, and bringeth daily more pleasure and more,
that in respect of it all other pleasures, in very deed, be but trifles
and troubles to me." The Duke and Duchess of Suffolk were neither better
nor worse than other parents who tormented and tyrannized over their
children _temp._ Edward VI., and nothing but the prominence of the most
unfortunate of their unfortunate daughters has preserved the memory of
their domestic despotism. Throughout all England it was the same, from
palace to castle, and from castle to hovel; and father and tyrant were
convertible terms. Youth must have been but a dreary time in those old
days. Scott's Sir Henry Lee, according to his son, kept strict rule over
his children, and he was a type of the antique knight, not of the
debauched cavalier, and would be obeyed, with or without reason. The
letters and the literature of the seventeenth century show, that, how
loose soever became other ties, parents maintained their hold on their
children with iron hands. Even the license of the Restoration left
fatherly rule largely triumphant and undisputed. When even "husbands, of
decent station, were not ashamed to beat their wives," sons and
daughters were not spoiled by a sparing of the rod. Harshness was the
rule in every grade of life, and harsh indeed was parental rule, until
the reader wonders that there was not a general rebellion of women,
children, scholars, and apprentices against the savage ascendency of
husbands, fathers, pedagogues, and masters.

But the fashions of this world, whether good or evil, pass away. In the
eighteenth century we find parents becoming more humane, though still
keeping their offspring pretty stiffly bitted. They shared in the
general melioration of the age. The father was "honored sir," and was
not too familiar with his boys. The great outbreak at the close of the
century did much for the emancipation of the young; and by the time that
the present century had advanced to a third of its years, youth had so
far got the best of the conflict, and treated their elders with so
little consideration, that it was thought the latter were rather
presumptuous in remaining on earth after fifty. Youth began to organize
itself. Young Germany, Young France, and Young England became powers in
the world. Young Germany was revolutionary and metaphysical, and
nourished itself on bad beer and worse tobacco. Young France was
full-bearded and decidedly dirty, and so far deferred to the past as to
look for models in '93; and it had a strong reverence for that antique
sentiment which exhibited itself in the assassination of kings. Young
England was gentlemanly and cleanly, its leaders being of the patrician
order; and it looked to the Middle Ages for patterns of conduct. Its
chiefs wore white waistcoats, gave red cloaks and broken meat to old
women, and would have lopped off three hundred years from Old England's
life, by pushing her back to the early days of Henry VIII., when the
religious houses flourished, and when the gallows was a perennial plant,
bearing fruit that was _not_ for the healing of the nations. Some of the
cleverest of the younger members of the aristocracy belonged to the new
organization, and a great genius wrote some delightful novels to show
their purpose, and to illustrate their manner of how-not-to-do-it in
grappling with the grand social questions of the age. In "Coningsby"
they sing canticles and carry about the boar's head; in "Sibyl" they
sing hymns to the Holy Virgin and the song of labor, and steal
title-deeds, after setting houses on fire to distract attention from
their immediate object; and in "Tancred" they go on pilgrimage to the
Holy Sepulchre, by way of reviving their faith. All this is so well
done, that Young England will survive in literature, and be the source
of edification, long after there shall be no more left of the dust of
its chiefs than there is of the dust of Cheops or Cæsar. For all these
youths are already vanished, leaving no more traces than you would find
of the flowers that bloomed in the days of their lives. Young Germany
went out immediately after the failure of the revolutionists of 1848-9.
Young France thought it had triumphed in the fall of the Orléans
monarchy, but had only taken the first long step toward making its own
fall complete; and now some of its early members are of the firmest
supporters of the new phase of imperialism, the only result of the
Revolution of February that has given signs of endurance. Young England
went out as soberly and steadily as it had lived. The select few who
composed it died like gentlemen, and were as polite as Lord Chesterfield
in the article of death. Some of them turned Whigs, and have held office
under Lord Palmerston; and others are Tories, and expect to hold office
under Lord Derby, when he shall form his third ministry. Young America,
the worst of these youths, and the latest born, was never above an
assassin in courage, or in energy equal to more than the plundering of a
hen-roost. The fruits of his exertions are to be seen in some of the
incidents of the Secession War, and they were not worth the gathering.

The world had settled down into the belief, that, after all, a man was
not much to be blamed for growing old, and liberal-minded people were
fast coming to the conclusion, that years, on the whole, were not
dishonorable, when the breaking out of a great war led to the return of
youth to consideration. The English found themselves at war with Russia,
much to their surprise; and, still more to their surprise, their part in
that war was made subordinate to that of the French, who acted with
them, in the world's estimate of the deeds of the members of the new
Grand Alliance. This is not the place to discuss the question whether
that estimate was a just one. We have to do only with the facts that
England was made to stand in the background and that she seemed at first
disposed to accept the general verdict. There was, too, much
mismanagement in the conduct of the war, some of which might easily have
been avoided; and there was not a little suffering, as the consequence
of that mismanagement. John Bull must have his scape-goat, like the rest
of us; and, looking over the field, he discovered that all his leaders
were old men, and forthwith, though the oldest of old fellows himself,
he laid all his mishaps to the account of the years of his upper
servants. Sir Charles Napier, who never got into St. Petersburg, was
old, and had been a dashing sailor forty years before. Admiral Dundas,
who did not destroy Sweaborg, but only burned a lot of corded wood there
in summer time, was another old sailor. Lord Raglan, who never saw the
inside of Sebastopol, was well stricken in years, having served in
Wellington's military family during the Peninsular War. General Simpson,
Sir C. Campbell, General Codrington, Sir G. Brown, Sir G. Cathcart, and
others of the leaders of the English army in the Crimea, were of the
class of gentlemen who might, upon meeting, furnish matter for a
paragraph on "united ages." What more natural than to attribute all that
was unpleasant in the war to the stagnated blood of men who had heard
the music of that musketry before which Napoleon I.'s empire had gone
down? The world went mad on the subject, and it was voted that old
generals were nuisances, and that no man had any business in active war
who was old enough to have much experience. Age might be venerable, but
it was necessarily weak; and the last place in which it should show
itself was the field.

It was not strange that the English should have come to the conclusion
that the fogies were unfit to lead armies. They were in want of an
excuse for their apparent failure in the war, and they took the part
that was suggested to them,--therein behaving no worse than ourselves,
who have accounted for our many reverses in many foolish and
contradictory ways. But it was strange that their view was accepted by
others, whose minds were undisturbed, because unmistified,--and
accepted, too, in face of the self-evident fact that almost every man
who figured in the war was old. Maréchal Pelissier,[A] to whom the chief
honor of the contest has been conceded, was but six years the junior of
Lord Raglan; and if the Englishman's sixty-six years are to count
against age in war, why should not the Frenchman's sixty years count for
it? Prince Gortschakoff, who defended Sebastopol so heroically, was but
four years younger than Lord Raglan; and Prince Paskevitch was more than
six years his senior. Muravieff, Menschikoff, Luders, and other Russian
commanders opposed to the Allies, were all old men, all past sixty years
when the war began. Prince Menschikoff was sixty-four when he went on
his famous mission to Constantinople, and he did not grow younger in the
eighteen months that followed, and at the end of which he fought and
lost the Battle of the Alma. The Russian war was an old man's war, and
the stubbornness with which it was waged had in it much of that ugliness
which belongs to age.

  "The young man's wrath is like light straw on fire.
  But like red-hot steel is the old man's ire."

What rendered the attacks that were made on old generals in 1854-6 the
more absurd was the fact, that the English called upon an old man to
relieve them from bad government, and were backed by other nations. Lord
Palmerston, upon whom all thoughts and all eyes were directed, was older
than any one of those generals to whose years Englishmen attributed
their country's failure. When, with the all but universal approbation of
Great Britain and her friends, he became Prime-Minister, he was in his
seventy-first year, and his action showed that his natural force was not
abated. He was called to play the part of the elder Pitt at a greater
age than Pitt reached; and he did not disappoint expectation. It is
strange indeed, considering that the Premiership was a more difficult
post to fill than that held by any English general, that the English
should rely upon the oldest of their active statesmen to retrieve their
fortunes, while they were condemning as unfit for service men who were
his juniors by several years.

In truth, the position that youth is necessary to success in war is not
sustained by military history. It may he no drawback to a soldier's
excellence that he is young, but it is equally true that an old man may
possess every quality that is necessary in a soldier who would serve his
country well and win immortal fame for himself. The best of the Greek
commanders were men in advanced life, with a few exceptions. The precise
age of Miltiades at Marathon is unproven; but as he had become a noted
character almost thirty years before the date of that most memorable of
battles, he must have been old when he fought and won it. Even
Alcibiades, with whom is associated the idea of youth through his whole
career, as if Time had stood still in his behalf, did not have a great
command until he was approaching to middle age; and it was not until
some years more had expired that he won victories for the Athenians. The
date of the birth of Epaminondas--the best public man of all antiquity,
and the best soldier of Greece--cannot be fixed; but we find him a
middle-aged man when first he appears on that stage on which he
performed so pure and brilliant a part through seventeen eventful years.
Eight years after he first came forward he won the Battle of Leuctra,
which shattered the Spartan supremacy forever, and was the most perfect
specimen of scientific fighting that is to be found in classical
history, and which some of the greatest of modern commanders have been
proud merely to imitate. After that action, but not immediately after
it, he invaded the Peloponnesus, and led his forces to the vicinity of
Sparta, and then effected a revolution that bridled that power
perpetually. Nine years after Leuctra he won the Battle of Mantinea,
dying on the field. He must then have been an old man, but the last of
his campaigns was a miracle of military skill in all respects; and the
effect of his death was the greatest that ever followed the fall of a
general on a victorious field, actually turning victory into defeat. The
Spartan king, Agesilaus II., who was a not unworthy antagonist of the
great Theban, was an old man, and was over seventy when he saved Sparta
solely through his skill as a soldier and his energy as a statesman. As
a rule, the Greeks, the most intellectual of all races, were averse to
the employment of young men in high offices. The Spartan Brasidas, if it
be true that he fell in the flower of his age, as the historian asserts,
may have been a young man at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, in
which he was eminently distinguished; but it was his good fortune to be
singularly favored by circumstances on more than one occasion, and his
whole career was eminently exceptional to the general current of
Hellenic life.

The Romans, though not braver than the Greeks, were more fortunate in
their military career than the stayers of the march of Persia. Like the
Greeks, they had but few young generals of much reputation. Most of
their conquests, and, indeed, the salvation of their country, were the
work of old leaders. The grand crisis of Rome was in the years that
followed the arrival of Hannibal in Italy; and the two men who did most
to baffle the invader were Fabius and Marcellus, who were called,
respectively, Rome's shield and sword. They were both old men, though
Marcellus may have been looked upon as young in comparison with Fabius,
who was upward of seventy, and who, eight years after his memorable
pro-dictatorship, retook Tarentum and baffled Hannibal. The old
_Lingerer_ was, at eighty, too clever, slow as they thought him at Rome,
to be "taken in" by Hannibal, who had prepared a nice trap for him, into
which he would not walk. Marcellus was about fifty-two when he was
pitted against the victor of Cannæ, and he met him on various occasions,
and sometimes with striking success. At the age of fifty-six he took
Syracuse, after one of the most memorable of sieges, in which he had
Archimedes for an opponent. At sixty he was killed in a skirmish,
leaving the most brilliant military name of the republican times, so
highly are valor and energy rated, though in the higher qualities of
generalship he was inferior to men whose names are hardly known.
Undoubtedly, Mommsen is right when he says that Rome was saved by the
Roman system, and not by the labors of this man or that; but it is
something for a country to have men who know how to work under its
system, and in accordance with its requirements; and such men were
Fabius and Marcellus, the latter old enough to be Hannibal's father,
while the former was the contemporary of his grandfather.

The turning point in the Second Punic War was the siege of Capua by the
Romans. That siege Hannibal sought by all means in his power to raise,
well knowing, that, if the Campanian city should fall, he could never
hope to become master of Italy. He marched to Rome in the expectation of
compelling the besiegers to hasten to its defence; but without effect.
Two old Romans commanded the beleaguering army, and while one of them,
Q. Fulvius, hastened home with a small force, the other, Appius
Claudius, carried on the siege. Hannibal had to retreat, and Capua fell,
the effect of the tenacity with which ancient generals held on to their
prey. Had they been less firm, the course of history would have been
changed. At a later period of the war, Rome was saved from great danger,
if not from destruction, by the victory of the Metaurus, won by M.
Livius Salinator and C. Claudius Nero. Nero was an elderly man, having
been conspicuous for some years, and the consular age being forty. His
colleague was a very old man, having been consul before the war began,
and having long lived in retirement, because he had been unjustly
treated. The Romans now forced him to take office, against his wish,
though his actions and his language were of the most insulting
character. A great union of parties had taken place, for Hasdrubal was
marching to Italy, for the purpose of effecting a junction with his
brother Hannibal, and it was felt that nothing short of perfect union
could save the State. The State was saved, the two old consuls acting
together, and defeating and slaying Hasdrubal in the last great battle
of the war that was fought in Italy. The old fogies were too much for
their foe, a much younger man than either of them, and a soldier of high
reputation.

It must be admitted, however, that the Second Punic War is fairly
quotable by those who insist upon the superiority of youthful generals
over old ones, for the two greatest men who appeared in it were young
leaders,--Hannibal, and Publius Cornelius Scipio, the first Africanus.
No man has ever exceeded Hannibal in genius for war. He was one of the
greatest statesmen that ever lived, and he was so because he was the
greatest of soldiers. He might have won pitched battles as a mere
general, but it was his statesmanship that enabled him to contend for
sixteen years against Rome, in Italy, though Rome was aided by
Carthaginian copperheads. But, though a young general, Hannibal was an
old soldier when he led his army from the Ebro to the Trebia, as the
avenging agent of his country's gods. His military as well as his moral
training began in childhood; and when his father, Hamilcar Barcas,[B]
was killed, Hannibal, though but eighteen, was of established reputation
in the Carthaginian service. Eight years later he took the place which
his father and brother-in-law had held, called to it by the voice of the
army. During those eight years he had been constantly employed, and he
brought to the command an amount and variety of experience such as it
has seldom been the lot of even old generals to acquire. Years brought
no decay to his faculties, and we have the word of his successful foe,
that at Zama, when he was forty-five, he showed as much skill as he had
displayed at Cannæ, when he was but thirty-one. Long afterward, when an
exile in the East, his powers of mind shine as brightly as they did when
he crossed the Pyrenees and the Alps to fulfil his oath. Scipio, too,
though in a far less degree than Hannibal, was an old soldier. He had
been often employed, and was present at Cannæ, before he obtained that
proconsular command in Spain which was the worthy foundation of his
fortunes. The four years that he served in that country, and his
subsequent services in Africa, qualified him to meet Hannibal, whose
junior he was by thirteen years. That he was Hannibal's superior,
because he defeated him at Zama, with the aid of Masinissa, no more
follows than that Wellington was Napoleon's superior, because, with the
aid of Blücher, he defeated him at Waterloo. It would not be more
difficult to account for the loss of the African field than it is to
account for the loss of the Flemish field, by the superior genius. The
elder Africanus is the most exceptional character in all history, and it
is impossible to place him. He seems never to have been young, and we
cannot associate the idea of age with him, even when he is dying at
Liternum at upwards of fifty. He was a man at seventeen, when first he
steps boldly out on the historic page, and there is no apparent change
in him when we find him leading great armies, and creating a new policy
for the redemption of Italy from the evils of war. He was intended to be
a king, but he was born two centuries too early to be of any use to his
country in accordance with his genius, out of the field. Such a man is
not to be judged as a mere soldier, and we were inclined not to range
him on the side of youthful generals; but we will be generous, and, in
consideration of his years, permit him to be claimed by those who insist
that war is the business of youth.

At later periods, Rome's greatest generals were men who were old. The
younger Africanus was fifty-one at Numantia, Marius did not obtain the
consulship until he was fifty; and he was fifty-five when he won his
first great victory over the Northern barbarians, and a year older when
he completed their destruction. Sulla was past fifty when he set out to
meet the armies of Mithridates, which he conquered; and he was fifty-six
when he made himself master of his country, after one of the fiercest
campaigns on record. Pompeius distinguished himself when very young, but
it is thought that the title of "the Great" was conferred upon him by
Sulla in a spirit of irony. The late Sir William Napier, who ought to
have been a good judge, said that he was a very great general, and in a
purely military sense perhaps greater than Cæsar. He was fifty-eight in
the campaign of Pharsalia, and if he then failed, his failure must be
attributed to the circumstances of his position, which was rather that
of a party leader than of a general; and a party leader, it has been
truly said, must sometimes obey, in order that at other times he may
command. Pompeius delivered battle at Pharsalia against his own
judgment. The "Onward to Rome!" cry of the fierce aristocrats was too
strong to be resisted; and "their general yielded with a sigh to the
importunities of his followers, declaring that he could no longer
command, and must submit to obey." Not long before he had beaten Cæsar
at Dyrrachium, with much loss to the vanquished, completely spoiling his
plans; and the great contest might have had a very different result, had
not political and personal considerations been permitted to outweigh
those of a military character. Politicians are pests in a camp. Cæsar
was in his fifty-first year when he crossed the Rubicon and began his
wonderful series of campaigns in the Civil War,--campaigns characterized
by an almost superhuman energy. The most remarkable of his efforts was
that which led to his last appearance in the field, at the Battle of
Munda, where he fought for existence; he was then approaching
fifty-five, and he could not have been more active and energetic, had he
been as young as Alexander at Arbela.

In modern days, the number of old generals who have gained great battles
is large, far larger than the number of young generals of the highest
class. The French claim to be the first of military peoples, and though
no other nation has been so badly beaten in battles, or so completely
crushed in campaigns, there is a general disposition to admit their
claim; and many of their best commanders were old men. Bertrand du
Gueselin performed his best deeds against the English after he was
fifty, and he was upward of sixty years when the commandant of Randon
laid the keys of his fortress on his body, surrendering, not to the
living, but to the dead. Turenne was ever great, but it is admitted that
his three last campaigns, begun when he was sixty-two, were his greatest
performances. Condé's victory at Rocroi was a most brilliant deed, he
being then but twenty-two; but it does not so strikingly illustrate his
genius as do those operations by which, at fifty-four, he baffled
Montecuculi, and prevented him from profiting from the fall of Turenne.
Said Condé to one of his officers, "How much I wish that I could have
conversed only two hours with the ghost of Monsieur de Turenne, so as to
be able to follow the scope of his ideas!" In these days, generals can
have as much ghostly talk as they please, but the privilege would not
seem to be much used, or it is not useful, for they do nothing that is
of consequence sufficient to be attributed to supernatural power.
Luxembourg was sixty-two when he defeated Prince Waldeck at Fleurus; and
at sixty-four and sixty-five he defeated William III. at Steinkirk and
Landen. Vendôme was fifty-one when he defeated Eugène at Cassano; and at
fifty-six he won the eventful Battle of Villaviciosa, to which the
Spanish Bourbons owe their throne. Villars, who fought the terrible
Battle of Malplaquet against Marlborough and Eugène, was then fifty-six
years old; and he had more than once baffled those commanders. At sixty
he defeated Eugène, and by his successes enabled France to conclude
honorably a most disastrous war. The Comte de Saxe was in his
forty-ninth year when he gained the Battle of Fontenoy;[C] and later he
won other successes. Rochambeau was in his fifty-seventh year when he
acted with Washington at Yorktown, in a campaign that established our
existence as a nation.

The Spanish army of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, down to the
date of the Battle of Rocroi, stood very high. Several of its best
generals were old men. Gonsalvo de Córdova, "the Great Captain," who may
be considered the father of the famous Spanish infantry, was fifty when
he completed his Italian conquests; and nine years later he was again
called to the head of the Spaniards in Italy, but the King of Aragon's
jealousy prevented him from going to that country. Alva was about sixty
when he went to the Netherlands, on his awful mission; and it must be
allowed that he was as great in the field as he was detestably cruel. At
seventy-four he conquered Portugal. Readers of Mr. Prescott's work on
Peru will remember his lively account of Francisco de Carbajal, who at
fourscore was more active than are most men at thirty. Francisco Pizarro
was an old man, about sixty, when he effected the conquest of Peru; and
his principal associate, Almagro, was his senior. Spinola, who died at
sixty-one, in the full possession of his reputation, was, perhaps, the
greatest military genius of his time, next to Gustavus Adolphus and
Wallenstein.

The Austrian military service has become a sort of butt with those who
shoot their arrows at what is called slowness, and who delight to
transfix old generals. Since Bonaparte, in less than a year, tumbled
over Beaulieu, Wurmser, and Alvinczy, (whose united ages exceeded two
hundred years,) it has been taken for granted that the Austrians never
have generals under threescore-and-ten years, and that they are always
beaten. There have been many old generals in the Austrian service, it is
true, and most of them have been very good leaders. Montecuculi was
fifty-six when he defeated the Turks at St. Gothard, which is counted
one of the "decisive battles" of the seventeenth century. Daun was
fifty-three when he won the victory of Kolin, June 18, 1757, inflicting
defeat on the Prussian Frederick, next to Marlborough the greatest
commander of modern times who had then appeared. Melas was seventy when
he met Bonaparte at Marengo, and beat him, the victory being with the
Austrian while he remained on the field; but infirmities having
compelled him to leave before he could glean it, the arrival of Desaix
and the dash of the younger Kellermann turned the tide of battle in
favor of the French. General Zach, Melas's chief of the staff, was in
command in the latter part of the battle, and it is supposed, that, if
he had not been captured, the Austrians would have kept what they had
won. He was fifty-six years old, but was not destined to be the "Old
Zach" of his country, as _the_ "Old Zach" was always victorious. Marshal
Radelzky was eighty-two when, in 1848, he found himself compelled to
uphold the Austrian cause in Italy, without the hope of aid from home;
and not only did he uphold it, but a year later he restored it
completely, and was the virtual ruler of the Peninsula until he had
reached the age of ninety. Of all the military men who took part in the
wars of 1848-9, he, it is admitted, displayed the most talent and
energy. So well was his work done, that it required the united forces of
France and Sardinia to undo it, shortly after his death; and he died in
the conviction that it could not be undone. Haynau, who certainly
displayed eminent ability in 1848-9, was in his sixty-second year when
the war began, and stands next to Radetzky as the preserver of the
Austrian monarchy; and we should not allow detestation of his cruelties
to detract from his military merits. The Devil is entitled to justice,
and by consequence so are his imps. Austria has often seen her armies
beaten when led by old men, but other old men have won victories for
her. Even those of her generals who were so rapidly beaten by young
Bonaparte had been good soldiers elsewhere; and when the Archduke
Charles, who was two years the junior of Bonaparte, was sent to meet the
Frenchman, he had no better luck than had been found by Beaulieu and
Wurmser, though his reverses were not on the same extraordinary scale
that had marked the fall of his predecessors. Twelve years later, in
1809, Napoleon again met the Archduke Charles, and defeated him
repeatedly; and though the Archduke was victorious at Essling, he, the
younger commander, had not sufficient boldness so to improve his success
as should have given to Austria the credit of the deliverance of
Germany, which was to come from Russia. Those who dwell so
pertinaciously on the failures of old Austrian generals should in
justice to age remember that it was a young Austrian general, and a good
soldier too, who showed a most extraordinary want of energy in 1809,
immediately after the French under Napoleon had met with the greatest
reverse which their arms had then experienced since Bonaparte had been
spoiled into a despot. Prince Schwartzenberg, who had nominal command of
the Allied Armies in 1813-14, was of the same age as the Archduke
Charles, but it would be absurd to call him a great soldier. He was a
brave man, and he had seen considerable service; but as a general he did
not rank even as second-rate. His appointment to command in 1813 was a
political proceeding, meant to conciliate Austria; but though it was a
useful appointment in some respects, it was injurious to the Allies in
the field; and had the Prince's plan at Leipsic been adhered to,
Napoleon would have won decided successes there. The Czar wished for the
command, and his zeal might have enabled him to do something; but the
entire absence of military talent from the list of his accomplishments
would have greatly endangered the Allies' cause. Schwartzenberg's merit
consisted in this, that he had sufficient influence and tact to "keep
things straight" in the councils of a jarring confederacy, until others
had gained such victories as placed the final defeat of Napoleon beyond
all doubt. His first battle was Dresden, and there Napoleon gave him a
drubbing of the severest character; and the loss of that battle would
have carried with it the loss of the cause for which it was fought by
the Allies, had it not been that at the very same time were fought and
won a series of battles, at the Katzbach and elsewhere, which were due
to the boldness of Blücher, who was old enough to be Schwartzenberg's
father, with more than a dozen years to spare. Blücher was also the real
hero at Leipsie, where he gained brilliant successes; while on that part
of the field where Schwartzenberg commanded, the Allies did but little
beyond holding their original ground. Had Blücher failed, Leipsie would
have been a French victory.

England's best generals mostly have been old men, or men well advance in
life, the chief exceptions being found among her kings and princes.[D]
The Englishmen who have exhibited the greatest genius for war, in what
may be called their country's modern history, are Oliver Cromwell,
Marlborough, and Wellington. Cromwell was in his forty-fourth year when
he received the baptism of fire at Edgehill, as a captain; and he was in
his fifty-third year when he fought, as lord-general, his last battle,
at Worcester, which closed a campaign, as well as an active military
career, that had been conducted with great energy. It was as a military
man that he subsequently ruled the British islands, and to the day of
his death there was no abatement in ability. Marlborough had a good
military education, served under Turenne when he was but twenty-two, and
attracted his commander's admiration; but he never had an independent
command until he was forty, when he led an expedition to Ireland, and
captured Cork and Kinsale. He was fifty-two when he assumed command of
the armies of the Grand Alliance against Louis XIV., and in his
fifty-fifth year when he won the Battle of Blenheim. At fifty-six he
gained the victory of Ramillies, and at fifty-eight that of Oudenarde.
His last great battle, Malplaquet, was fought when he was in his
sixtieth year; and after that the French never durst meet him in the
field. He never knew what defeat meant, from experience, and was the
most successful even of those commanders who have never failed. He left
his command at sixty-two, with no one to dispute his title of the first
of living soldiers; and with him victory left the Alliance. Subsequently
he was employed by George I., and to his measures the defeat of the
rebels of 1715 was due, he having predicted that they would be
overthrown precisely where they were overthrown. The story that he
survived his mental powers is without foundation, and he continued to
perform his official duties to the last, the King having refused to
accept his proffered resignation. Wellington had a thorough military
training, received his first commission at eighteen, and was a
lieutenant-colonel in his twenty-fifth year. After showing that he was a
good soldier in 1794-5, against the French, he went to India, where he
distinguished himself in subordinate campaigns, and was made a
major-general in 1802. Assaye, the first battle in which he commanded,
was won when he was in his thirty-fifth year. He had just entered on his
fortieth year when he took command of that force with which he first
defeated the French in Portugal. He was in his forty-seventh year when
he fought at Waterloo. If he cannot be classed with old generals,
neither can he be placed in the list of youthful soldiers; and so little
confidence had he in his military talents, that at twenty-six he
petitioned to be transferred to the civil service. His powers were
developed by events and time. Some of his Peninsular lieutenants were
older than himself. Craufurd was five years his senior, and was a
capital soldier. Picton, who had some of the highest military qualities,
was almost eleven years older than his chief, and was little short of
fifty-seven when he fell at Waterloo. Lord Hopetoun was six years older
than Wellington. Lord Lynedoch (General Sir Thomas Graham) was in his
sixty-first year when he defeated Maréchal Victor at Barrosa, and in his
sixty-third when he led the left wing of the Allies at Vittoria, which
was the turning battle of the long contest between England and France. A
few months later he took St. Sebastian, after one of the most terrible
sieges known to modern warfare. He continued to serve under Wellington
until France was invaded. Returning to England, he was sent to Holland,
with an independent command; and though his forces were few, so little
had his fire been dulled by time, that he carried the great fortress of
Bergen-op-Zoom by storm, but only to lose it again, with more than two
thousand men, because of the sense and gallantry of the French General
Bezanet, who, like our Rosecrans at Murfreesboro', would not accept
defeat under any circumstances. When Wellington afterward saw the place,
he remarked that it was very strong, and must have been extremely
difficult to enter; "but when once in," he added, "I wonder how the
Devil they suffered themselves to be beaten out again!" Though the old
Scotchman failed on this particular occasion, his boldness and daring
are to be cited in support of the position that energy in war is not the
exclusive property of youth.

Some of the best of the English second-class generals were old men. Lord
Clyde began his memorable Indian campaigns at sixty-six, and certainly
showed no want of talent and activity in their course. He restored, to
all appearance, British supremacy in the East. Sir C.J. Napier was in
his sixty-second year when he conquered Sinde, winning the great Battles
of Meanee and Doobah; and six years later he was sent out to India, as
Commander-in-chief, at the suggestion of Wellington, who said, that, if
Napier would not go, he should go himself. He reached India too late to
fight the Sikhs, but showed great vigor in governing the Indian army. He
died in 1853; had he lived until the next spring, he would
unquestionably have been placed at the head of that force which England
sent first to Turkey and then to Southern Russia. Lord Raglan was almost
sixty-six when he was appointed to his first command, and though his
conduct has been severely criticized, and much misrepresented by many
writers, the opinion is now becoming common that he discharged well the
duties of a very difficult position. Mr. Kinglake's brilliant work is
obtaining justice for the services and memory of his illustrious friend.
Lord Hardinge and Lord Gough were old men when they carried on some of
the fiercest hostilities ever known to the English in India. Sir Ralph
Abercromby was sixty-three when he defeated the French in Egypt, in
1801. Lord Cornwallis was fifty-two when he broke the power of Tippoo
Saib, and prepared the way for his ultimate overthrow. Lord Peterborough
was forty-seven, and had never before held a command or seen much
service, when he set out on that series of extraordinary campaigns which
came so near replacing the Austrian house in possession of Spain and the
Indies. Peterborough has been called the last of the knights-errant;
but, in fact, no book on knight-errantry contains anything half so
wonderful as his deeds in the country of Don Quixote. Sir Eyre Coote,
who had so boldly supported that bold policy which led to the victory of
Plassey, nearly a quarter of a century later supported Hastings in the
field with almost as much vigor as he had supported Clive in council,
and saved British India, when it was assailed by the ablest of all its
foes. His last victories were gained in advanced life, and are ranked
with the highest of those actions to which England owes her wonderful
Oriental dominion. Lord Keane was verging upon sixty when he led the
British forces into Afghanistan, and took Ghuznee. Against all her old
and middle-aged generals, her kings and princes apart, England could
place but very few young commanders of great worth. Clive's case was
clearly exceptional; and Wolfe owed his victory on the Heights of
Abraham as much to Montcalm's folly as to his own audacity. The
Frenchman should have refused battle, when time and climate would soon
have wrought his deliverance and his enemy's ruin.

It is generally held that the wars which grew out of the French
Revolution, and which involved the world in their flames, were chiefly
the work of young men, and that their history illustrates the
superiority of youth over age in the ancient art of human destruction.
But this belief is not well founded, and, indeed, bears a close
resemblance to that other error in connection with the French
Revolution, namely, that it proceeded from the advent of new opinions,
which obtained ascendency,--whereas those opinions were older than
France, and had more than once been aired in France, and there had
struggled for supremacy. The opinions before the triumph of which the
old monarchy went down were much older than that monarchy; but as they
had never before been able definitely to influence the nation's action,
it was not strange that they should be considered new, when there was
nothing new about them save their application. Young opinions, as they
are supposed to have been, are best championed by young men; and hence
it is assumed that the French leaders in the field were youthful heroes,
as were the civil leaders in many instances,--and a very nice mess the
latter made of the business they engaged in, doing little that was well
in it beyond getting their own heads cut off. There are some facts that
greatly help to sustain the position that France was saved from
partition by the exertions of young generals, the new men of the new
time. Hoche, Moreau, Bonaparte, Desaix, Soult, Lannes, Ney, and others,
who early rose to fame in the Revolutionary wars, were all young men,
and their exploits were so great as to throw the deeds of others into
the shade; but the salvation of France was effected before any one of
their number became conspicuous as a leader. Napoleon once said that it
was not the new levies that saved France, but the old soldiers of the
Bourbons; and he was right; and he might have added, that they were led
by old or elderly generals. Dumouriez was in his fifty-fourth year when,
in 1792, he won the Battles of Valmy and Jemmapes; and at Valmy he was
aided by the elder Kellermann, who was fifty-seven. Those two battles
decided the fate of Europe, and laid the foundation of that French
supremacy which endured for twenty years, until Napoleon himself
overthrew it by his mad Moscow expedition. Custine, who also was
successful in 1792, on the side of Germany, was fifty-two. Jourdan and
Pichegru, though not old men, were old soldiers, when, in 1794 and 1795,
they did so much to establish the power of the French Republic, the
former winning the Battle of Fleurus. It was in the three years that
followed the beginning of the war in 1792, that the French performed
those deeds which subsequently enabled Napoleon and his Marshals to
chain victory to their chariots, and to become so drunk from success
that they fell through their own folly rather than because of the
exertions of their enemies. Had the old French generals been beaten at
Valmy, the Prussians would have entered Paris in a few days, the
monarchy would have been restored, and the name of Bonaparte never would
have been heard; and equally unknown would have been the names of a
hundred other French leaders, who distinguished themselves in the
three-and-twenty years that followed the first successes of Dumouriez
and Kellermann. Let honor be given where it is due, and let the fogies
have their just share of it. There can be nothing meaner than to insist
upon stripping gray heads of green laurels.

After the old generals and old soldiers of France had secured
standing-places for the new generation, the representatives of the
latter certainly did make their way brilliantly and rapidly. The school
was a good one, and the scholars were apt to learn, and did credit to
their masters. They carried the tricolor over Europe and into Egypt, and
saw it flying over the capital of almost every member of those
coalitions which had purposed its degradation at Paris. It was the flag
to which men bowed at Madrid and Seville, at Milan and Rome, at Paris
and at the Hague, at Warsaw and Wilna, at Dantzie and in Dalmatia, at
the same time that it was fast approaching Moscow; and it was thought
of with as much fear as hatred at Vienna and Berlin. No wonder that the
world forgot or overlooked the earlier and fewer triumphs of the first
Republican commanders, when dazzled by the glories that shone from
Arcola, the Pyramids, Zürich, Marengo, Hohenlinden, Ulm, Austerlitz,
Jena, Eckmühl, Wagram, Borodino, Lützen, Bautzen, and Dresden. But those
young generals of the Republic and the Empire were sometimes found
unequal to the work of contending against the old generals of the
Coalitionists. Suvaroff was in his seventieth year when he defeated
Macdonald at the Battle of the Trebbia, the Frenchman being but
thirty-four; and a few months later he defeated Joubert, who was thirty,
at Novi. Joubert was one of Bonaparte's generals in his first Italian
wars, and was so conspicuous and popular that he had been selected to
command the Army of Italy by the moderate reactionists, in the hope that
he might there win such glory as should enable him to play the part
which Bonaparte played but a few months later,--Bonaparte being then in
the East, with the English fleets between him and France, so that he was
considered a lost man. "The striking similarity of situation between
Joubert and Bonaparte," says Madame d'Abrantes, "is most remarkable.
They were of equal age, and both, in their early career, suffered a sort
of disgrace; they were finally appointed to command, first, the
seventeenth military division, and afterward the Army of Italy. There is
in all this a curious parity of events; but death soon ended the career
of one of the young heroes. That which ought to have constituted the
happiness of his life was the cause of Joubert's death,--his marriage.
But how could he refrain from loving the woman he espoused? Who can
have forgotten Zaphirine de Montholon, her enchanting grace, her playful
wit, her good humor, and her beauty?" Like another famous soldier,
Joubert loved too well to love wisely. Bonaparte, who never was young,
had received the command of the Army of Italy as the portion of the
ex-mistress of Barras, who was seven years his senior, and, being a
matter-of-fact man, he reduced his _lune de miel_ to three days, and
posted off to his work. He knew the value of time in those days, and not
Cleopatra herself could have kept him from his men. Joubert, more of a
man, but an inferior soldier, took his honeymoon in full measure,
passing a month with his bride; and the loss of that month, if so sweet
a thirty days could be called a loss, ruined him, and perhaps prevented
him from becoming Emperor of the French. The enemy received
reinforcements while he was so lovingly employed, and when he at length
arrived on the scene of action he found that the Allies had obtained
mastery of the situation. It was no longer in the power of the French to
say whether they would fight or not. They had to give battle at Novi,
where the tough old Russian of seventy years asserted his superiority
over the _héros de roman_ who had posted from Paris to retrieve the
fortune of France, and to make his own. When he left Paris, he said to
his wife, "You will see me again, dead or victorious,"--and dead he was,
in less than a month. He fell early in the action, on the fifteenth of
August, 1799, the very day on which Bonaparte completed his thirtieth
year. Moreau took the command, but failed to turn the tide of disaster.
The French are unanimous in ascribing their defeat to Joubert's delay at
Paris, and it is certain that the enemy did take Alexandria and Mantua
during that month's delay, and thus were enabled to add the besieging
forces to their main army, so that Joubert was about to retreat to the
Apennines, and to assume a defensive position, when Suvaroff forced him
to accept battle. But something should be allowed for the genius of the
Russian general, who was one of the great master-spirits of war, and who
seldom fought without being completely victorious. He had mostly been
employed against the Turks, whose military reputation was then at the
lowest, or the Poles, who were too divided and depressed to do
themselves and their cause justice, and therefore his character as a
soldier did not stand so high as that of more than one man who was his
inferior; but when, in his seventieth year, he took command in Italy,
there to encounter soldiers who had beaten the armies of almost all
other European nations, and who were animated by a fanatical spirit as
strong as that which fired his own bosom, he showed himself to be more
than equal to his position. He was not at all at fault, though brought
face to face with an entirely new state of things, but acted with his
accustomed vigor, marching from victory to victory, and reconquering
Italy more rapidly than it had been conquered three years before by
Bonaparte. When Bonaparte was destroying the Austrian armies in Italy,
Suvaroff watched his operations with deep interest, and said that he
must go to the West to meet the new genius, or that Bonaparte would
march to the East against Russia,--a prediction, it has been said, that
was fulfilled to the Frenchman's ruin. Whether, had he encountered
Bonaparte, he would have beaten him, is a question for the ingenious to
argue, but which never can be settled. But one thing is certain, and
that is, that Bonaparte never encountered an opponent of that determined
and energetic character which belonged to Suvaroff until his latter
days, and then his fall was rapid and his ruin utter. That Suvaroff
failed in Switzerland, to which country he had been transferred from
Italy, does not at all impeach his character for generalship. His
failure was due partly to the faults of others, and partly to
circumstances. Switzerland was to him what Russia became to Napoleon in
1812. Massena's victory at Zürich, in which half of Korsakoff's army was
destroyed, rendered Russian failure in the campaign inevitable. All the
genius in the world, on that field of action, could not have done
anything that should have compensated for so terrible a calamity. Zürich
saved France far more than did Marengo, and it is to be noted that it
was fought and won by the oldest of all the able men who figure in
history as Napoleon's Marshals. There were some of the Marshals who were
older than Massena, but they were not men of superior talents. Massena
was forty-one when he defeated Korsakoff, and he was a veteran soldier
when the Revolutionary wars began.

The three commanders who did most to break down Napoleon's power, and to
bring about his overthrow, namely,--Benningsen, and Kutusoff, and
Blücher,--were all old men; and the two last-named were very old men. It
would be absurd to call either of them a great commander, but it is
indisputable that they all had great parts in great wars. Benningsen can
scarcely be called a good general of the second class, and he is mostly
spoken of as a foolish braggart and boaster; but it is a fact that he
did some things at an important time which indicated his possession of
qualities that were highly desirable in a general who was bound to act
against Napoleon. Having, in 1807, obtained command of the Russian army
in Poland, he had what the French considered the consummate impudence to
take the offensive against the Emperor, and compelled him to mass his
forces, and to fight in the dead of winter, and a Polish winter to boot,
in which all that is not ice and snow is mud. True, Napoleon would have
made him pay dear for his boldness, had there not occurred one or two of
those accidents which often spoil the best-laid plans of war; but as it
was, the butcherly Battle of Eylau was fought, both parties, and each
with some show of reason, claiming the victory. Had the Russians acted
on the night after Eylau as the English acted on the night after
Flodden, and remained on the field, the world would have pronounced them
victorious, and the French Empire might have been shorn of its
proportions, and perhaps have fallen, seven years in advance of its
time; but they retreated, and thus the French made a fair claim to the
honors of the engagement, though virtually beaten in the fight.
Benningsen boasted tremendously, and as there were men enough to believe
what he said to be true, because they wished it to be true, and as he
had behaved well on some previous occasions, his reputation was vastly
raised, and his name was in all mouths and on all pens. If the reader
will take the trouble to look over a file of some Federal journal of
1807, he will find Benningsen as frequently and as warmly praised as Lee
or Stonewall Jackson is (or was) praised by English journals in
1863,--for the Federalists hated Napoleon as bitterly as the English
hate us, and read of Eylau with as much unction as the English of to-day
read of the American reverses at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville,
while Austerlitz and Friedland pleased our Federalists about as well as
Donelson and Pulaski please the English of these times. A few months
after Eylau, Benningsen repulsed an attack which Napoleon imprudently
made on his intrenched camp at Heilsberg, which placed another feather
in his cap; nor did the smashing defeat he met with four days later, at
Friedland, lessen his reputation. The world is slow to think poorly of a
man who has done some clever things. We have seen how it was with the
late Stonewall Jackson, concerning whom most men spoke as if he had
never known defeat, though it is, or it should be, notorious, that he
was as often beaten as successful, that more than once he had to fly
with wind-like swiftness to escape personal destruction, and that on one
occasion he was saved from ruin only because of an exhibition on our
side of more than a usual amount of stupidity. But he had repeatedly
showed some of the best qualities of a dashing general, and all else was
overlooked in admiration of the skill and the audacity with which he
then had done his evil work. So it was with Benningsen, and with more
justice. The man who had bearded Napoleon but a few months after Jena,
and not much more than a year after Austerlitz, and who had fought an
even battle with him, in which fifty thousand men fell, must have had
some high moral qualities that entitled him to respect; and he continued
to be much talked of until greater and more fruitful campaigns had
obscured his deeds. The pluck which he had exhibited tended to keep
alive the spirit of European resistance to Napoleon, as it showed that
the conqueror had only to be firmly met to be made to fight hardly for
victory; and that was much, in view of the rapidity with which Napoleon
had beaten both Austria and Russia in 1805, and Prussia in 1806.
Benningsen completed his sixty-second year two days after the Battle of
Eylau. He was employed in 1812, '13, '14, but not in the first line, and
his name is not of much mention in the histories of those eventful
years.

Prince Kutusoff, though a good soldier in the Turkish and Polish wars,
did not have a command against the French until he had completed his
sixtieth year, in 1805, when he led a Russian army to the aid of
Austria. He checked the advance of the French after Ulm, and was in
nominal command of the Allies at Austerlitz; but that battle was really
fought in accordance with the plans of General Weyrother, for which
Kutusoff had a profound contempt. If thorough beating could make good
soldiers of men, the vanquished at Austerlitz ought to have become the
superiors of the victors. In 1812, when the Russians had become weary of
that sound policy which was drawing Napoleon to destruction, Kutusoff
assumed command of their army, and fought the Battle of Borodino, which
was a defeat in name, but a victory in its consequences, to the invaded
party. His conduct while the French were at Moscow had the effect of
keeping them in that trap until their fate was sealed; and his action
while following them on their memorable retreat was a happy mixture of
audacity and prudence, and completed the Russian triumph. Sir Robert
Wilson, who was with the Russian general, who must have found him a bore
of the first magnitude, is very severe on Kutusoff's proceedings; but
all that he says makes it clear that the stout old Russian knew what he
was about, and that he was determined not to be made a mere tool of
England. If success is a test of merit, Kutusoff's action deserves the
very highest admiration, for the French army was annihilated. He died
just after he had brought the greatest of modern campaigns to a
triumphant close, at the age of sixty-eight, and before he could hear
the world's applause. The Germans, who were to owe so much to his
labors, rejoiced at his removal, because he was supposed to belong to
the peace party, who were opposed to further action, and who thought
that their country was under no obligation to fight for the deliverance
of other nations. They feared, too, that, if the war should go on, his
"Muscovite hoof" would be too strong for the Fatherland to bear it; and
they saw in his death a Providential incident, which encouraged them to
move against the French. It is altogether probable, that, if he had
lived but three months longer, events would have taken quite a different
turn. Baron von Müffling tells us that Kutusoff "would not hear a word
of crossing the Elbe; and all Scharnhorst's endeavors to make him more
favorably disposed toward Prussia were fruitless. The whole peace party
in the Russian army joined with the Field-Marshal, and the Emperor was
placed in a difficult position. On my arrival at Altenberg, I found
Scharnhorst deeply dejected, for he could not shut his eyes to the
consequences of this resistance. Unexpectedly, the death of the
obstinate old Marshal occurred on the twenty-eighth of April, and the
Emperor was thus left free to pursue his own policy." The first general
who had successfully encountered Napoleon, it would have been the
strangest of history's strange facts, if the Emperor had owed the
continuance of his reign to Kutusoff's influence, and that was the end
to which the Russian's policy was directed; for, though he wished to
confine French power within proper limits, he had no wish to strengthen
either England or any of the German nations, deeming them likely to
become the enemies of Russia, while he might well suppose that the
French had had enough of Russian warfare to satisfy them for the rest of
the century. Had his astute policy been adopted and acted on, there
never would have been a Crimean War, and Sebastopol would not now be a
ruin; and Russia would have been greater than she is likely to be in our
time, or in the time of our children.

Blücher, who completed the work which Kutusoff began, and in a manner
which the Russian would hardly have approved, was an older man than the
hero of Borodino. When called to the command of the Prussian army, in
March, 1813, he was in his seventy-first year; and he was in his
seventy-third year when his energy enabled him, in the face of
difficulties that no other commander could have overcome, to bring up
more than fifty thousand men to the assistance of Wellington at
Waterloo, losing more than an eighth of their number. He had no military
talent, as the term is generally used. He could not tell whether a plan
was good or bad. He could not understand the maps. He was not a
disciplinarian, and he was ignorant of all the details of preparing an
army, of clothing and feeding and arming it. In all those things which
it is supposed a commander should know, and which such commanders as
Napoleon and Wellington did know well, he was so entirely ignorant, that
he might have been raised to the head of an army of United States
Volunteers amid universal applause. He was vicious to an extent that
surprised even the fastest men of that vicious time,--a gambler, a
drunkard, and a loose liver every way, indulging in vices that are held
by mild moralists to be excusable in youth who are employed in sowing
wild oats, but which are universally admitted to be disgusting in those
upon whom age has laid its withering hand. Yet this vicious and ignorant
old man had more to do with bringing about the fall of Napoleon than all
the generals and statesmen of the Allies combined. He had energy, which
is the most valuable of all qualities in a military leader; and he
hated Napoleon as heartily as he hated Satan, and a great deal more
heartily than he hated sin. Mr. Dickens tells us that the vigorous
tenacity of love is always much stronger than hate, and perhaps he is
right, so far as concerns private life; but in public life hate is by
far the stronger passion. But for Blücher's hatred of Napoleon the
campaign of 1813 would have terminated in favor of the Emperor, that of
1814 never would have been undertaken, and that of 1815, if ever
attempted, would have had a far different issue. The old German
disregarded all orders and suggestions, and set all military and
political principles at defiance, in his ardor to accomplish the one
purpose which he had in view; and as that purpose was accomplished, he
has taken his place in history as one of the greatest of soldiers.
Napoleon himself is not more secure of immortality. He was greatly
favored by circumstances, but he is a wise man who knows how to profit
from circumstances. Take Blücher out of the wars of 1813-15, and there
is little left in them on the side of the Allies that is calculated to
command admiration. Next to Blücher stands his celebrated chief of the
staff, General Count Gneisenau, who was the brains of the Army of
Silesia, Blücher being its head. When Blücher was made an LL.D. at
Oxford, he facetiously remarked, "If I am a doctor, here is my
pill-maker," placing his hand on Gneisenau's head,--which was a frank
acknowledgment that few men would have been able to make. Gneisenau was
fifty-three when he became associated with Blücher, and he was
fifty-five when he acted with him in 1815. In 1831 he was appointed to
an important command, being then seventy-one. The celebrated
Scharnhorst, Gneisenau's predecessor, and to whom the Prussians owed so
much, was in his fifty-seventh year when he died of the wounds he had
received at the Battle of Lützen.

There are some European generals whom it is difficult to class, as they
showed great capacity and won great victories as well in age as in
youth. Prince Eugène was one of these, and Frederick of Prussia was
another. Eugène showed high talent when very young, and won the first of
his grand victories over the Turks at thirty-four; but it was not so
splendid an affair as that of Belgrade, which he won at fifty-four. He
was forty-three when he defeated the French at Turin, under
circumstances and with incidents that took attention even from
Marlborough, whom he subsequently aided to gain the victories of
Oudenarde and Malplaquet, as he had previously aided him at Blenheim. At
seventy-one Eugène led an Austrian army against the French; and though
no battle was fought, his conduct showed that he had not lost his
capacity for command. Frederick began his military life when in his
thirtieth year, and was actively engaged until thirty-three, showing
striking ability on several occasions, though he began badly, according
to his own admission. But it was in the Seven Years' War that his fame
as a soldier was won, and that contest began when he was in his
forty-fifth year. He was close upon forty-six when he gained the Battles
of Rossbach and Leuthen. Whatever opinion others may entertain as to his
age, it is certain that he counted himself an old man in those days.
Writing to the Marquis d'Argens, a few days before he was forty-eight,
he said, "In my old age I have come down almost to be a theatrical
king"; and not two years later he wrote to the same friend, "I have
sacrificed my youth to my father, and my manhood to my fatherland. I
think, therefore, I have acquired the right to my old age." He reckoned
by trials and events, and he had gone through enough to have aged any
man. Those were the days when he carried poison on his person, in order
that, should he be completely beaten, or captured, he might not adorn
Maria Theresa's triumph, but end his life "after the high Roman
fashion." When the question of the Bavarian succession threatened to
lead to another war with Austria, Frederick's action, though he was in
his sixty-seventh year, showed, to use the homely language of the
English soldier at St. Helena when Napoleon arrived at that famous
watering place, that he had many campaigns in his belly yet. The
youthful Emperor, Joseph II., would have been no match for the old
soldier of Liegnitz and Zorndorf.

Some of Frederick's best generals were old men. Schwerin, who was killed
in the terrible Battle of Prague, was then seventy-three, and a soldier
of great reputation. Sixteen years before he had won the Battle of
Mollwitz, one of the most decisive actions of that time, from which
Frederick himself is said to have run away in sheer fright. General
Ziethen, perhaps the best of all modern cavalry commanders, was in his
fifty-eighth year when the Seven Years' War began, and he served through
it with eminent distinction, and most usefully to his sovereign. He
could not have exhibited more dash, if he had been but eight-and-twenty,
instead of eight-and-fifty, or sixty-five, as he was when peace was
made. Field-Marshal Keith, an officer of great ability, was sixty when
he fell at Hochkirchen, after a brilliant career.

American military history is favorable to old generals. Washington was
in his forty-fourth year when he assumed command of the Revolutionary
armies, and in his fiftieth when he took Yorktown. Wayne and Greene were
the only two of our young generals of the Revolution who showed decided
fitness for great commands. Had Hamilton served altogether in the field,
his would have been the highest military name of the war. The absurd
jealousies that deprived Schuyler of command, in 1777, alone prevented
him from standing next to Washington. He was close upon forty-four when,
he gave way to Gates, who was forty-nine. The military reputation of
both Schuyler and Hamilton has been most nobly maintained by their
living descendants. Washington was called to the command of the American
forces at sixty-six, when it was supposed that the French would attempt
to invade the United States, which shows that the Government of that day
had no prejudice against old generals. General Jackson's great Louisiana
campaign was conducted when he was nearly forty-eight, and he was, from
almost unintermitted illness, older in constitution than in years. Had
General Scott had means at his disposal, we should have been able to
point to a young American general equal to any who is mentioned in
history; but our poverty forbade him an opportunity in war worthy of his
genius. It "froze the genial current of his soul." As a veteran leader,
he was most brilliantly distinguished. He was in his sixty-first year
when he set out on his memorable Mexican campaign, which was an unbroken
series of grand operations and splendid victories, such as are seldom to
be found in the history of war. The weight of years had no effect on
that magnificent mind. Of him, as it was of Carnôt, it can be said that
he organized victory, and made it permanent. His deeds were all the
greater because of the feeble support he received from his Government.
Like Wellington, in some of his campaigns, he had to find within himself
the resources which were denied him by bad ministers. General Taylor was
in his sixty-second year when the Mexican War began, and in less than a
year he won the Battles of Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, Monterey, and
Buena Vista. He, too, was badly supported. The Secession War has been
conducted by elderly or middle-aged men. General Lee, whom the world
holds to have displayed the most ability in it, is about fifty-six.
General Rosecrans is forty-four, and General Grant forty-two. Stonewall
Jackson died at thirty-seven. General Banks is forty-eight, General
Hooker forty-five, General Beauregard forty-six, General Bragg
forty-nine, General Burnside forty, General Gillmore thirty-nine,
General Franklin forty-one, General Magruder fifty-three, General Meade
forty-eight, General Schuyler Hamilton forty-two, General Charles S.
Hamilton forty, and General Foster forty. General Lander, a man of
great promise, died in his fortieth year. General Kearney was killed at
forty-seven, and General Stevens at forty-five. General Sickles was in
his forty-first year when he was wounded at Gettysburg, and General Reno
was thirty-seven when he died so bravely at South Mountain. General
Pemberton lost Vicksburg at forty-five. General T.W. Sherman is
forty-six, and General W. T. Sherman forty-four. General McClellan was
in his thirty-fifth year when he assumed command at Washington in 1861.
General Lyon had not completed the first month of his forty-third year
when he fell at Wilson's Creek. General McDowell was in his forty-third
year when he failed at Bull Run, in consequence of the coming up of
General Joe Johnston, who was fifty-one. General Keyes is fifty-three,
General Kelley fifty-seven, General King forty, and General Pope
forty-one. General A.S. Johnston was fifty-nine when he was killed at
Shiloh. General Halleck is forty-eight. General Longstreet is forty. The
best of the Southern cavalry-leaders was General Ashby, who was killed
at thirty-eight. General Stuart is twenty-nine. On our side, General
Stanley is thirty, General Pleasonton forty, and General Averell about
thirty. General Phelps is fifty-one, General Polk fifty-eight, General
S. Cooper sixty-eight, General J. Cooper fifty-four, and General Blunt
thirty-eight. The list might be much extended, but very few young men
would be found in it,--or very few old men, either. The best of our
leaders are men who have either passed beyond middle life, or who may be
said to be in the enjoyment of that stage of existence. It is so, too,
with the Rebels. If the war does not afford many facts in support of the
position that old generals are very useful, neither does it afford many
to be quoted by those who hold that the history of heroism is the
history of youth.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE WRECK OF RIVERMOUTH.[E]

[1657.]


  Rivermouth Rocks are fair to see,
    By dawn or sunset shone across,
  When the ebb of the sea has left them free
    To dry their fringes of gold-green moss:
  For there the river comes winding down
  From salt sea-meadows and uplands brown,
  And waves on the outer rocks afoam
  Shout to its waters, "Welcome home!"

  And fair are the sunny isles in view
    East of the grisly Head of the Boar,
  And Agamenticus lifts its blue
    Disk of a cloud the woodlands o'er;
  And southerly, when the tide is down,
  'Twixt white sea-waves and sand-hills brown,
  The beach-birds dance and the gray gulls wheel
  Over a floor of burnished steel.

  Once, in the old Colonial days,
    Two hundred years ago and more,
  A boat sailed down through the winding ways
    Of Hampton river to that low shore,
  Full of a goodly company
  Sailing out on the summer sea,
  Veering to catch the land-breeze light,
  With the Boar to left and the Rocks to right.

  In Hampton meadows, where mowers laid
    Their scythes to the swaths of salted grass,
  "Ah, well-a-day! our hay must be made!"
    A young man sighed, who saw them pass.
  Loud laughed his fellows to see him stand
  Whetting his scythe with a listless hand,
  Hearing a voice in a far-off song,
  Watching a white hand beckoning long.

  "Fie on the witch!" cried a merry girl,
    As they rounded the point where Goody Cole
  Sat by her door with her wheel atwirl,
    A bent and blear-eyed poor old soul.
  "Oho!" she muttered, "ye're brave to-day!
  But I hear the little waves laugh and say,
  'The broth will be cold that waits at home;
  For it's one to go, but another to come!'"

  "She's curst," said the skipper; "speak her fair:
    I'm scary always to see her shake
  Her wicked head, with its wild gray hair,
    And nose like a hawk, and eyes like a snake."
  But merrily still, with laugh and shout,
  From Hampton river the boat sailed out,
  Till the huts and the flakes on Star seemed nigh,
  And they lost the scent of the pines of Rye.

  They dropped their lines in the lazy tide,
    Drawing up haddock and mottled cod;
  They saw not the Shadow that walked beside,
    They heard not the feet with silence shod.
  But thicker and thicker a hot mist grew,
  Shot by the lightnings through and through;
  And muffled growls, like the growl of a beast,
  Ran along the sky from west to east.

  Then the skipper looked from the darkening sea
    Up to the dimmed and wading sun,
  But he spake like a brave man cheerily,
    "Yet there is time for our homeward run."
  Veering and tacking, they backward wore;
  And just as a breath from the woods ashore
  Blew out to whisper of danger past,
  The wrath of the storm came down at last!

  The skipper hauled at the heavy sail:
    "God be our help!" he only cried,
  As the roaring gale, like the stroke of a flail,
    Smote the boat on its starboard side.
  The Shoalsmen looked, but saw alone
  Dark films of rain-cloud slantwise blown,
  Wild rocks lit up by the lightning's glare,
  The strife and torment of sea and air.

  Goody Cole looked out from her door:
    The Isles of Shoals were drowned and gone,
  Scarcely she saw the Head of the Boar
    Toss the foam from tusks of stone.
  She clasped her hands with a grip of pain,
  The tear on her cheek was not of rain:
  "They are lost," she muttered, "boat and crew!
  Lord, forgive me! my words were true!"

  Suddenly seaward swept the squall;
   The low sun smote through cloudy rack;
  The Shoals stood clear in the light, and all
    The trend of the coast lay hard and black.
  But far and wide as eye could reach,
  No life was seen upon wave or beach;
  The boat that went out at morning never
  Sailed back again into Hampton river.

  O mower, lean on thy bended snath,
    Look from the meadows green and low:
  The wind of the sea is a waft of death,
    The waves are singing a song of woe!
  By silent river, by moaning sea,
  Long and vain shall thy watching be:
  Never again shall the sweet voice call,
  Never the white hand rise and fall!

  O Rivermouth Rocks, how sad a sight
    Ye saw in the light of breaking day!
  Dead faces looking up cold and white
    From sand and sea-weed where they lay!
  The mad old witch-wife wailed and wept,
  And cursed the tide as it backward crept:
  "Crawl back, crawl back, blue water-snake!
  Leave your dead for the hearts that break!"

  Solemn it was in that old day
    In Hampton town and its log-built church,
  Where side by side the coffins lay
    And the mourners stood in aisle and porch.
  In the singing-seats young eyes were dim,
  The voices faltered that raised the hymn,
  And Father Dalton, grave and stern,
  Sobbed through his prayer and wept in turn.

  But his ancient colleague did not pray,
    Because of his sin at fourscore years:
  He stood apart, with the iron-gray
    Of his strong brows knitted to hide his tears.
  And a wretched woman, holding her breath
  In the awful presence of sin and death,
  Cowered and shrank, while her neighbors thronged
  To look on the dead her shame had wronged.

  Apart with them, like them forbid,
    Old Goody Cole looked drearily round,
  As, two by two, with their faces hid,
    The mourners walked to the burying-ground.
  She let the staff from her clasped hands fall:
  "Lord, forgive us! we're sinners all!"
  And the voice of the old man answered her:
  "Amen!" said Father Bachiler.

  So, as I sat upon Appledore
    In the calm of a closing summer day,
  And the broken lines of Hampton shore
    In purple mist of cloudland lay,
  The Rivermouth Rocks their story told;
  And waves aglow with sunset gold,
  Rising and breaking in steady chime,
  Beat the rhythm and kept the time.

  And the sunset paled, and warmed once more
    With a softer, tenderer after-glow;
  In the east was moon-rise, with boats off-shore
    And sails in the distance drifting slow.
  The beacon glimmered from Portsmouth bar,
  The White Isle kindled its great red star;
  And life and death in my old-time lay
  Mingled in peace like the night and day!

       *       *       *       *       *

THE SCHOOLMASTER'S STORY.


I was in the shop of my friend on the day of the great snow-storm, when
the plan was proposed which he mentions in the beginning of his story,
called "Pink and Blue," printed in this magazine in the month of May,
1861. Fears were entertained that some of the women might object. And
they did. My sister Fanny, Mrs. Maylie, said it was like being set in a
frame. Farmer Hill's wife hoped we shouldn't tell _exactly_ how much we
used to think of them, for "praise to the face was open disgrace." But
my wife, Mrs. Browne, thought the stories should be made as good as
possible, for praise could not hurt them so long as they knew
themselves, just what they were. It was suggested by some one, that, if
the married men told how they won their wives, there were a couple of
old bachelors belonging to our set who ought to tell how they came to be
without, which seemed very fair.

When the lot fell upon me, my wife laughed, and declared that our
affairs ran so crooked, she didn't believe I could tell a straight
story. But Fanny said _that_ would make it seem more like a book; the
puzzle to her was what I should call myself, seeing that I was neither
one thing nor another. It was finally agreed, however, that, as I had
taught school one winter, and that an important one, I should call mine
"The Schoolmaster's Story." The truth is, my own calling would not look
well at the head of an article, for I am by profession a loafer. For
this vocation, which was my own deliberate choice, I was well prepared,
having graduated, with a moderate degree of honor, from Cambridge
College. I know of no profession requiring for its complete enjoyment a
more thorough and varied preparation.

My sister Fanny and I were two poor orphans, brought up, fed, clothed,
and loved by our Aunt Huldah. If it had not been for her, I don't know
what we should have done. Our Aunt Huldah was a widow and a _manager_.
Nearly every person has among his acquaintances one individual, usually
a female, who is called _a good manager_. She knows what is to be done,
and who should do it,--picks out wives for the young men, husbands for
the maidens, and attends herself to the matter of bringing them
together. Sometimes these individuals become tyrannical, standing with
vials of wrath all ready to be poured forth upon the heads of the
unsubmissive, and it must be owned that our aunt was in this not wholly
unlike the rest; but then she was so good-natured, so reasonable, that,
although the aforesaid vials were often known to be well filled, yet her
kindness and good sense always kept the corks in.

I think she took us partly from love, and partly to show how children
ought to be managed. We got on admirably together. I was by no means a
fiery youth. I was amiable, fond of books, had soft, light hair, fair
complexion, a quiet, persevering way, and never _ran_ after the girls.
Taking all these things into consideration, my aunt determined that I
should go to college, and become an honor to the family.

Fanny, though not a bit like me, got along equally as well with the
reigning power. She was a smart, black-eyed maiden, full of life, and
had herself some of the managing blood in her veins. In fact, so bright
and so sly was my dear little sister, that she often succeeded in
managing the Grand Panjandra herself. I speak thus particularly of
Fanny, because, if it had not been for her, I might now have no story to
tell. I never, from childhood to manhood, worked myself into any tight
place, that her little scheming brain did not invent some way of getting
me out.

When my collegiate labors were nearly finished, our aunt was taken
_poor_. She was subject to these attacks, under which she always
resorted to the heroic treatment, retrenching and economizing with the
greatest zeal. This attack of hers was the primary cause of my taking a
winter school in the little village of Norway, about twenty miles from
home. I was perfectly willing to keep school; it seemed the easiest
thing in the world.

The night before leaving home, my aunt summoned me to her chamber. She
sat erect in her straight-backed chair, a tall, dark woman, in a
bombazine gown, with white muslin frill and turban. Her eyes were black
and deep. Her nose was rather above than below the usual height, and
eminently fitted to bear its spectacles. She was evidently a person who
thought before she acted, but who was sure to act after she had thought.

Good advice was what she wanted to give me. The world was a snare. The
Devil was always on the lookout, and everywhere in a minute. She read
considerable portions from the "Boston Recorder," after which she
dropped some hints about the marriage-state,--said she had noticed, with
pleasure, my prudence in not hurrying these matters, adding, that it was
much safer to choose a wife from among our own neighbors and friends
than to run the risk of marrying a stranger. No names were mentioned,
but I knew she was thinking of Alice, the postmaster's daughter, a fair
young maiden, soft in speech, quiet in manners, and constant at
meeting,--a maiden, in fact, of whom I had long stood in dread.

My school commenced the week after Thanksgiving. I had fancied myself
appearing among my scholars like a king surrounded by his subjects. But
these lofty notions soon melted down beneath the searching glances of
forty pairs of eyes. A sense of my incompetency came over me, and I felt
like saying,--"Young people, little children, what can I do for you, and
how shall I show you any good?"

The first thing I did was to take the names. Ah! in what school-record
of modern times could be found such a catalogue of the Christian
virtues? Think of mending pens for Faith and Prudence!--of teaching
arithmetic to Love, Hope, and Charity!--of imparting general knowledge
to Experience! There were three of this last name, and it was only after
a long _experience_ of my own that I learned that the first was called
"Pelly," the second, "Exy," and the third, "Sperrence." Penelope was
rendered "Pep."

It gave me peculiar sensations to find among my scholars so many large
girls. I have said that I had never been in the habit of running after
the girls, and I never had. I was one of those quiet young men who read
poetry, buy pictures and statues, and play the flute on still, moonlight
evenings. Not that I was indifferent to female charms, or let beauty
pass by unnoticed. In fact, I was keenly alive to the beautiful in all
its forms. I had seen, in the course of my life, a great many handsome
faces, which, in my quiet way, I had studied, when nobody was minding,
comparing beauties, or imagining alterations for the better, just as if
I had been studying a picture or a statue, and with no more fear of
being myself affected. Passing strange it was, that, exposed as I had
been, I should have remained so long unscathed. My time had not yet
come. But now dangers thickened around me, and I felt that Aunt Huldah
knew the world, when she said it was a _snare_. For, in glancing about
the room carelessly, while taking the names, I could not but perceive
that I was beset by perils on every side,--perils from which there
seemed no possible escape: for no sooner did I turn resolutely away from
a dove-like face in one corner than my eye was caught by a bright eye or
a sweet smile in another; and the admiring glance which with reluctance
I withdrew from a graceful figure was arrested by a well-shaped head or
a rosy cheek. One was almost a beauty, with her light curls and delicate
pink cheeks; another was quite such: her smile was bewitching, and her
eyes were roguish. But I soon found that there were other things to be
attended to besides picking out the prettiest flowers in my winter
bouquet.

I have intimated that my ideas regarding school-keeping were exceedingly
vague. Nevertheless, I had in the course of my studies picked out and
put together a system for the instruction and management of youth. This
system I now proceeded to apply.

It is curious, as we trace back the current of our lives, to discover
the multitude of whims, plans, and mighty resolves which lie wrecked
upon the shore. I cannot help smiling, as, in looking back upon my own
life-stream, I discern the remains of my precious system lying high and
dry among the rocks of that winter's experience. Yet I tried all ways to
make it go. I was like a boy with a new boat, who increases or lessens
his ballast, now tries her with mainsail, foresail, topsail, jib, flying
jib, and jibber jib, and now with bare poles,--_anything_ to make her
float. Each night I took my poor system home for repairs, and each
morning, full of hope, tried to launch it anew in my school-room. I have
always felt that I wronged those scholars, that I learned more than I
taught. I have no doubt of it.

I, of course, as was then the custom, boarded round; and this method of
obtaining nourishment, though savoring somewhat of the Arab or the
common beggar, I, on the whole, enjoyed. It gave me a much stronger
interest in the children, seeing them thus in their own homes, where was
so much love, so much solicitude for even the dullest of them. Besides
this, I came in contact with all sorts of curious people, found new
faces to study.

Another custom of the place I also fell in with, which was, to keep an
evening-school. All the schoolmasters had kept one from time immemorial.
This evening-school I really enjoyed. Plenty of charming girls, too big
or too busy to waste their daylight upon books, came from great
distances, bringing their brothers and their beaux, all intent upon
having a good time and getting on in their ciphering. Teaching them was
a pleasure, for they felt the need of knowledge. I feel bound to say,
however, that imparting knowledge was not my only pleasure. In intervals
of leisure, before or after school, or at recess, I found much that was
worthy attention. Seated at my desk, wrapped in my dignity, I watched,
with many a sidelong glance, the progress of rustic love-making. I only
mean by this, that from their general movements I constructed such
love-stories as seemed to me probable. I learned who went with whom, who
wished they could go with whom, who could and who couldn't, who did and
who didn't.

Did I not go into the business on my own account? That is by no means an
improper question. In fact, I might have expected it. Some have, no
doubt, considered it a settled thing that I fell in love with the
bright-eyed beauty, before mentioned, or with the pink-cheeked; but I
beg that such fancies may be brushed away, that all may be in readiness
to receive the true queen, who in due time will come to take possession
of her kingdom. For I will be honest with you, and not, like most
story-tellers, try to pull wool over your eyes all the way through. I
will say openly, that I did first see the girl who was afterwards my
wife in that cold little village of Norway. Cold it seems not to me now,
in the light of so many warm, sunshiny memories!

When my evening-school had been in operation a few weeks, I noticed, one
evening, at the end of the back-form on the girls' side a new face. The
owner of this new face was very quietly studying her book, a thin,
blue-covered book, Temple's Arithmetic. She was dressed in black,--not
fine, glossy black, but black that was gray, rusty, and well worn. A
very small silk handkerchief of the same color was drawn over her
shoulders and pinned where its two corners met her gown in front, making
a sort of triangle of whiteness,--some would say, "revealing a neck and
throat pure and white as a lily-leaf"; and they would say no more than
the truth, only I never like to put things in that way. Just so white
was her face. Her hair was black, soft, but not what the other girls
would have called smooth, or "slick." It was pulled away behind her
ears, and fixed up rather queerly in a great bunch behind, as if the
only aim were to get it out of the way. The upper part of her face was
the most striking,--the black eyebrows upon such a white, straight
forehead. I am rather particular in describing this new face,
because--well, perhaps because I remember it so distinctly. While I was
studying her as, I might perhaps say, a work of Art, she suddenly raised
her eyes, as people always do when they are watched. I looked away in a
hurry, though her eyes were just what I wanted to see more of, for they
were splendid eyes. "Splendid" is not the right word, though. Deep,
thoughtful, sorrowful, are the words which are floating about in my
mind. I wondered how she would look when animated, and watched, at
recess, for some of the others to talk to her.

But she seemed one by herself. While other girls chatted with their
beaux, or whispered wonderful secrets, she remained sitting alone, now
looking at her book, and now glancing around in a pitiful sort of way,
that made me feel like going to speak to her. In fact, as her teacher, I
was bound to do this, and, true to the promptings of duty, I walked
slowly down the alley. As I paused by her side, she glanced up in my
face. I never forgot that look. I might say that I never recovered from
the effects of it. I asked about her studies, and very willingly
explained a sum over which she had stumbled.

After this, she came every evening, and it usually happened that it was
most convenient for me to attend to her at recess. Helping her in her
sums was a pleasant thing to do, but in nothing was I more interested
than in the writing-exercise. I felt that I was indeed fortunate to be
in duty bound to follow the movement of her charming little hand across
the page, to teach her pretty fingers how to hold the pen; but then, if
pleasure and duty _would_ unite, how could I help it? Then I had a way,
all my own, of throwing looks sidelong at her face, while thus engaged;
but sometimes my eyes would get so entangled in her long lashes, that I
could hardly turn them away before she looked up.

Yet I never thought then of being in love with the girl. Marriage was a
subject upon which I had never seriously reflected. Much as I liked to
watch, to criticize pretty faces, I never had thought of taking one for
my own. I was like a good boy in a flower-garden, who looks about him
with delight, admiring each beautiful blossom, but plucking none. Not
that I meant to live a bachelor; for, whenever I looked forward,--an
indefinite number of years,--I invariably saw myself sitting by my own
fireside, with a gentle-faced woman making pinafores near me, a cradle
close by, and one or two chaps reading stories, or playing checkers with
beans and buttons. But this gentle maker of pinafores had never yet
assumed a tangible shape. She had only floated before me, in my lonely
moments, enveloped in mist, and far too indistinct for revealing the
color of the eyes and hair. So I could not be in love with Rachel,--her
name was Rachel Lowe,--only a sort of magnetism, as it would be called
in these days, drew my eyes constantly that way. I soon found, however,
that it was impossible to watch her face with that indifference with
which, as I have before stated, it had been my custom to regard female
beauty. Its peculiar expression puzzled me, and I kept trying to study
it out. Interesting, but dangerous study! The difficulties of
school-keeping are by no means fully appreciated.

One evening, after school, the young folks stopped to slide down-hill.
Rachel and a few little girls stood awhile, watching the sleds go by;
but it was cold standing still, and they soon moved homewards. I walked
along by the side of Rachel: this was the first time I ever went home
with her. I found she was living in the family of Squire Brewster, a
family in which I had not yet boarded. After this I frequently walked
home with her. Sometimes I would determine not to do so again, for I was
afraid I was getting--I didn't know where, but where I had never been
before; but when evening came, and I saw how handsome she looked, and
how all alone, I couldn't help it. It was not often I could get her to
talk much. She was bashful, different from any girl I had ever met. The
only friend she seemed to have was the young wife of the Doctor, Mrs.
James. The Doctor, she said, had attended her through a fever, and asked
no pay. His wife was kind, and lent her books to read.

I was boarding at that time with a poor widow-woman, and one night I
asked her about Rachel. She warmed up immediately, said Rachel Lowe was
a good girl and ought to be "sot by," and not slighted on her parents'
account.

"And who were her parents?" I asked.

"Why, when her father was a poor boy, the Squire thought he would take
him and bring him up to learnin'; but when he came to be a man grown
almost, he ran away to sea; and long afterwards we heard of his marryin'
some outlandish girl, half English, half French,--but Rachel's no worse
for that. After his wife died,--and, as far as I can find out, the way
he carried on was what killed her,--he started to bring Rachel here; but
he died on the passage, and she came with only a letter. I suppose he
thought the ones that had been kind to him would be kind to her; but,
you see, the Squire is a-livin' with his second wife, and she isn't the
woman the first Miss Brewster was. In time folks will come round, but
now they sort of look down upon her; for, you see, everybody knows who
her father was, and how he didn't do any credit to his bringin' up, and
nobody knows who her mother was, only that she was a furrener, which was
so much agin her. But you are goin' right from here to the Squire's; and
mebby, if you make of her, and let folks see that you set store by her,
they'll begin to open their eyes."

I thought I felt just like kissing the poor widow; anyway, I knew I felt
like kissing somebody. To be sure, the talk was all about Rachel, and it
might--But no matter; what difference does it make now who it was I
wanted to kiss forty or fifty years ago?

The next day I went to board at the Squire's. It was dark when I reached
the house; the candles were just being lighted. The Squire, a kindly old
man, met me in the porch and took my bundle. I followed him into the
kitchen. There something more than common seemed to be going on, for
chairs were being arranged in rows, and Mrs. Brewster was putting out of
sight every article suggestive of work. There was to be an evening
meeting. I watched the people as they came in, still and solemn. Not
many of the women wore bonnets. All who lived within a moderate distance
just stepped in with a little homespun blanket over the head, or a
patchwork cradle-quilt. I noticed Rachel when she entered and took her
seat upon the settle. It will only take a minute to tell what a settle
is, or, rather, was. If you should take a low wooden bench and add to it
a high back and ends, you would make a settle. It usually stood near the
fireplace, and was a most luxurious seat,--its high back protecting you
from cold draughts and keeping in the heat of the fire. It was now
shoved back against the wall. This neighborhood-gathering was called a
conference-meeting, being carried on by the brethren. I liked to hear
them speak, because they were so much in earnest. The exercises closed
with singing "Old Hundred." I joined at first, but soon there fell upon
my ear such sweet strains from the other side of the room that I was
glad to stop and listen. They came from the settle. It was Rachel,
singing counter. Only those who have heard it know what counter is, and
how particularly beautiful it is in "Old Hundred." I think it has
already been intimated that I was somewhat poetical. It will not,
therefore, be considered strange, that, when I heard those clear tones,
rising high above the harsher ones around, above the grating bass of the
brethren and the cracked voices of elderly females, I thought of summer
days in the woods, when I had listened to the notes of the robin amid a
chorus of locusts and grasshoppers.

Squire Brewster treated Rachel kindly; but women make the home, and Mrs.
Brewster was a hard woman. The neighbors said she was close, and would
have more of a cat than her skin. Miss Sarah had been out of town to
school, and was proud. Sam, the grown-up son, was coarse, but just as
proud as his sister. I disliked the way he looked at Rachel. Her
position in the family I soon understood. She was there to take the
drudgery from Mrs. Brewster, to be ordered about by Miss Sarah,
tormented by the younger children, and teased, if not insulted, by Sam.
What puzzled me was her manner towards them. She spoke but seldom, and,
it seemed to me, had a way of looking _down_ upon these people, who were
so bent upon making her look _up_ to them. The cross looks and words
seemed not to hit her. Her deep, dark eyes appeared as if they were
looking away beyond the scenes around her. I was very glad to see,
however, that she could notice Sam enough to avoid him; for to that
young man I had taken a dislike, and not, as it turned, without reason.

One evening, during my second week at the Brewsters', I sat long at my
chamber-window, watching the fading twilight, the growing moonlight, and
the steady snow-light. Presently I saw Rachel come out to take in the
clothes. It seemed just right that she should appear then, for in her
face were all three,--the shadowy twilight, the soft moonlight, and the
white snow-light.

She wore a little shawl, crossed in front, and tied behind at the waist,
and over her head a bright-colored blanket, just pinned under the chin.
This exposed her face, and while I watched it, as it showed front-view
or profile, not knowing which I liked best, admiring, meanwhile, the
grace with which she reached up, where the line was high, sometimes
springing from the ground, I saw Sam approaching, very slowly and
softly, from behind. When quite near, watching his opportunity, he
seized her by the waist. He was going to kiss her. I started up, as if
to do something, but there was nothing to be done. With a quick motion
she slid from his grasp, stepped back, and looked him in the face. Not a
word fell from her lips, only her silence spoke. "I despise you! There
is nothing in you that words can reach!" was the speech which I felt in
my heart she was making, though her lips never moved. Other things, too,
I felt in my heart,--rather perplexing, agitating, but still pleasing
sensations, which I did not exactly feel like analyzing. One of the
children came out to take hold one side of the basket, and Sam walked
away.

I went down soon after and look my favorite seat upon the settle, which
was then in its own place by the fire. The children were in bed, the
older ones had gone to singing-school, and Mrs. Brewster was at an
evening-meeting. The Squire was at home with his rheumatism.

I liked a nice chat with the Squire. He was a great reader, and
delighted to draw me into long talks, political or theological. My
remarks on this particular evening would have been more brilliant, had
not Rachel been sprinkling and folding clothes at the back of the room.
The Squire, in his roundabout, came exactly between us, so that, in
looking up to answer his questions, I could not help seeing a white arm
with the sleeve rolled above the elbow, could not help watching the
drops of water, as she shook them from her fingers. I wondered how it
was, that, while working so hard, her hands should be so white. My
sister Fanny told me, long afterwards, that some girls always have white
hands, no matter how hard they work.

This question interested me more than the political ones raised by the
Squire, and I became aware that my answers were getting wild, by his
eying me over his spectacles. Rachel finished the clothes, and seated
herself, with her knitting-work, at the opposite corner of the
fireplace. I changed to the other end of the settle: sitting long in one
position is tiresome. She was knitting a gray woollen stocking. I think
she must have been "setting the heel," for she kept counting the
stitches. I had often noticed Fanny doing the same thing, at this
turning-point in the progress of a stocking; but then it never took her
half as long. After knitting so many feet of leg, though, any change
must have been pleasant.

A mug of cider stood near one andiron; leaning against the other was a
flat stone,--the Squire's "Simon." It would soon be needed, for he was
already nodding,--nodding and brightening up,--nodding and brightening
up. While he slept, the room was still, unless the fire snapped, or a
brand fell down. I said within myself, "This is a pleasant time! It is
good to be here!" That cozy settle, that glowing fire, that good old
man, that pure-hearted girl,--how distinctly do they now rise before me!
It seems such a little, little while ago! For I feel young. I like to be
with young folks; I like what they like. Yet deep lines are set in my
forehead, the veins stand out upon my hands, and my shadow is the shadow
of a stooping old man; and when, from frequent weariness, I rest my head
on my hand, the fingers clasp only smoothness, or, at best, but a few
scattered locks,--_wisps_, I might as well say. If ever I took pride in
anything, it was in my fine head of hair. Well, what matters it? Since
_heart_ of youth is left me, I'll never mind the _head_.

Many writers speak well of age, and it certainly is not without its
advantages, meeting everywhere, as it does, with respect and indulgence.
Neither is it, so the books say, without its own peculiar beauty. An old
man leaning upon his staff, with white locks streaming in the wind, they
call a picturesque object. All this may be; still, I have tried both,
and must say that my own leaning is towards youth.

Remembering the desire of the poor widow, that Rachel should be "made
of," I continued to walk home with her from evening-school, and to pay
her many little attentions, even after I had left the Squire's. The
widow was right in saying, that, when folks saw that I "set store" by
her, they would open their eyes. They did,--in wonder that "the
schoolmaster should be so attentive to Rachel Lowe!" We were
"town-talk." I often, in the school-house entry, overheard the scholars
joking about us; and once I saw them slyly writing our names together on
the bricks of the fireplace. Everybody was on the look-out for what
might happen.

One evening, in school-time, I stood a long while leaning over her desk,
working out for her a difficult sum. On observing me change my position,
to rest myself, she, very naturally, and almost unconsciously, moved for
me to sit down, and I took a seat beside her, going on, all the while,
with my ciphering. Happening to look up suddenly, I saw that half the
school were watching us. I kept my seat with calmness, though I knew I
turned red. I glanced at Rachel, and really pitied her, she looked so
distressed, so conscious. That night she hurried home before I had put
away my books, and for several evenings did not appear.

But if she could do without me, I could not do without her. I missed her
face there at the end of the back-seat. I missed the walk home with her:
I had grown to depend upon it. She was just getting willing to talk, and
in what she said and the way she said it, in the tone of her voice and
in her whole manner, there was something to me extremely bewitching. She
had been strangely brought up, was familiar with books, but, having
received no regular education, fancied herself ignorant, and different
from everybody.

Finding that she still kept away from the school, I resolved one night
to call at the Squire's. It was some time after dark when I reached
there; and as I stood in the porch, brushing the snow from my boots, I
became aware of loud talking in the kitchen. Poor Rachel! both Mrs.
Brewster and Sarah were upon her, laughing and sneering about her
"setting her cap" for the schoolmaster, and accusing her of trying to
get him to come home with her, of moving for him to sit down by her
side! Once I heard Rachel's voice,--"Oh, please don't talk so! I don't
do as you say. It is dreadful for you to talk so!" I judged it better to
defer my call, and walked slowly along the road. It was not very cold,
and I sat down upon the stone wall. I sat down to think. Presently
Rachel herself hurried by, carrying a pitcher. She was bound on some
errand up the road. I called out,--

"Rachel, stop!"

She turned, in affright, and, upon seeing me, hurried the more. But I
overtook her, and placed her arm within mine in a moment, saying,--

"Rachel, you are not afraid of me, I hope!"

"Oh, no, Sir! no, indeed!" she exclaimed.

"And yet you run away from me."

She made no answer.

"Rachel," I said, at last, "I wish you would talk to me freely. I wish
you would tell what troubles you."

She hesitated a moment; and when, at last, she spoke, her answer rather
surprised me.

"I ought not to be so weak, I know," she replied; "but it is so hard to
stand all alone, to live my life just right, that sometimes I get
discouraged."

I had expected complaints of ill treatment, but found her blaming no one
but herself.

"And who said you must stand alone?" I asked.

"That was one of the things my mother used to say."

"And what other things did she say?"

"Oh, Mr. Browne," she replied, "I wish I could tell you about my mother!
But I can't talk; I am too ignorant; I don't know how to say it. When
she was alive," she continued, speaking very slowly, "I never knew how
good she was; but now her words keep coming back to me. Sometimes I
think she whispers them,--for she is an angel, and you know the hymn
says,

  'There are angels hovering round.'

When we sing,

  'Ye holy throng of angels bright,'

I always sing to her, for I know she is listening."

Here she stopped suddenly, as if frightened that she had said so much.
The house to which she was going was now close by. I waited for her to
come out, and walked back with her towards home. After proceeding a
little way in silence, I said, abruptly,--

"Rachel, do they treat you well at the house yonder?"

She seemed reluctant to answer, but said, at last,--

"Not very well."

"Then, why stay? Why not find some other home?"

"I don't think it is time yet," she replied.

"I don't understand you. I wish--Rachel, can't you make a friend of me,
since you have no other?"

"I will tell you as well as I can," she replied, "what my mother used to
say. She said we must act rightly."

"That is true," I replied; "and what else did she say?"

"She said, that _that_ would only be the outside life, but the inside
life must be right too, must be pure and strong, and that the way to
make it pure and strong was to learn to _bear_."

"Still," I urged, "I wish you would find a better home. You cannot learn
to bear any more patiently than you do."

She shook her head.

"That shows that you don't know," she answered. "It seems to me right to
remain. Why, you know they can't hurt me any. Suppose they scold me
when I am not to blame, and my temper rises,--for I am very
quick-tempered"--

"Oh, no, Rachel!"

"Oh, yes, Mr. Browne! Suppose my temper rises, and I put it down, and
keep myself pleasant, do I not do myself good? And thinking about it in
this way, is not their unkindness a benefit to me,--to the real me,--to
the soul of Rachel Lowe?"

I hardly knew what to say. Somehow, she seemed away up above me, while I
found that I had, in common with the Brewsters, only in a different way,
taken for granted my own superiority.

"All this may be true," I remarked, after a pause, "but it is not the
common way of viewing things."

"Perhaps not," she answered. "My mother was not like other people. My
father was a strong man, but he looked _up_ to her, and he loved her;
but he killed her at last,--with his conduct, he killed her. But when
she was dead, he grew crazy with grief, he loved her so. He talked about
her always,--talked in an absent, dreamy way about her goodness, her
beauty, her white hands, her long hair. Sometimes he would seem to be
whispering with her, and would say, softly,--'Oh, yes! I'll take care of
Rachel! pretty Rachel! your Rachel!'"

I longed to have her go on; but we had now reached the bars, and she was
not willing to walk farther.

"I have been talking a great deal about myself," she said; "but you know
you kept asking me questions."

"Yes, Rachel, I know I kept asking you questions. Do you care? I may
wish to ask you others."

"Oh, no," she replied; "but I could not answer many questions. I have
only a few thoughts, and know very little."

I watched her into the house, and then walked slowly homewards,
thinking, all the way, of this strange young girl, striving thus to
stand alone, working out her own salvation. I passed a pleasant night,
half sleeping, half waking, having always before my eyes that white
face, earnest and beautiful, as it looked up to me in the winter
starlight, and in my ears her words, "Is not their unkindness a benefit
to me,--to the real me,--to the soul of Rachel Lowe?"

But spring came; my school drew to a close; and I began to think of
home, Aunt Huldah, and Fanny. I wished that my sister could see Rachel.
I knew she would appreciate her, for there was depth in Fanny, with all
her liveliness. Sometimes I imagined, just imagined, myself married to
Rachel. But then there was Aunt Huldah,--what would she say to a
foreigner? And I was dependent upon Aunt Huldah. Besides, how did I know
that Rachel would have me? Was I equal to her? How worthless seemed my
little stock of book-learning by the side of that heart-wisdom which she
had coined, as it were, from her own sorrow!

My last day came, and I had not spoken. In fact, we latterly had both
grown silent. I was to leave in the afternoon stage. I gave the driver
my trunk, telling him to call for me at the Squire's,--for I must bid
Rachel good-bye, and in some way let her know how I felt towards her. As
I drew near the house, I saw that she was drawing water. I stepped
quickly towards the well, but Sam appeared just then, and I could not
say one word. She walked into the house. I went behind with the
water-pail, and Sam followed us into the porch. Rachel was going
up-stairs, but I took her hand to bid her good-bye. Mrs. Brewster and
Sarah were in the kitchen, watching. "Quite a love-scene!" I heard them
whisper. "I do believe he'll marry her!"

Now, although I was by nature quiet, yet I _could_ be roused. Bidding
good-bye to Rachel had stirred the very depths of my nature. I longed to
take her in my arms, and bear her away to my own quiet home. And when,
instead of this, I thought of the life to which I must leave her, it
needed but those sneering whispers to make me speak out,--and I did
speak out. Taking her by the hand, I stepped quickly forward, and stood
before them.

"And so I _will_ marry her!" I exclaimed. "If she will accept me, I
shall be _proud_ to marry her!"

"Rachel," said I, turning towards her, "this is strange wooing; but
before these people I ask, Will you be my wife?"

The astonished spectators of our love-scene looked on in dismay.

"Mr. Browne!" exclaimed Mrs. Brewster, "do you know what you are doing?
I have no ill-will to the girl; but I feel it my duty to tell you who
and what she is."

"I know what Rachel Lowe is, Madam!" I cried, almost fiercely; "you
don't,--you can't!"

Then, turning to the trembling girl, I said again,--

"Rachel, say, _will_ you be my wife?"

At this moment Sam came forward. His face was pale, and he trembled.

"No, Rachel," said he, "don't be his wife! Be mine! I haven't treated
you right, I know I haven't; but I love you, you don't know how much!
The very way you have tried to keep me off has made me love you!"

"Sam! stop!" cried his mother, in a rage. "What do you mean? You _know_
you won't marry that girl!"

"Mother," exclaimed Sam, "you don't know anything about her! She is
worth every other girl in the place, and handsomer than all of them put
together!"

"Sam!" began Miss Sarah.

"Now, Sarah, you stop!" cried he. "I've begun, and now I'll _tell_. At
first I teased her for fun. Then I watched her to see how she bore
everything so well. And while I was watching, I--before I knew it--I
began to love her. You may talk, if you want to; but I shall never _be_
anybody, if she won't have me!"

"Stage coming!" said a little boy, running in.

I took Rachel by the hand, and drew her with me into the porch.

"Don't promise to marry him!" cried Sam, as we passed through the
door-way. "But she will,--I know she will!" he added, as I closed the
door.

He spoke in a pitiful tone, and his voice trembled. I was surprised that
he showed so much feeling.

"Rachel," said I, as soon as we were alone, "won't you answer me now?
You must know how much I love you. Will you be my wife?"

"Oh, Mr. Browne, I cannot! I cannot!" she whispered.

I was silent, for my fears came uppermost. Pressing one hand to my
forehead, I thought of a thousand things in a moment. Nothing seemed
more probable than that she should already have a lover across the sea.
Seeing my distress, she spoke.

"Don't think, Mr. Browne," she began, earnestly, "that it is because I
do not"--

There she stopped. I gazed eagerly in her face. It was strangely
agitated. I should hardly have known my calm, white-faced Rachel. Just
then I heard the stage stop at the bars.

"Oh, Rachel!" I cried, "go on! What mustn't I think? What shall I
think?"

"Don't think me ungrateful,--you have been so kind," she said, softly.

"And is that all?" I asked.

"Stage ready!" called out the driver.

I opened the door, to show that I was coming; then, taking her hand, I
said,--

"Good bye, Rachel! And so--you can't love me!"

An expression of pain crossed her face. She leaned against the wall, but
did not speak.

"Hurry up there!" shouted the driver.

"Yes, yes!" I cried, impatiently.

"If you can't speak," I went on to Rachel, "press my hand, if you can
love me,--now, for I am going. Good bye!"

She did not press my hand, and I could not go.

"You can't say you love me," I cried; "then say you don't. Anything
rather than this doubt."

"Oh, Mr. Browne!" she replied, at last, "I can't say anything--but--good
bye!"

"Good bye, then," I said, sadly. "But shall you still live here?"

"Oh, no!" she exclaimed, earnestly; "you can't think that I"--

Here she stopped, and glanced towards the kitchen-door.

"No," said I, "I won't think it. But where will you stay?"

"With Mrs. James. You know her. I have already spoken with her."

The tramp of the driver was now heard, approaching.

"Any passenger here bound for Boston?"

"Yes, Sir," I answered, and with one more whispered good-bye, one wring
of the hand, I passed out, gave my bundle to the driver, and entered the
coach.

What a ride home that was! What a half-day of doubting, hoping,
despairing! I had not before realized how sure I had been of her
accepting me; and now that I felt how much I loved her, and thought of
the many causes which might separate us, I could not but say over in my
heart the sorrowful words of poor Sam,--"I shall never _be_ anybody, if
she won't have me." Still, though not accepted, I could not feel
refused; for what was it I read in her face? why so agitated? That she
struggled with some strong feeling was evident. The remembrance,
perhaps, of a former love.

In this tumult, this miserable condition, I reached home, where,
spreading my old calmness over my new agitation, I received, as best I
might, the joyful greeting of Fanny, the heartfelt welcome of Aunt
Huldah. I tried hard to be my own old self, and could not but hope that
even my sharp-eyed sister was blinded. But no sooner had I entered my
room for the night, no sooner had I thrown myself into my deep-cushioned
arm-chair, than this lively sprite entered, on her way to bed. She
seated herself on the trunk close by me, laid her hand upon my arm, and
said,--

"What is it, Charley?"

"What, Fanny?" I asked.

"Now, Charley," said she, "you might as well speak out at once. Why was
I left, when all the rest were taken, but that you might have at least
_one_ that you loved to tell your troubles to? Come, now! Take off that
manner of yours; you might as well, for I can see right through it. You
will feel better to let everything out,--and then, who knows but I might
help you?"

Sure enough. It was strange, considering what Fanny had always been to
me, that this had not occurred to my own mind. How natural it seemed now
to tell her all about it! What a relief it would be! But how should I
begin? I shrank from it. I began to come round to my first position. It
seemed as if the corner of my heart which held Rachel was a holy of
holies, too sacred to be entered even by my dear, good sister. While I
was thinking, she watched my face.

"Ah!" said she, "I see you don't know how to begin, and that I must both
listen and talk. Give me your hand. Haven't I got gypsy eyes? I will
tell your fortune."

Dear little bright-faced Fanny! I smiled a real smile when she took my
hand.

"It is about a girl?" she said, half inquiringly.

I colored, though it was only Fanny, and nodded,--

"Yes."

"You love the girl?" she continued, after a pause.

"I _do_ love the girl!" I said, earnestly,--for, now that the curtain
was lifted, she might see all she chose.

"And she loves you?"

"No,--I think so,--I don't know," was my satisfactory reply.

"But why don't you ask her?"

"I _have_ asked her."

"And what did she say? I wish, Charley, you would begin at the beginning
and tell me all about it. How can I help you, if I don't know?"

I was glad enough to do it. I began at the beginning, and told all there
was to tell. It was not much,--for the beauty, the goodness, the
patience of Rachel could not be told. When all was over, she said,--

"I am glad you have told me, for I can make you easy on one point. She
loves you. Ah, I can see! Women can always see, but men are stupid. Your
declaration was too sudden. She might have thought you were forced into
it. She is too high-minded to take advantage of a moment when your
feelings were all excited. Wait awhile. Let her see that you do not
change, and she will give you just such an answer as you will like to
hear. Why, Charley, I like her better for not accepting you than for
anything you have told about her."

"Well, Fanny," I said, half sighing, "it may be so,--I hope it may be
so; but if it does turn out as you say, how shall we manage about Aunt
Huldah? You know how she feels; and then there is Alice."

"What a brother you are!" exclaimed Fanny. "No sooner do I get you out
of one difficulty than you go beating against another! Perhaps _I_
shan't like her; then how will you manage about _me_? It is not every
girl I will take for a sister! And as for Alice, do you think she is
waiting for you all this time, vain man? She's got another beau. But
now," she went on, as soon as she could stop laughing, "go to bed, and
sleep easy, knowing that Rachel loves you, for I have said it. She loves
you too well to take you at your word. I hope she isn't too good for
you. I will think it all over, and see what can be done. Good night!
Kiss me now for what I have told you, just as you would Rachel, if she
had told you herself."

And I did, almost.

The next afternoon Fanny and I went out for a long walk. Aunt Huldah
encouraged our going, for she was coloring, and wanted from the store
both indigo and alum.

"Do you know the person with whom Rachel is staying?" asked Fanny, as
soon as we were fairly started.

"Mrs. James? Yes, she is a nice young woman."

"Do you think Rachel would like to learn the milliner's trade? It would
be a good thing for her."

"So it would; but where?"

"Does she know much of your friends, of how you are situated?"

"No. In the few hours we were together I was too much occupied in
drawing her out to speak of my own affairs."

"I suppose she knows where you live?"

"I don't know; I think, if I spoke of any place, it was Cambridge,--I
hailed from there."

"Well," said Fanny, thoughtfully, "perhaps it will make no difference.
Anyway, it will do to try it. There are many Brownes. Besides, Aunt
Huldah will be different. She will be Sprague, I shall be only Fanny,
and Charley will be Charley."

"My dear Fanny!" I exclaimed, "what _are_ you saying?"

"Why, you see, buddy,"--she often called me "buddy" for
"brother,"--"that, if Rachel loves you, and you love her, you will
_have_ each other. If Aunt Huldah is angry, and won't give you any of
her money, still you will be married, even if you both have to work by
the day. Does this seem clear?"

I laughed, and said,--

"Very,--and right, too."

"Still," she went on, "it will be better for all concerned to have Aunt
Huldah like her. Don't you remember that one summer a young girl from
the milliner's boarded with us, and helped us, to pay her board?"

"Capital!" I said. "But can you manage it?"

"I think I can. Mrs. Sampson is, I know, wanting a girl for the busy
season."

"But Rachel wouldn't come here,--to my home!"

"She need not know it is your home. I will write to Mrs. James, and tell
her all about it,--tell why I want Rachel here, and what a good
situation it will be for her at Mrs. Sampson's. She can find out whether
the plan is pleasing to her; and if it is, she can herself make all the
arrangements. Of course I shall charge her not to tell. Then, when
everything is settled, I can just say to the milliner that we should
like to make the same little arrangement that we did before."

"And she live here with you, with Aunt Huldah?"

"Why not? She needn't know that Mrs. Huldah Sprague is your aunt, or
that this is your home."

"But she would find it out some way. People calling would mention me.
Aunt herself would."

"I know it," said Fanny, not quite so hopefully; "and that is the weak
point of my plan. But then, you know, we are Charley and Fanny to
everybody. _She_ only thinks of you as Mr. Browne. Anyway, something
will be gained. I shall see her, and decide about liking her, which is
quite important; and it will be well for her to have the situation, even
if nothing else comes of it. I don't see any harm our scheme can do; do
you, Charley?"

"No,--no harm; but still, things don't look--exactly clear."

"Of course not; it is not to be expected. I have read in books that
lovers have always a mist before their eyes. Mine are clear yet; and I
will tell you what to do,--or, rather, what not to do. Don't write her
from here; wait till you are in Cambridge."

By this time we reached the house. The moment we entered, Aunt Huldah
stretched out her hand for the dye-stuff. We had forgotten all about it!

Those few days at home were pleasant. Aunt Huldah was unusually kind. It
was such a satisfaction to her to know that I had kept a school,--to
think that some of her own pluck was hid beneath my quiet seeming. She
proposed my becoming a lawyer, to which I made no objection,--for I knew
I could make a _dumb_ lawyer, one of the kind who only sit and write.

I wrote to Rachel from Cambridge, and she answered my letter. It was
like herself. "How very kind you have been," she wrote, "to me, a poor
stranger-girl! If I knew how to write, I would try to let you know how
much I feel it. I can't understand your wanting to marry a girl like me.
I know so little, _am_ so little. I hope it will not offend you, but I
think I ought to say, even if it does, that you must not write any more.
Sometime you will thank me, in your heart, for not doing as you want me
to now."

I saw that I had indeed a noble nature to deal with. Here was a girl,
all alone in the world, rejecting the sweetest offering that could be
made to a friendless one,--a loving heart,--lest that heart should be
made to suffer on her account! Of course I kept on writing, though my
letters were not answered. I sent her letter to Fanny, who wrote me to
keep up good courage, for she had already put her irons in the
fire,--that, although now fully convinced that Rachel was too good for
me, she had herself begun to love her, and was at work on her own
account.

I always kept Fanny's letters. Here is a part of one I received after
having been a few weeks from home:--

"I have just got my answer from Mrs. James. She is just the woman to
help us along. Rachel wants to come! I have spoken to Aunt Huldah. It is
too bad, but I had to be a bit of a hypocrite, to hint that I was rather
poorly, and how nice it would be to have a little help. She had just got
in a new piece to weave, and so was quite ready to take up with my plan.
I shall get well as soon as it will do, for she seems anxious. Aunt has
a stiff way, I know, but there's a warm corner somewhere in her heart,
and we are in it, and you know there's always room for one more."

It was a week, and more, before I got another letter from my scheming
sister. It began this way:--

"Your Rachel is a beauty! Just as sweet and modest as she can be! She is
sitting at the end-window of my room, watching the vessels. I am writing
at the front-window. She has just looked at me. What eyes she has! If
she _only_ knew whom I was writing to! When I see you, I shall tell you
the particulars. But don't come posting home now, and spoil everything.
You shall hear all that is necessary for you to know."

Fanny need not have cautioned me about coming home. It was happiness
enough then to think of Rachel sitting in my sister's room,--of Aunt
Huldah's keen eyes watching her daily life.

"My plan works," writes Fanny, a week afterwards. "Aunt seems to take a
liking to Rachel, which I, if anything, rather discourage, thinking she
will be more likely to stick to it. Rachel is a sister after my own
heart. I do like those people who, while they are so steady and calm,
show by their eyes and the tone of the voice what warm, delicate
feelings they are keeping to themselves! She is one of the real good
kind! What a way she has with her!--I saw her to-day, when she received
a letter from you. It came in one from Mrs. James. I was making believe
read, but peeped at her sideways, just as I have seen you do at the
girls in meeting-time. She slipped yours into her pocket, with such a
blush,--then looked up, sort of scared, to see if I noticed anything;
but I was reading my book. Then she stepped quickly out of the room, and
I saw her, a moment after, go through the garden into the apple-orchard,
and along the path to the low-branching apple-tree, to read it all
alone."

This tree I knew well. It was an irregular old apple-tree, one of whose
branches formed of itself a nice seat, where Fanny and I had often sat
from childhood up.

Afterwards she writes,--

"You have sent Rachel a ring,--a pearl ring; you didn't tell me, but I
know. I have seen her kiss it. (Does this please you?) I happened to
find it yesterday, while rummaging her box for the buttonhole scissors.
(She sent me there.) Said I,--'Oh, what a pretty ring! Why don't you
wear it?' I never thought till I had spoken; but then I knew in a
minute, by her looking so red. She said she'd a reason for thinking it
would not be quite right to wear it,--said perhaps she would tell
sometime. It was last night I saw her kiss it, when she thought I was
asleep,--we sleep in the same room. She tried it on her finger, but took
it right off again, sighing, and looking so sad that I don't know what I
should have done, had I not known how it was all coming out right pretty
soon.--Aunt Huldah is completely entangled in my web. She has come into
it with her sharp eyes wide open! She likes Rachel,--says she always
knows where to _take hold_, and makes no fuss about doing things. She
gets her to read the chapter, because she says she likes the sound of
her voice. There is not only _sound_, but _feeling_ in her voice, and
that is what aunt means; but you know she never says _all_ she
means,--she isn't one of the kind. Rachel is always doing little things
for her, and bringing home bunches of sweet-fern and everlasting. Even
if my plan upsets now, much will be gained,--for aunt can't get back her
liking, I have found a dear friend, and Rachel a good place. Your name
has been mentioned, but only as Charley. I am in daily fear that aunt
will allude to your school, though, to be sure, she is not at all
communicative, (girls having brothers in college should use a big word
now and then,) but we are getting so well acquainted that I begin to
shake in my shoes. But the mornings are busy, the noons are short, and
you know aunt always goes to bed with the hens. My dread is of
_callers_,--not just the neighbors running in, but the _regulars_. It is
so natural for them to say, 'How is your nephew?'--not that they care
for you, except as being something to talk about."

Soon after, came the following:--

"Charley, my boy, what I feared has come to pass! Last night our new
young minister called. He is a good young man, I know, but so stiff! Not
too stiff, though, to take a good look at Rachel. We all sat up straight
in our chairs. His eyes were deep and black, his face pale and solemn.
He was all in black, but just the white about his throat. When the
weather, the prospects of the farmers, and of the church, were all over
with, then came an awful pause. _Then_ it was that I began to shiver,
and that the mischief was done. 'Mrs. Sprague.' he began, 'I understand
you have a nephew, not now at home, who taught school last winter in the
little village of Norway.' You may guess the rest. There was a long talk
about you. Rachel hasn't said a word, but I see by her face that she is
laying some desperate plan. Now, Charley, is your time! Hurry home! Come
and spend next Sunday. Aunt spoke of your coming in four weeks, but I
shall look for you next Saturday night. She gets through work earlier
then. The stage reaches here about sunset. Stop at the tavern, and run
home over the hills. You will come out behind the orchard, and Rachel
and I will be sitting on the branch of the low apple-tree."

Now I had been getting uneasy for some time. All this while I had been
living on Fanny's letters. Now I wanted more. It was much to know that
Rachel loved me, but I longed to hear her say so. I depended upon her.
She seemed already a part of myself. My shadowy pinafore-maker had
assumed a living form of beauty, and was already more to me than I had
ever imagined woman could be to man, than one soul could be to another.
I had always, in common with other men, considered myself as an oak
destined in the course of Nature to support some clinging vine; but, if
I were an oak-tree, she was another, with an infinitude more of grace
and beauty.

As may be supposed, I required no urging to take the Saturday's stage
for home. We arrived at sunset. I made for the hills with all speed,
rushing through bushes and briers, leaping brooks at a bound, until I
came out just behind the orchard. There I paused. My happiness seemed so
near that I would fain enjoy, before grasping it. I walked softly along
under the trees, until I came in sight of two girls sitting with their
arms around each other's waists upon the low branch of the apple-tree.
There was just room for two. The branch, after running parallel with the
ground for a little way, took a sudden turn upwards; and to this natural
seat I had myself, in my younger days, added a back of rough branches. I
came towards them, from behind, and hid myself awhile behind the trunk
of a tree. Fanny was making Rachel talk, making her laugh, in spite of
herself, as I could well see. Then she began to play with her dark hair,
twining it prettily about her head, and twisting among it damask roses
with their buds,--for it was June, and our damask rose-bush was then
always in full bloom.

If Rachel had been beautiful in her rusty black dress, what could I say
of her now? She wore a gown of pink gingham, made after the fashion of
the day, short-waisted and low in the neck, with a--finishing-off--of
white muslin or lace, edged with a tucker. There was color in her
cheeks, and added to this was the glow from the roses, and from the pink
gown. When she smiled, her mouth was beautiful. I had not been used to
seeing her smile. As she threw her arm over the back of the seat, in
turning her face towards Fanny, laughing as I had never before seen her
laugh, I was so bewildered by the beauty of her face and figure that I
forgot my caution, and made a hasty step towards her. The grass was
soft, but they heard the noise and turned full upon me.

"Why, Charley! you dear boy!" exclaimed Fanny; and she came running up,
throwing both arms around my neck.

I kissed her; and then she drew me towards Rachel, who stood, like one
in despair, trembling, blushing, almost weeping.

"Charley," cried Fanny, roguishly, "kiss me, kiss my friend. This is my
friend. Won't you kiss her, too?"

"With pleasure," I answered, with too much of deep feeling to laugh.
"Rachel, I always mind Fanny; you will not, then, think it strange, if
I"--

I cannot finish the sentence on paper, because it had not a grammatical
ending. I kept hold of Rachel's hand, thus adding to her
distress,--telling her, all the while, how good it was to see her, and
to see her there. She tried to withdraw her hand, tried to speak, tried
to keep silent, and at last burst out with,--

"Oh, Fanny! do tell him that I didn't know,--that I had no idea,--that
you asked me,--that you never told me!"

"Charley," said Fanny, laughing, "did you ever know me to tell a lie? To
my certain knowledge, this young woman came here to board, expecting to
find nothing worse than Aunt Huldah and myself; and it was at my
suggestion she came."

Then taking Rachel by the hand, she said,--

"Be easy, my dear child. You need not feel so pained. Charley loves you,
and you love him, and we all love one another. Charley is a dear boy,
and you mustn't plague him. I will tell you all about it, dear. When
Charley came home, and I made him tell me about you, I know, from what
he said, that you were--But I won't praise you to your face. Hasn't
Charley seen plenty of girls, handsome girls, educated, accomplished?
And haven't I watched him these years, to see when Love would catch him?
Haven't I searched his face, time and again, for signs of love at his
heart? When he came home in the spring, I saw that his time had come,
and trouble with it. I made him _tell_, for I would not send him away
with a grief shut up in his heart. Then I contrived this plan of seeing
and knowing you, dear. I knew that Charley would never have been so
deeply moved, had you not been worthy; but, my dear child, I never
thought of loving you so! I shall be so proud, if you will be my
sister,--for you will, I know. You can't refuse such a dear boy as
Charley!"

I still held Rachel by the hand; and while Fanny was speaking so
earnestly, my other hand, of itself, went creeping around her waist, and
drew her close to me.

"You can't refuse," I whispered, reposting Fanny's words; and I knew by
the look in her face, and the way her heart beat, that she couldn't.

But Fanny was one who never liked deep waters. Seeing that matters were
growing earnest, she rose quickly to the surface, and went rattling on,
in her lively way.

"Now, come, you two, and sit down in this cozy seat. You have never had
a nice time all to yourselves, to make love in. Ah! how well you look
together! Just room enough! Rachel, dear, rest your head on Charley's
shoulder. You must. Charley always minds me, and you will have to. Now,
buddy, just drop your head on hers a minute. Capital! Your light curls
make her hair look more like black velvet than ever! That will do. Now I
leave you to your fate. I am rattle-headed, I know, but I hope I have
some consideration."

And so she left us, sitting there in the twilight, in the solemn hush of
Saturday night.

The next day we all went to meeting. It seemed good that I was only to
spend Sunday at home. The quiet, the air of solemnity all around us,
harmonized well with the song my own soul was singing. It was
Sabbath-day within, one long, blessed Sabbath, with which the bustle of
week-day life would ill accord. That perfect day I never forgot. Even
now I can scent its roses in the air. Even now I can almost feel the
daisies brushing against my feet, while walking up the narrow lane on
our way to church,--can see the sweetbrier by the red gate, and myself
giving Rachel one of its blossoms.

During the rest of the term I had frequent letters from Fanny and
Rachel, telling how happy they both were, and what talks they had in the
apple-tree,--telling that Aunt Huldah _knew_, but wasn't angry, only
just a little at Fanny, for being so sly. Then came the long summer
vacation. The very day I got home, the solemn young minister called.
Fanny said that he came often, but she thought he would do so no longer,
for he would see that it was of no use to be looking at Rachel. He did,
however, and Rachel said he came to look at Fanny. I bestirred myself,
therefore, to become acquainted with him. His stiffness was only of the
manners. I found him a genial, cultivated, warm-hearted person; in fact,
I liked him. How cold the word sounds now, applied to one whom I
afterwards came to love as a brother, whose gentle heart sympathized in
all our troubles, whose tears were ever ready to mingle with our own!

He gave us every opportunity of finding him out, joined us in our sunset
walks, and in our long sittings under the trees. I soon came to be well
satisfied that he should look at Fanny,--satisfied that she should watch
for his coming, and blush when he came. I was happy to see the mist she
once spoke of slowly gathering before her own eyes, and to know, from
the strange quiet which came over her, that some new influence was at
work within her heart.

The beauty of Rachel seemed each day more brilliant. Amid such happy
influences, the lively, genial side of her nature expanded like a flower
in the sunshine. "The soul of Rachel Lowe," having no longer to stand
alone, bearing the weight of its own sorrows, brought its energies to
promote the happiness of us all. She contrived pleasant surprises, and
charmed Aunt Huldah with her constant acts of kindness. She sang
beautiful songs, and filled the house with flowers; and when we sat
long, in the cool of the evening, out under the trees, she would relate
strange, wild stories which she had heard from her mother,--stories of
other times and distant lands.

Meanwhile Aunt Huldah was as kind as heart could wish, treating us
tenderly, and as if we were little children; and one stormy night, when
we four sat with her in the keeping-room, talking, until daylight faded,
and the short twilight left us nearly in darkness, she told us some
things about her own youth, things of which, by daylight, she would
never have spoken,--and told, too, of a dear, only brother, who was
ruined for all time, and, she feared, for eternity also, from being
crossed in love by the strong will of his father. Aunt Huldah had a
tender heart. Her voice grew thick and hoarse, while telling the story.
I was always glad we had that talk. It made us know her better. She
lived only a year after. She died in June, when the grass was green and
the roses were in bloom,--just a year from that Sabbath I spent at home,
that perfect day when I walked to meeting with Rachel up the grassy
lane. With sad hearts, we laid her to rest in a spot that she loved,
where the sweet-fern and wild-roses were growing,--with sad, grateful
hearts, for she had been to us as father, mother, and true friend. We
loved her for the affection she showed, and still more for that which we
knew she concealed within herself,--for the tenderness she would not let
be revealed.

The next year Rachel and I were married, thus making the month of June
trebly sacred. We had a double wedding; for the young minister, finding
that he had looked at Fanny too long for his own tranquillity, proposed
to mend matters in a way which no one whose faculties were not strangely
betwisted by love would ever have thought of. And my sister must either
have secretly liked the plan, or else have lost her old faculty of
managing; for, when he said, "Come, Fanny, and let us dwell together in
the parsonage," she went, just as quiet as a lamb.

Rachel and I remained, and do remain to this day, at the old house.
Fanny said we ought to go into the world,--that I might possibly become
brilliant, and Rachel would certainly be admired. But the first of these
suggestions had little weight with me; and Rachel said how nice it would
be to live here among the apple-trees, near Fanny, to read books, sing
songs, and so have a good time all our lives!

"And have nobody but Charley see how handsome you are!" exclaimed Fanny.

Rachel didn't color at this, but remarked, a little roguishly, that she
would rather have one of those sidelong looks I used to give her in the
old school-house than all the admiration in the world.

This was the time when I chose my profession, as mentioned in the
beginning. And I may say that we _have_ had a good time all our lives.
Yet we have known sorrow. Four times has the dark shadow fallen upon our
hearts; four sad processions have passed up the narrow lane; four little
graves, by the side of Aunt Huldah's, show where, standing together, we
wept tears of agony! Yet we stood together; and Rachel, who knew so
well, taught me how to bear. In every hour of anguish I have found
myself leaning upon the strong, steadfast "soul of Rachel Lowe." I say
still, therefore, that we have had a good time, for we have loved one
another all our lives. And we have never been too much alone. Plenty of
friends have been glad to come and see us; and on Anniversary Week we
have usually made a journey to Boston, to wear off the rust, and get
stirred up generally. We attend most frequently the Anti-Slavery
Conventions. I know of no better place, whether for getting stirred up,
or wearing off the rust. That couple whom you may have noticed
sitting near the platform--that bald-headed old gentleman and
intelligent-looking elderly lady--are my wife and I. We met with the
early Abolitionists in a stable; we saw Garrison dragged through the
streets, and heard Phillips's first speech in Faneuil Hall.

I have always kept my old habit of watching pretty faces; only I don't
look sideways now: for the girls never think that an old man cares to
see them; but he does. We have one son, who Fanny devoutly hopes will
turn out better than his father. May he go through life as happily! And
he is in a fair way for it. I like to see him with Jenny, the pretty
daughter of my friend the watchmaker. If my good friend thinks to keep
always with him that youngest one of his flock, he will find his
mistake; for it was only yesterday that I saw them sitting together on
the seat in the low-branching apple-tree.

       *       *       *       *       *

PICTOR IGNOTUS.


Human nature is impatient of mysteries. The occurrence of an event out
of the line of common causation, the advent of a person not plastic to
the common moulds of society, causes a great commotion in this little
ant-hill of ours. There is perplexity, bewilderment, a running hither
and thither, until the foreign substance is assigned a place in the
ranks; and if there be no rank to which it can be ascertained to belong,
a new rank shall be created to receive it, rather than that it shall be
left to roam up and down, baffling, defiant, and alone. Indeed, so great
is our abhorrence of outlying, unclassified facts, that we are often
ready to accept classification for explanation; and having given our
mystery a niche and a name, we cease any longer to look upon it as
mysterious. The village-schoolmaster, who displayed his superior
knowledge to the rustics gazing at an eclipse of the sun by assuring
them that it was "only a phenomenon," was but one of a great host of
wiseacres who stand ready with brush and paint-pot to label every new
development, and fancy that in so doing they have abundantly answered
every reasonable inquiry concerning cause, character, and consequence.

When William Blake flashed across the path of English polite society,
society was confounded. It had never had to do with such an apparition
before, and was at its wits' end. But some Daniel was found wise enough
to come to judgment, and pronounce the poet-painter mad; whereupon
society at once composed itself, and went on its way rejoicing.

There are a few persons, however, who are not disposed to let this
verdict stand unchallenged. Mr. Arthur Gilchrist, late a barrister of
the Middle Temple, a man, therefore, who must have been accustomed to
weigh evidence, and who would not have been likely to decide upon
insufficient grounds, wrote a life of Mr. Blake, in which he strenuously
and ably opposed the theory of insanity. From this book, chiefly, we
propose to lay before our readers a slight sketch of the life of a man
who, whether sane or insane, was one of the most remarkable productions
of his own or of any age.

One word, in the beginning, regarding the book before us. The death of
its author, while as yet but seven chapters of his work had been
printed, would preclude severe criticism, even if the spirit and purpose
with which he entered upon his undertaking, and which he sustained to
its close, did not dispose us to look leniently upon imperfections of
detail. Possessing that first requisite of a biographer, thorough
sympathy with his subject, he did not fall into the opposite error of
indiscriminate panegyric. Looking at life from the standpoint of the
"madman," he saw how fancies could not only appear, but be, facts; and
then, crossing over, he looked at the madman from the world's
standpoint, and saw how these soul-born facts could seem not merely
fancies, but the wild vagaries of a crazed brain. For the warmth with
which he espoused an unpopular cause, for the skill with which he set
facts in their true light, for the ability which he brought to the
defence of a man whom the world had agreed to condemn, for the noble
persistence with which he forced attention to genius that had hitherto
received little but neglect, we cannot too earnestly express our
gratitude. But the greater our admiration of material excellence, the
greater is our regret for superficial defects. The continued oversight
of the author would doubtless have removed many infelicities of style;
yet we marvel that one with so clear an insight should ever, even in the
first glow of composition, have involved himself in sentences so
complicated and so obscure. The worst faults of Miss Sheppard's worst
style are reproduced here, joined to an unthriftiness in which she had
no part nor lot. Not unfrequently a sentence Is a conglomerate in which
the ideas to be conveyed are heaped together with no apparent attempt at
arrangement, unity, or completeness. Surely, it need be no presumptuous,
but only a tender and reverent hand that should have organized these
chaotic periods, completing the work which death left unfinished, and
sending it forth to the world in a garb not unworthy the labor of love
so untiringly bestowed upon it by the lamented author.

To show that our strictures are not undeserved, we transcribe a few
sentences, taken at random from the memoir:--

"Which decadence it was led this Pars to go into the juvenile
Art-Academy line, _vice_ Shipley retired."

"The unusual notes struck by William Blake, in any case appealing but to
one class and a small one, were fated to remain unheard, even by the
Student of Poetry, until the process of regeneration had run its course,
and, we may say, the Poetic Revival gone to seed again: seeing that the
virtues of simplicity and directness the new poets began by bringing
once more into the foreground, are those least practised now."

"In after years of estrangement from Stothard, Blake used to complain of
this mechanical employment as engraver to a fellow-designer, who (he
asserted) first borrowed from one that, in his servile capacity, had
then to copy that comrade's version of his own inventions--as to motive
and composition his own, that is."

"And this imposing scroll of fervid truisms and hap-hazard generalities,
as often disputable as not, if often acute and striking, always
ingenuous and pleasant, was, like all his other writings, warmly
welcomed in this country."

Let us now go back a hundred years, to the time when William Blake was a
fair-haired, smooth-browed boy, wandering aimlessly, after the manner of
boys, about the streets of London. It might seem at first a matter of
regret that a soul full of all glowing and glorious fancies should have
been consigned to the damp and dismal dulness of that crowded city; but,
in truth, nothing could be more fit. To this affluent, creative mind
dinginess and dimness were not. Through the grayest gloom golden palaces
rose before him, silver pavements shone beneath his feet, jewelled gates
unfolded on golden hinges turning, and he wandered forth into a fair
country. What need of sunshine and bloom for one who saw in the deepest
darkness a "light that never was on sea or land"? Rambling out into the
pleasant woods of Dulwich, through the green meadows of Walton, by the
breezy heights of Sydenham, bands of angels attended him. They walked
between the toiling haymakers, they hovered above him in the
apple-boughs, and their bright wings shone like stars. For him there was
neither awe nor mystery, only delight. Angels were no more unnatural
than apples. But the honest hosier, his father, took different views.
Never in all his life had that worthy citizen beheld angels perched on
tree-tops, and he was only prevented from administering to his son a
sound thrashing for the absurd falsehood by the intercession of his
mother. Ah, these mothers! By what fine sense is it that they detect the
nascent genius for which man's coarse perception can find no better name
than perverseness, and no wiser treatment than brute force?

The boy had much reason to thank his mother, for to her intervention it
was doubtless largely due that he was left to follow his bent, and haunt
such picture-galleries as might be found in noblemen's houses and public
sale-rooms. There he feasted his bodily eyes on earthly beauty, as his
mental gaze had been charmed with heavenly visions. From admiration to
imitation was but a step, and the little hands soon began to shape such
rude, but loving copies as Raffaelle, with tears in his eyes, must have
smiled to see. His father, moved by motherly persuasions, as we can
easily infer, bought him casts for models, that he might continue his
drawing-lessons at home; his own small allowance of pocket-money went
for prints; his wistful child-face presently became known to dealers,
and many a cheap lot was knocked down to him with amiable haste by
friendly auctioneers. Then and there began that life-long love and
loyalty to the grand old masters of Germany and Italy, to Albrecht
Dürer, to Michel Angelo, to Raffaelle, which knew no diminution, and
which, in its very commencement, revealed the eclecticism of true
genius, because the giants were not the gods in those days.

But there came a time when Pegasus must be broken in to drudgery, and
travel along trodden ways. By slow, it cannot be said by toilsome
ascent, the young student had reached the vestibule of the temple; but

    "Every door was barred with gold, and opened but to golden keys,"

which, alas! to him were wanting. Nothing daunted, his sincere soul
preferred to be a doorkeeper in the house of his worship rather than a
dweller in the tents of Mammon. Unable to be an artist, he was content
for the time to become an artisan, and chose to learn engraving,--a
craft which would keep him within sight and sound of the heaven from
which he was shut out. Application was first made to Ryland, then in the
zenith of his fame, engraver to the King, friend of authors and artists,
himself a graceful, accomplished, and agreeable gentleman. But the
marvellous eyes that pierced through mortal gloom to immortal glory saw
also the darkness that brooded behind uncanny light. "I do not like the
man's face," said young Blake, as he was leaving the shop with his
father; "it looks as if he will live to be hanged." The negotiation
failed; Blake was apprenticed to Basire; and twelve years after, the
darkness that had lain so long in ambush came out and hid the day:
Ryland was hanged.

His new master, Basire, was one of those workmen who magnify their
office and make it honorable. The most distinguished of four generations
of Basires, engravers, he is represented as a superior, liberal-minded,
upright man, and a kind master. With him Blake served out his seven
years of apprenticeship, as faithful, painstaking, and industrious as
any blockhead. So great was the confidence which he secured, that, month
after month, and year after year, he was sent out alone to Westminster
Abbey and the various old churches in the neighborhood, to make drawings
from the monuments, with no oversight but that of his own taste and his
own conscience. And a rich reward we may well suppose his integrity
brought him, in the charming solitudes of those old-time sanctuaries.
Wandering up and down the consecrated aisles,--eagerly peering through
the dim, religious light for the beautiful forms that had leaped from
many a teeming brain now turned to dust,--reproducing, with patient
hand, graceful outline and deepening shadow,--his daring, yet reverent
heart held high communion with the ages that were gone. The Spirit of
the Past overshadowed him. The grandeur of Gothic symbolism rose before
him. Voices of dead centuries murmured low music down the fretted vault.
Fair ladies and brave gentlemen came up from the solemn chambers where
they had lain so long in silent state, and smiled with their olden
grace. Shades of nameless poets, who had wrought their souls into a
cathedral and died unknown and unhonored, passed before the dreaming
boy, and claimed their immortality. Nay, once the Blessed Face shone
through the cloistered twilight, and the Twelve stood roundabout. In
this strange solitude and stranger companionship many an old problem
untwined its Gordian knot, and whispered along its loosened length,--

  "I give you the end of a golden string:
    Only wind it into a ball,
  It will lead you in at Heaven's gate,
    Built in Jerusalem wall."

To an engraving of "Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion,"
executed at this time, he appends,--"This is one of the Gothic artists
who built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages, wandering about
in sheepskins and goatskins; of whom the world was not worthy. Such were
the Christians in all ages."

Yet, somewhere, through mediæval gloom and modern din, another spirit
breathed upon him,--a spirit of green woods and blue waters, the
freshness of May mornings, the prattle of tender infancy, the gambols of
young lambs on the hill-side. From his childhood, Poetry walked hand in
hand with Painting, and beguiled his loneliness with wild, sweet
harmonies. Bred up amid the stately, measured, melodious platitudes of
the eighteenth century, that Golden Age of commonplace, he struck down
through them all with simple, untaught, unconscious directness, and
smote the spring of ever-living waters. Such wood-notes wild as trill in
Shakspeare's verse sprang from the stricken chords beneath his hand. The
little singing-birds that seem almost to have leaped unbidden into life
among the gross creations of those old Afreets who

  "Stood around the throne of Shakspeare,
  Sturdy, but unclean,"

carolled their clear, pure lays to him, and left a quivering echo. Fine,
fleeting fantasies we have, a tender, heartfelt, heart-reaching pathos,
laughter that might at any moment tremble into tears, eternal truths,
draped in the garb of quaint and simple story, solemn fervors, subtile
sympathies, and the winsomeness of little children at their
play,--sometimes glowing with the deepest color, often just tinged to
the pale and changing hues of a dream, but touched with such coy grace,
modulated to such free, wild rhythm, suffused with such a delicate,
evanishing loveliness, that they seem scarcely to be the songs of our
tangible earth, but snatches from fairy-land. Often rude in form, often
defective in rhyme, and not unfrequently with even graver faults than
these, their ruggedness cannot hide the gleam of the sacred fire. "The
Spirit of the Age," moulding her pliant poets, was wiser than to meddle
with this sterner stuff. From what hidden cave in Rare Ben Jonson's
realm did the boy bring such an opal as this

  SONG.

  "My silks and fine array,
    My smiles and languished air,
  By Love are driven away;
    And mournful, lean Despair
  Brings me yew to deck my grave:
  Such end true lovers have!

  "His face is fair as heaven,
    Where springing buds unfold;
  Oh, why to him was 't given,
    Whose heart is wintry cold?
  His breast is Love's all-worshipped tomb,
  Where all Love's pilgrims come.

  "Bring me an axe and spade,
    Bring me a winding-sheet;
  When I my grave have made,
    Let winds and tempests beat:
  Then down I'll lie, as cold as clay.
  True love doth pass away."

What could the Spirit of the Age hope to do with a boy scarcely yet in
his teens, who dared arraign her in such fashion as is set forth in his
address

  TO THE MUSES.

  "Whether on Ida's shady brow,
    Or in the chambers of the East,
  The chambers of the Sun, that now
    From ancient melody have ceased;

  "Whether in heaven ye wander fair,
    Or the green corners of the earth,
  Or the blue regions of the air,
    Where the melodious winds have birth;

  "Whether on crystal rocks ye rove
    Beneath the bosom of the sea,
  Wandering in many a coral grove,
    Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry;

  "How have you left the ancient love
    That bards of old enjoyed in you!
  The languid strings do scarcely move,
    The sound is forced, the notes are few."

Whereabouts in its Elegant Extracts would a generation that strung
together sonorous couplets, and compiled them into a book to Enforce the
Practice of Virtue, place such a ripple of verse as this?--

  "Piping down the valleys wild,
    Piping songs of pleasant glee,
  On a cloud I saw a child,
    And he, laughing, said to me:

  "'Pipe a song about a lamb!'
    So I piped with merry cheer.
  'Piper, pipe that song again!'
    So I piped; he wept to hear.

  "'Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;
    Sing thy songs of happy cheer!'
  So I sang the same again,
    While he wept with joy to hear.

  "'Piper, sit thee down and write
    In a book, that all may read!'
  So he vanished from my sight.
    And I plucked a hollow reed,

  "And I made a rural pen,
    And I stained the water clear,
  And I wrote my happy songs
    Every child may joy to hear."

A native of the jungle, leaping into the fine drawing-rooms of Cavendish
Square, would hardly create more commotion than such a poem as "The
Tiger," charging in among Epistles to the Earl of Dorset, Elegies
describing the Sorrow of an Ingenuous Mind, Odes innumerable to Memory,
Melancholy, Music, Independence, and all manner of odious themes.

  "Tiger, tiger, burning bright
  In the forests of the night,
  What immortal hand or eye
  Framed thy fearful symmetry?

  "In what distant deeps or skies
  Burned that fire within thine eyes?
  On what wings dared he aspire?
  What the hand dared seize the fire?

  "And what shoulder, and what art,
  Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
  When thy heart began to beat,
  What dread hand formed thy dread feet?

  "What the hammer, what the chain,
  Knit thy strength and forged thy brain?
  What the anvil? What dread grasp
  Dared thy deadly terrors clasp?

  "When the stars threw down their spears,
  And watered heaven with their tears,
  Did he smile his work to see?
  Did He who made the lamb make thee?"

Mrs. Montagu, by virtue of the "moral" in the last line, may possibly
have ventured to read the "Chimney-Sweeper" at her annual festival to
those swart little people; but we have not space to give the gem a
setting here; nor the "Little Black Boy," with its matchless, sweet
child-sadness. Indeed, scarcely one of these early poems--all written
between the ages of eleven and twenty--is without its peculiar, and
often its peerless charm.

Arrived at the age of twenty-one, he finished his apprenticeship to
Basire, and began at once the work and worship of his life,--the latter
by studying at the Royal Academy, the former by engraving for the
booksellers. Introduced by a brother-artist to Flaxman, he joined him in
furnishing designs for the famous Wedgwood porcelain, and so one
dinner-set gave bread and butter to genius, and nightingales' tongues to
wealth. That he was not a docile, though a very devoted pupil, is
indicated by his reply to Moser, the keeper, who came to him, as he was
looking over prints from his beloved Raffaelle and Michel Angelo, and
said, "You should not study these old, hard, stiff, and dry, unfinished
works of Art: stay a little, and _I_ will show you what you should
study." He brought down Le Brun and Rubens. "How did I secretly rage!"
says Blake. "I also spake my mind! I said to Moser, 'These things that
you call finished are not even begun; how, then, can they be finished?'"
The reply of the startled teacher is not recorded. In other respects,
also, he swerved from Academical usage. Nature, as it appeared in models
artificially posed to enact an artificial part, became hateful to him,
seemed to him a caricature of Nature, though he delighted in the noble
antique figures.

Nature soon appeared to him in another shape, and altogether charming. A
lively miss to whom he had paid court showed herself cold to his
advances; which circumstance he was one evening bemoaning to a
dark-eyed, handsome girl,--(a dangerous experiment, by the way,)--who
assured him that she pitied him from her heart. "_Do_ you pity me?" he
eagerly asked. "Yes, I do, most sincerely." "Then I love you for that,"
replied the new Othello to his Desdemona; and so well did the wooing go
that the dark-eyed Catharine presently became his wife, the Kate of a
forty-five years' marriage. Loving, devoted, docile, she learned to be
helpmeet and companion. Never, on the one side, murmuring at the narrow
fortunes, nor, on the other, losing faith in the greatness to which she
had bound herself, she not only ordered well her small household, but
drew herself up within the range of her husband's highest sympathy. She
learned to read and write, and to work off his engravings. Nay, love
became for her creative, endowed her with a new power, the vision and
the faculty divine, and she presently learned to design with a spirit
and a grace hardly to be distinguished from her husband's. No children
came to make or mar their harmony; and from the summer morning in
Battersea that placed her hand in his, to the summer evening in London
that loosed it from his dying grasp, she was the true angel-vision,
Heaven's own messenger to the dreaming poet-painter.

Being the head of a family, Blake now, as was proper, went into
"society." And what a society it was to enter! And what a man was Blake
to enter it! The society of President Reynolds, and Mr. Mason the poet,
and Mr. Sheridan the play-actor, and pompous Dr. Burney, and abstract
Dr. Delap,--all honorable men; a society that was dictated to by Dr.
Johnson, and delighted by Edmund Burke, and sneered at by Horace
Walpole, its untiring devotee: a society presided over by Mrs. Montagu,
whom Dr. Johnson dubbed Queen of the Blues; Mrs. Carter, borrowing, by
right of years, her matron's plumes; Mrs. Chapone, sensible, ugly, and
benevolent; the beautiful Mrs. Sheridan; the lively, absurd, incisive
Mrs. Cholmondeley; sprightly, witty Mrs. Thrale; and Hannah More, coiner
of guineas, both as saint and sinner: a most piquant, trenchant, and
entertaining society it was, and well might be, since the bullion of
genius was so largely wrought into the circulating medium of small talk;
but a society which, from sheer lack of vision, must have entertained
its angels unawares. Such was the current which caught up this
simple-hearted painter, this seer of unutterable things, this "eternal
child,"--caught him up only to drop him, with no creditable, but with
very credible haste. As a lion, he was undoubtedly thrice welcome in
Rathbone Place; but when it was found that the lion would not roar there
gently, nor be bound by their silken strings, but rather shook his mane
somewhat contemptuously at his would-be tamers, and kept, in their grand
saloons, his freedom of the wilderness, he was straightway suffered to
return to his fitting solitudes. One may imagine the consternation that
would be caused by this young fellow turning to Mrs. Carter, whose "talk
was all instruction," or to Mrs. Chapone, bent on the "improvement of
the mind," or to Miss Streatfield, with her "nose and notions _à la
Grecque_," and abruptly inquiring, "Madam, did you ever see a fairy's
funeral?" "Never, Sir!" responds the startled Muse. "I have," pursues
Blake, as calmly as if he were proposing to relate a _bon mot_ which he
heard at Lady Middleton's rout last night. "I was walking alone in my
garden last night: there was great stillness among the branches and
flowers, and more than common sweetness in the air. I heard a low and
pleasant sound, and knew not whence it came. At last I saw the broad
leaf of a flower move, and underneath I saw a procession of creatures of
the size and color of green and gray grasshoppers, bearing a body laid
out on a rose-leaf, which they buried with songs, and then disappeared.
It was a fairy funeral." Or they are discussing, somewhat pompously,
Herschel's late discovery of Uranus, and the immense distances of
heavenly bodies, when Blake bursts out uproariously, "'Tis false! I was
walking down a lane the other day, and at the end of it I touched the
sky with my stick." Truly, for this wild man, who obstinately refuses to
let his mind be regulated, but bawls out his mad visions the louder, the
more they are combated, there is nothing for it but to go back to his
Kitty, and the little tenement in Green Street.

But real friends Blake found, who, if they could not quite understand
him, could love and honor and assist. Flaxman, the "Sculptor for
Eternity," and Fuseli, the fiery-hearted Swiss painter, stood up for him
manfully. His own younger brother, Robert, shared his talents, and
became for a time a loved and honored member of his family,--too much
honored, if we may credit an anecdote in which the brother appears to
much better advantage than the husband. A dispute having one day arisen
between Robert and Mrs. Blake, Mr. Blake, after a while, deemed her to
have gone too far, and bade her kneel down and beg Robert's pardon, or
never see her husband's face again. Nowise convinced, she nevertheless
obeyed the stern command, and acknowledged herself in the wrong. "Young
woman, you lie!" retorted Robert "_I_ am in the wrong!" This beloved
brother died at the age of twenty-five. During his last illness, Blake
attended him with the most affectionate devotion, nor ever left the
bedside till he beheld the disembodied spirit leave the frail clay and
soar heavenward, clapping its hands for joy!

His brother gone, though not so far away that he did not often revisit
the old home,--friendly Flaxman in Italy, but more inaccessible there
than Robert in the heaven which lay above this man in his perpetual
infancy,--the _bas-bleus_ reinclosed in the charmed circle in which
Blake had so riotously disported himself, a small attempt at
partnership, shop-keeping, and money-making, wellnigh "dead before it
was born,"--the poet began to think of publishing. The verses of which
we have spoken had been seen but by few people, and the store was
constantly increasing. Influence with the publishers, and money to
defray expenses, were alike wanting. A copy of Lavater's "Aphorisms,"
translated by his fellow-countryman, Fuseli, had received upon its
margins various annotations which reveal the man in his moods. "The
great art to love your enemy consists in never losing sight of _man_ in
him," says Lavater. "None _can_ see the man in the enemy," pencils
Blake. "If he is ignorantly so, he is not truly an enemy; if maliciously
so, not a man. I cannot love my enemy; for my enemy is not a man, but a
beast. And if I have any, I can love him as a beast, and wish to beat
him." No equivocation here, surely. On superstition he comments,--"It
has been long a bugbear, by reason of its having been united with
hypocrisy. But let them be fairly separated, and then superstition will
be honest feeling, and God, who loves all honest men, will lead the poor
enthusiast in the path of holiness." Herein lies the germ of a truth.
Again, Lavater says,--"A great woman not imperious, a fair woman not
vain, a woman of common talents not jealous, an accomplished woman who
scorns to shine, are four wonders just great enough to be divided among
the four corners of the globe." Whereupon Blake adds,--"Let the men do
their duty, and the women will be such wonders; the female life lives
from the life of the male. See a great many female dependents, and you
know the man." If this be madness, would that the madman might have
bitten all mankind before he died! To the advice, "Take here the grand
secret, if not of pleasing all, yet of displeasing none: court
mediocrity, avoid originality, and sacrifice to fashion," he appends,
with an evident reminiscence of Rathbone Place, "And go to hell."

But this private effervescence was not enough; and long thinking
anxiously as to ways and means, suddenly, in the night, Robert stood
before him, and revealed to him a secret by which a facsimile of poetry
and design could be produced. On rising in the morning, Mrs. Blake was
sent out with a half-crown to buy the necessary materials, and with that
he began an experiment which resulted in furnishing his principal means
of support through life. It consisted in a species of engraving in
relief both of the words and the designs of his poems, by a process
peculiar and original. From his plates he printed off in any tint he
chose, afterwards coloring up his designs by hand. Joseph, the sacred
carpenter, had appeared in a vision, and revealed to him certain secrets
of coloring. Mrs. Blake delighted to assist him in taking impressions,
which she did with great skill, in tinting the designs, and in doing up
the pages in boards; so that everything, except manufacturing the paper,
was done by the poet and his wife. Never before, as his biographer
justly remarks, was a man so literally the author of his own book. If we
may credit the testimony that is given, or even judge from such proofs
as Mr. Gilchrist's book can furnish, these works of his hands were
exquisitely beautiful. The effect of the poems imbedded in their designs
is, we are told, quite different from their effect set naked upon a
blank page. It was as if he had transferred scenery and characters from
that spirit-realm where his own mind wandered at will; and from wondrous
lips wondrous words came fitly, and with surpassing power. Confirmation
of this we find in the few plates of "Songs of Innocence" which have
been recovered. Shorn of the radiant rainbow hues, the golden sheen,
with which the artist, angel-taught, glorified his pictures, they still
body for us the beauty of his "Happy Valley." Children revel there in
unchecked play. Springing vines, in wild exuberance of life, twine
around the verse, thrusting their slender coils in among the lines.
Weeping willows dip their branches into translucent pools. Heavy-laden
trees droop their ripe, rich clusters overhead. Under the shade of
broad-spreading oaks little children climb on the tiger's yielding back
and stroke the lion's tawny mane in a true Millennium.

The first series, "Songs of Innocence," was succeeded by "Songs of
Experience," subsequently bound in one volume. Then came the book of
"Thel," an allegory, wherein Thel, beautiful daughter of the Seraphim,
laments the shortness of her life down by the River of Adona, and is
answered by the Lily of the Valley, the Little Cloud, the Lowly Worm,
and the Clod of Clay; the burden of whose song is--

  "But how this is, sweet maid, I know not, and I cannot know,
  I ponder, and I cannot ponder: yet I live and love!"

The designs give the beautiful daughter listening to the Lily and the
Cloud. The Clod is an infant wrapped in a lily-leaf. The effect of the
whole poem and design together is as of an "angel's reverie."

The "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" is considered one of the most curious
and original of his works. After an opening "Argument" comes a series of
"Proverbs of Hell," which, however, answer very well for earth: as, "A
fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees"; "He whose face gives
no light shall never become a star"; "The apple-tree never asks the
beech how he shall grow, nor the lion the horse how he shall take his
prey." The remainder of the book consists of "Memorable Fancies," half
dream, half allegory, sublime and grotesque inextricably commingling,
but all ornamented with designs most daring and imaginative in
conception, and steeped in the richest color. We subjoin a description
of one or two, as a curiosity. "A strip of azure sky surmounts, and of
land divides, the words of the title-page, leaving on each side scant
and baleful trees, little else than stem and spray. Drawn on a tiny
scale lies a corpse, and one bends over it. Flames burst forth below and
slant upward across the page, gorgeous with every hue. In their very
core, two spirits rush together and embrace." In the seventh design is
"a little island of the sea, where an infant springs to its mother's
bosom. From the birth-cleft ground a spirit has half emerged. Below,
with outstretched arms and hoary beard, an awful, ancient man rushes at
you, as it were, out of the page." The eleventh is "a surging of mingled
fire, water, and blood, wherein roll the volumes of a huge,
double-fanged serpent, his crest erect, his jaws wide open." "The
ever-fluctuating color, the spectral pigmies rolling, flying, leaping
among the letters, the ripe bloom of quiet corners, the living light and
bursts of flame, the spires and tongues of fire vibrating with the full
prism, make the page seem to move and quiver within its boundaries, and
you lay the book down tenderly, as if you had been handling something
sentient."

We have not space to give a description, scarcely even a catalogue, of
Blake's numerous works. Wild, fragmentary, gorgeous dreams they are,
tangled in with strange allegoric words and designs, that throb with
their prisoned vitality. The energy, the might, the intensity of his
lines and figures it is impossible for words to convey. It is power in
the fiercest, most eager action,--fire and passion, the madness and the
stupor of despair, the frenzy of desire, the lurid depths of woe, that
thrill and rivet you even in the comparatively lifeless rendering of
this book. The mere titles of the poems give but a slight clue to their
character. Ideas are upheaved in a tossing surge of words. It is a
mystic, but lovely Utopia, into which "The Gates of Paradise" open. The
practical name of "America" very faintly foreshadows the Ossianic Titans
that glide across its pages, or the tricksy phantoms, the headlong
spectres, the tongues of flame, the folds and fangs of symbolic
serpents, that writhe and leap and dart and riot there. With a poem
named "Europe," we should scarcely expect for a frontispiece the Ancient
of Days, in unapproached grandeur, setting his "compass upon the face of
the Earth,"--a vision revealed to the designer at the top of his own
staircase.

Small favor and small notice these works secured from the public, which
found more edification in the drunken courtship and brutal squabbles of
"the First Gentleman of Europe" than in Songs of Innocence or Sculptures
for Eternity. The poet's own friends constituted his public, and
patronized him to the extent of their power. The volume of Songs he sold
for thirty shillings and two guineas. Afterwards, with the delicate and
loving design of helping the artist, who would receive help in no other
way, five and even ten guineas were paid, for which sum he could hardly
do enough, finishing off each picture like a miniature. One solitary
patron he had, Mr. Thomas Butts, who, buying his pictures for thirty
years, and turning his own house into "a perfect Blake Gallery, often
supplied the painter with his sole means of subsistence." May he have
his reward! Most pathetic is an anecdote related by Mr. H.C. Robinson,
who found himself one morning sole visitor at an Exhibition which Blake
had opened, on his own account, at his brother James's house. In view of
the fact that he had bought four copies of the Descriptive Catalogue,
Mr. Robinson inquired of James, the custodian, if he might not come
again free. "Oh, yes! _free as long an you live_!" was the reply of the
humble hosier, overjoyed at having so munificent a visitor, or a visitor
at all.

We have a sense of incongruity in seeing this defiant, but sincere
pencil employed by publishers to illustrate the turgid sorrow of Young's
"Night Thoughts." The work was to have been issued in parts, but got no
farther than the first. (It would have been no great calamity, if the
poem itself had come to the same premature end!) The sonorous mourner
could hardly have recognized himself in the impersonations in which he
was presented, nor his progeny in the concrete objects to which they
were reduced. The well-known couplet,

  "'Tis greatly wise to talk with our past hours
  And ask them what report they've borne to heaven,"

is represented by hours "drawn as aërial and shadowy beings," some of
whom are bringing their scrolls to the inquirer, and others are carrying
their records to heaven.

  "Oft burst my song beyond the bounds of life"

has a lovely figure, holding a lyre, and springing into the air, but
confined by a chain to the earth. Death puts off his skeleton, and
appears as a solemn, draped figure; but in many cases the clerical poet
is "taken at his word," with a literalness more startling than
dignified.

Introduced by Flaxman to Hayley, friend and biographer of Cowper,
favorably known to his contemporaries, though now wellnigh forgotten,
Blake was invited to Felpham, and began there a new life. It is pleasant
to look back upon this period. Hayley, the kindly, generous, vain,
imprudent, impulsive country squire, not at all excepting himself in his
love for mankind, pouring forth sonnets on the slightest
provocation,--indeed, so given over to the vice of verse, that

            "he scarce could ope
  His mouth but out there flew a trope,"--

floating with the utmost self-complacence down the smooth current of his
time; and Blake, sensitive, unique, protestant, impracticable,
aggressive: it was a rare freak of Fate that brought about such
companionship; yet so true courtesy was there that for four years they
lived and wrought harmoniously together,--Hayley pouring out his
harmless wish-wash, and Blake touching it with his fiery gleam. Their
joint efforts were hardly more pecuniarily productive than Blake's
single-handed struggles; but his life there had other and better fruits.
In the little cottage overlooking the sea, fanned by the pure breeze,
and smiled upon by sunshine of the hills, he tasted rare spiritual joy.
Throwing off mortal incumbrance,--never, indeed, an overweight to
him,--he revelled in his clairvoyance. The lights that shimmered across
the sea shone from other worlds. The purple of the gathering darkness
was the curtain of God's tabernacle. Gray shadows of the gloaming
assumed mortal shapes, and he talked with Moses and the prophets, and
the old heroes of song. The Ladder of Heaven was firmly fixed by his
garden-gate, and the angels ascended and descended. A letter written to
Flaxman, soon after his arrival at Felpham, is so characteristic that we
cannot refrain from transcribing it:--

    "DEAR SCULPTOR OF ETERNITY,--We are safe arrived at our cottage,
    which is more beautiful than I thought it, and more convenient. It
    is a perfect model for cottages, and, I think, for palaces of
    magnificence,--only enlarging, not altering, its proportions, and
    adding ornaments, and not principles. Nothing can be more grand
    than its simplicity and usefulness. Simple, without intricacy, it
    seems to be the spontaneous expression of humanity, congenial to
    the wants of man. No other formed house can ever please me so
    well, nor shall I ever be persuaded, I believe, that it can be
    improved, either in beauty or use.

    "Mr. Hayley received us with his usual brotherly affection. I have
    begun to work. Felpham is a sweet place for study, because it is
    more spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her
    golden gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapors; voices of
    celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, and their forms
    more distinctly seen; and my cottage is also a shadow of their
    houses. My wife and sister are both well, courting Neptune for an
    embrace.

    "Our journey was very pleasant; and though we had a great deal of
    luggage, no grumbling. All was cheerfulness and good-humor on the
    road, and yet we could not arrive at our cottage before half-past
    eleven at night, owing to the necessary shifting of our luggage
    from one chaise to another; for we had seven different chaises,
    and as many different drivers. We set out between six and seven in
    the morning of Thursday, with sixteen heavy boxes and portfolios
    full of prints.

    "And now begins a new life, because another covering of earth is
    shaken off. I am more famed in heaven for my works than I could
    well conceive. In my brain are studies and chambers filled with
    books and pictures of old, which I wrote and painted in ages of
    Eternity, before my mortal life, and those works are the delight
    and study of archangels. Why, then, should I be anxious about the
    riches or fame of mortality? The Lord our Father will do for us
    and with us according to Ins Divine will, for our good.

    "You, O dear Flaxman, are a sublime archangel,--my friend and
    companion from Eternity. In the Divine bosom is our
    dwelling-place. I look back into the regions of reminiscence, and
    behold our ancient days, before this earth appeared in its
    vegetated mortality to my mortal vegetated eyes. I see our houses
    of eternity, which can never be separated, though our mortal
    vehicles should stand at the remotest corners of heaven from each
    other.

    "Farewell, my best friend! Remember me and my wife in love and
    friendship to our dear Mrs. Flaxman, whom we ardently desire to
    entertain beneath our thatched roof of rusted gold. And believe me
    forever to remain your grateful and affectionate

    "WILLIAM BLAKE."

Other associations than spiritual ones mingle with the Felpham sojourn.
A drunken soldier one day broke into his garden, and, being great of
stature, despised the fewer inches of the owner. But between spirits of
earth and spirits of the skies there is but one issue to the conflict,
and Blake "laid hold of the intrusive blackguard, and turned him out
neck and crop, in a kind of inspired frenzy." The astonished ruffian
made good his retreat, but in revenge reported sundry words that
exasperation had struck from his conqueror. The result was a trial for
high treason at the next Quarter Sessions. Friends gathered about him,
testifying to his previous character; nor was Blake himself at all
dismayed. When the soldiers trumped up their false charges in court, he
did not scruple to cry out, "False!" with characteristic and convincing
vehemence. Had this trial occurred at the present day, it would hardly
be necessary to say that he was triumphantly acquitted. But fifty years
ago such a matter wore a graver aspect. In his early life he had been an
advocate of the French Revolution, an associate of Price, Priestley,
Godwin, and Tom Paine, a wearer of white cockade and _bonnet rouge_. He
had even been instrumental in saving Tom Paine's life, by hurrying him
to France, when the Government was on his track; but all this was
happily unknown to the Chichester lawyers, and Blake, more fortunate
than some of his contemporaries, escaped the gallows.

The disturbance caused by this untoward incident, the repeated failures
of literary attempts, the completion of Cowper's Life, which had been
the main object of his coming, joined, doubtless, to a surfeit of
Hayley, induced a return to London. He feared, too, that his imaginative
faculty was failing. "The visions were angry with me at Felpham," he
used afterwards to say. We regret to see, also, that he seems not always
to have been in the kindest of moods towards his patron. Indeed, it was
a weakness of his to fall out occasionally with his best friends; but
when a man is waited upon by angels and ministers of grace, it is not
surprising that he should sometimes be impatient with mere mortals. Nor
is it difficult to imagine that the bland and trivial Hayley,
perpetually kind, patronizing, and obvious, should, without any definite
provocation, become presently insufferable to such a man as Blake.

Returned to London, he resumed the production of his oracular
works,--"prophetic books," he called them. These he illustrated with his
own peculiar and beautiful designs, "all sanded over with a sort of
golden mist." Among much that is incoherent and incomprehensible may be
found passages of great force, tenderness, and beauty. The concluding
verses of the Preface to "Milton" we quote, as shadowing forth his great
moral purpose, and as revealing also the luminous heart of the cloud
that so often turns to us only its gray and obscure exterior:--

  "And did those feet in ancient time
    Walk upon England's mountain green?
  And was the holy Lamb of God
    On England's pleasant pastures seen?

  "And did the countenance Divine
    Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
  And was Jerusalem builded here
    Among these dark, Satanic hills?

  "Bring me my bow of burning gold!
    Bring me my arrows of desire!
  Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
    Bring me my chariot of fire!

  "I will not cease from mental fight,
    Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
  Till we have built Jerusalem
    In England's green and pleasant land."

The same lofty aim is elsewhere expressed in the line,--

  "I touch the heavens as an instrument to glorify the Lord!"

Our rapidly diminishing space warns us to be brief, and we can only
glance at a few of the remaining incidents of this outwardly calm, yet
inwardly eventful life. In an evil hour--though to it we owe the
"Illustrations to Blair's Grave"--he fell into the hands of Cromek, the
shrewd Yorkshire publisher, and was tenderly entreated, as a dove in the
talons of a kite. The famous letter of Cromek to Blake is one of the
finest examples on record of long-headed worldliness bearing down upon
wrong-headed genius. Though clutching the palm in this case, and in some
others, it is satisfactory to know that Cromek's clever turns led to no
other end than poverty; and nothing worse than poverty had Blake, with
all his simplicity, to encounter. But Blake, in his poverty, had meat to
eat which the wily publisher knew not of.

In the wake of this failure followed another. Blake had been engaged to
make twenty drawings to illustrate Ambrose Philips's "Virgil's
Pastorals" for schoolboys. The publishers saw them, and stood aghast,
declaring he must do no more. The engravers received them with derision,
and pronounced sentence, "This will never do." Encouraged, however, by
the favorable opinion of a few artists who saw them, the publishers
admitted, with an apology, the seventeen which had already been
executed, and gave the remaining three into more docile hands. Of the
two hundred and thirty cuts, the namby-pambyism, which was thought to be
the only thing adapted to the capacity of children, has sunk to the
level of its worthlessness, and the book now is valued only for Blake's
small contribution.

Of an entirely different nature were the "Inventions from the Book of
Job," which are pronounced the most remarkable series of etchings on a
Scriptural theme that have been produced since the days of Rembrandt and
Albrecht Dürer. Of these drawings we have copies in the second volume of
the "Life," from which one can gather something of their grandeur, their
bold originality, their inexhaustible and often terrible power. His
representations of God the Father will hardly accord with modern taste,
which generally eschews all attempt to embody the mind's conceptions of
the Supreme Being; but Blake was far more closely allied to the ancient
than to the modern world. His portraiture and poetry often remind us of
the childlike familiarity--not rude in him, but utterly reverent--which
was frequently, and sometimes offensively, displayed in the old miracle
and moral plays.

These drawings, during the latter part of his life, secured him from
actual want. A generous friend, Mr. Linnell, himself a struggling young
artist, gave him a commission, and paid him a small weekly stipend: it
was sufficient to keep the wolf from the door, and that was enough: so
the wolf was kept away, his lintel was uncrossed 'gainst angels. It was
little to this piper that the public had no ear for his piping,--to this
painter, that there was no eye for his pictures.

  "His soul was like a star, and dwelt apart."

He had but to withdraw to his inner chamber, and all honor and
recognition awaited him. The pangs of poverty or coldness he never
experienced, for his life was on a higher plane:--

  "I am in God's presence night and day,
  He never turns his face away."

When a little girl of extraordinary beauty was brought to him, his
kindest wish, as he stood stroking her long ringlets, was, "May God make
this world to you, my child, as beautiful as it has been to me!" His own
testimony declares,--

  "The angel who presided at my birth
  Said,--'Little creature, formed of joy and mirth,
  Go, love without the help of anything on earth!'"

But much help from above came to him. The living lines that sprung
beneath his pencil were but reminiscences of his spiritual home.
Immortal visitants, unseen by common eyes, hung enraptured over his
sketches, lent a loving ear to his songs, and left with him their legacy
to Earth. There was no looking back mournfully on the past, nor forward
impatiently to the future, but a rapturous, radiant, eternal now. Every
morning came heavy-freighted with its own delights; every evening
brought its own exceeding great reward.

So, refusing to the last to work in traces,--flying out against
Reynolds, the bland and popular President of the Royal Academy, yet
acknowledging with enthusiasm what he deemed to be excellence,--loving
Fuseli with a steadfast love through all neglect, and hurling his
indignation at a public that refused to see his worth,--flouting at
Bacon, the great philosopher, and fighting for Barry, the restorer of
the antique, he resolutely pursued his appointed way unmoved. But the
day was fast drawing on into darkness. The firm will never quailed, but
the sturdy feet faltered. Yet, as the sun went down, soft lights
overspread the heavens. Young men came to him with fresh hearts, and
drew out all the freshness of his own. Little children learned to watch
for his footsteps over the Hampstead hills, and sat on his knee, sunning
him with their caresses. Men who towered above their time, reverencing
the god within, and bowing not down to the _dæmon à la mode_, gathered
around him, listened to his words, and did obeisance to his genius. They
never teased him with unsympathetic questioning, or enraged him with
blunt contradiction. They received his visions simply, and discussed
them rationally, deeming them worthy of study rather than of ridicule or
vulgar incredulity. To their requests the spirits were docile. Sitting
by his side at midnight, they watched while he summoned from unknown
realms long-vanished shades. William Wallace arose from his "gory bed,"
Edward I. turned back from the lilies of France, and, forgetting their
ancient hate, stood before him with placid dignity. The man who built
the Pyramids lifted his ungainly features from the ingulfing centuries;
souls of blood--thirsty men, duly forced into the shape of fleas, lent
their hideousness to his night; and the Evil One himself did not disdain
to sit for his portrait to this undismayed magician. That these are
actual portraits of concrete object? is not to be affirmed. That they
are portraits of what Blake saw is as little to be denied. We are
assured that his whole manner was that of a man copying, and not
inventing, and the simplicity and sincerity of his life forbid any
thought of intentional deceit. No criticism affected him. Nothing could
shake his faith. "It must be right: I saw it so," was the beginning and
end of his defence. The testimony of these friends of his is that he was
of all artists most spiritual, devoted, and single-minded. One of them
says, if asked to point out among the intellectual a happy man, he
should at once think of Blake. One, a young artist, finding his
invention flag for a whole fortnight, had recourse to Blake.

"It is just so with us," he exclaimed, turning to his wife, "is it not,
for weeks together, wh

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