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The Professor at the Breakfast-Table

by Oliver Wendell Holmes · English · Gutenberg #2665 · 560,206 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Professor at the Breakfast-Table

Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes


        
Release date: September 27, 2004 [eBook #2665]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE ***




Produced by David Widger







THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE

by Oliver Wendell Holmes




PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION.

The reader of to-day will not forget, I trust, that it is nearly a
quarter of a century since these papers were written. Statements which
were true then are not necessarily true now. Thus, the speed of the
trotting horse has been so much developed that the record of the year
when the fastest time to that date was given must be very considerably
altered, as may be seen by referring to a note on page 49 of the
“Autocrat.” No doubt many other statements and opinions might be more or
less modified if I were writing today instead of having written before
the war, when the world and I were both more than a score of years
younger.

These papers followed close upon the track of the “Autocrat.” They had
to endure the trial to which all second comers are subjected, which is
a formidable ordeal for the least as well as the greatest. Paradise
Regained and the Second Part of Faust are examples which are enough
to warn every one who has made a jingle fair hit with his arrow of the
danger of missing when he looses “his fellow of the selfsame flight.”

There is good reason why it should be so. The first juice that runs of
itself from the grapes comes from the heart of the fruit, and tastes
of the pulp only; when the grapes are squeezed in the press the flow
betrays the flavor of the skin. If there is any freshness in the
original idea of the work, if there is any individuality in the method
or style of a new author, or of an old author on a new track, it will
have lost much of its first effect when repeated. Still, there have not
been wanting readers who have preferred this second series of papers to
the first. The new papers were more aggressive than the earlier ones,
and for that reason found a heartier welcome in some quarters, and met
with a sharper antagonism in others. It amuses me to look back on some
of the attacks they called forth. Opinions which do not excite the
faintest show of temper at this time from those who do not accept them
were treated as if they were the utterances of a nihilist incendiary. It
required the exercise of some forbearance not to recriminate.

How a stray sentence, a popular saying, the maxim of some wise man, a
line accidentally fallen upon and remembered, will sometimes help one
when he is all ready to be vexed or indignant! One day, in the time when
I was young or youngish, I happened to open a small copy of “Tom Jones,”
 and glance at the title-page. There was one of those little engravings
opposite, which bore the familiar name of “T. Uwins,” as I remember it,
and under it the words “Mr. Partridge bore all this patiently.” How
many times, when, after rough usage from ill-mannered critics, my own
vocabulary of vituperation was simmering in such a lively way that it
threatened to boil and lift its lid and so boil over, those words have
calmed the small internal effervescence! There is very little in
them and very little of them; and so there is not much in a linchpin
considered by itself, but it often keeps a wheel from coming off and
prevents what might be a catastrophe. The chief trouble in offering such
papers as these to the readers of to-day is that their heresies
have become so familiar among intelligent people that they have too
commonplace an aspect. All the lighthouses and land-marks of belief
bear so differently from the way in which they presented themselves when
these papers were written that it is hard to recognize that we and our
fellow-passengers are still in the same old vessel sailing the same
unfathomable sea and bound to the same as yet unseen harbor.

But after all, there is not enough theology, good or bad, in
these papers to cause them to be inscribed on the Protestant Index
Expurgatorius; and if they are medicated with a few questionable dogmas
or antidogmas, the public has become used to so much rougher treatments,
that what was once an irritant may now act as an anodyne, and the reader
may nod over pages which, when they were first written, would have waked
him into a paroxysm of protest and denunciation.

November, 1882.




PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION

This book is one of those which, if it lives for a number of decades,
and if it requires any Preface at all, wants a new one every ten
years. The first Preface to a book is apt to be explanatory, perhaps
apologetic, in the expectation of attacks from various quarters. If the
book is in some points in advance of public opinion, it is natural that
the writer should try to smooth the way to the reception of his more or
less aggressive ideas. He wishes to convince, not to offend,--to obtain
a hearing for his thought, not to stir up angry opposition in those
who do not accept it. There is commonly an anxious look about a first
Preface. The author thinks he shall be misapprehended about this or that
matter, that his well-meant expressions will probably be invidiously
interpreted by those whom he looks upon as prejudiced critics, and if he
deals with living questions that he will be attacked as a destructive
by the conservatives and reproached for his timidity by the noisier
radicals. The first Preface, therefore, is likely to be the weakest part
of a work containing the thoughts of an honest writer.

After a time the writer has cooled down from his excitement,--has got
over his apprehensions, is pleased to find that his book is still read,
and that he must write a new Preface. He comes smiling to his task. How
many things have explained themselves in the ten or twenty or thirty
years since he came before his untried public in those almost plaintive
paragraphs in which he introduced himself to his readers,--for the
Preface writer, no matter how fierce a combatant he may prove, comes on
to the stage with his shield on his right arm and his sword in his left
hand.

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table came out in the “Atlantic Monthly”
 and introduced itself without any formal Preface. A quarter of a century
later the Preface of 1882, which the reader has just had laid before
him, was written. There is no mark of worry, I think, in that. Old
opponents had come up and shaken hands with the author they had attacked
or denounced. Newspapers which had warned their subscribers against him
were glad to get him as a contributor to their columns. A great change
had come over the community with reference to their beliefs. Christian
believers were united as never before in the feeling that, after all,
their common object was to elevate the moral and religious standard of
humanity. But within the special compartments of the great Christian
fold the marks of division have pronounced themselves in the most
unmistakable manner. As an example we may take the lines of
cleavage which have shown themselves in the two great churches, the
Congregational and the Presbyterian, and the very distinct fissure which
is manifest in the transplanted Anglican church of this country. Recent
circumstances have brought out the fact of the great change in the
dogmatic communities which has been going on silently but surely.
The licensing of a missionary, the transfer of a Professor from
one department to another, the election of a Bishop,--each of these
movements furnishes evidence that there is no such thing as an air-tight
reservoir of doctrinal finalities.

The folding-doors are wide open to every Protestant to enter all the
privileged precincts and private apartments of the various exclusive
religious organizations. We may demand the credentials of every
creed and catechise all the catechisms. So we may discuss the gravest
questions unblamed over our morning coffee-cups or our evening tea-cups.
There is no rest for the Protestant until he gives up his legendary
anthropology and all its dogmatic dependencies.

It is only incidentally, however, that the Professor at the
Breakfast-Table handles matters which are the subjects of religious
controversy. The reader who is sensitive about having his fixed beliefs
dealt with as if they were open to question had better skip the pages
which look as if they would disturb his complacency. “Faith” is the most
precious of possessions, and it dislikes being meddled with. It means,
of course, self-trust,--that is, a belief in the value of our own
opinion of a doctrine, of a church, of a religion, of a Being, a belief
quite independent of any evidence that we can bring to convince a jury
of our fellow beings. Its roots are thus inextricably entangled with
those of self-love and bleed as mandrakes were said to, when pulled up
as weeds. Some persons may even at this late day take offence at a few
opinions expressed in the following pages, but most of these passages
will be read without loss of temper by those who disagree with them, and
by-and-by they may be found too timid and conservative for intelligent
readers, if they are still read by any.

BEVERLY FARM, MASS., June 18, 1891. O. W. H.




THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.

    What he said, what he heard, and what he saw.




I

I intended to have signalized my first appearance by a certain large
statement, which I flatter myself is the nearest approach to a universal
formula, of life yet promulgated at this breakfast-table. It would
have had a grand effect. For this purpose I fixed my eyes on a certain
divinity-student, with the intention of exchanging a few phrases, and
then forcing my court-card, namely, The great end of being.--I will
thank you for the sugar,--I said.--Man is a dependent creature.

It is a small favor to ask,--said the divinity-student,--and passed the
sugar to me.

--Life is a great bundle of little things,--I said.

The divinity-student smiled, as if that were the concluding epigram of
the sugar question.

You smile,--I said.--Perhaps life seems to you a little bundle of great
things?

The divinity-student started a laugh, but suddenly reined it back with a
pull, as one throws a horse on his haunches.--Life is a great bundle of
great things,--he said.

(NOW, THEN!) The great end of being, after all, is....

Hold on!--said my neighbor, a young fellow whose name seems to be John,
and nothing else,--for that is what they all call him,--hold on! the
Sculpin is go'n' to say somethin'.

Now the Sculpin (Cottus Virginianus) is a little water-beast which
pretends to consider itself a fish, and, under that pretext, hangs about
the piles upon which West-Boston Bridge is built, swallowing the bait
and hook intended for flounders. On being drawn from the water, it
exposes an immense head, a diminutive bony carcass, and a surface so
full of spines, ridges, ruffles, and frills, that the naturalists have
not been able to count them without quarrelling about the number, and
that the colored youth, whose sport they spoil, do not like to touch
them, and especially to tread on them, unless they happen to have shoes
on, to cover the thick white soles of their broad black feet.

When, therefore, I heard the young fellow's exclamation, I looked round
the table with curiosity to see what it meant. At the further end of it
I saw a head, and a--a small portion of a little deformed body, mounted
on a high chair, which brought the occupant up to a fair level enough
for him to get at his food. His whole appearance was so grotesque, I
felt for a minute as if there was a showman behind him who would pull
him down presently and put up Judy, or the hangman, or the Devil, or
some other wooden personage of the famous spectacle. I contrived to lose
the first of his sentence, but what I heard began so:

--by the Frog-Pond, when there were frogs in and the folks used to come
down from the tents on section and Independence days with their pails to
get water to make egg-pop with. Born in Boston; went to school in Boston
as long as the boys would let me.--The little man groaned, turned, as
if to look around, and went on.--Ran away from school one day to see
Phillips hung for killing Denegri with a logger-head. That was in flip
days, when there were always two three loggerheads in the fire. I'm a
Boston boy, I tell you,--born at North End, and mean to be buried on
Copp's Hill, with the good old underground people,--the Worthylakes,
and the rest of 'em. Yes,--up on the old hill, where they buried Captain
Daniel Malcolm in a stone grave, ten feet deep, to keep him safe from
the red-coats, in those old times when the world was frozen up tight
and there was n't but one spot open, and that was right over Faneuil
all,--and black enough it looked, I tell you! There 's where my bones
shall lie, Sir, and rattle away when the big guns go off at the Navy
Yard opposite! You can't make me ashamed of the old place! Full crooked
little streets;--I was born and used to run round in one of 'em--

--I should think so,--said that young man whom I hear them call
“John,”--softly, not meaning to be heard, nor to be cruel, but thinking
in a half-whisper, evidently.--I should think so; and got kinked up,
turnin' so many corners.--The little man did not hear what was said, but
went on,--

--full of crooked little streets; but I tell you Boston has opened, and
kept open, more turnpikes that lead straight to free thought and free
speech and free deeds than any other city of live men or dead men,--I
don't care how broad their streets are, nor how high their steeples!

--How high is Bosting meet'n'-house?--said a person with black whiskers
and imperial, a velvet waistcoat, a guard-chain rather too massive, and
a diamond pin so very large that the most trusting nature might confess
an inward suggestion,--of course, nothing amounting to a suspicion. For
this is a gentleman from a great city, and sits next to the landlady's
daughter, who evidently believes in him, and is the object of his
especial attention.

How high?--said the little man.--As high as the first step of the stairs
that lead to the New Jerusalem. Is n't that high enough?

It is,--I said.--The great end of being is to harmonize man with the
order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be
so still. But who shall tune the pitch-pipe? Quis cus-(On the whole, as
this quotation was not entirely new, and, being in a foreign language,
might not be familiar to all the boarders, I thought I would not finish
it.)

--Go to the Bible!--said a sharp voice from a sharp-faced, sharp-eyed,
sharp-elbowed, strenuous-looking woman in a black dress, appearing as
if it began as a piece of mourning and perpetuated itself as a bit of
economy.

You speak well, Madam,--I said;--yet there is room for a gloss or
commentary on what you say. “He who would bring back the wealth of the
Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies.” What you bring away
from the Bible depends to some extent on what you carry to it.--Benjamin
Franklin! Be so good as to step up to my chamber and bring me down the
small uncovered pamphlet of twenty pages which you will find lying under
the “Cruden's Concordance.” [The boy took a large bite, which left a
very perfect crescent in the slice of bread-and-butter he held, and
departed on his errand, with the portable fraction of his breakfast to
sustain him on the way.]

--Here it is. “Go to the Bible. A Dissertation, etc., etc. By J. J.
Flournoy. Athens, Georgia, 1858.”

Mr. Flournoy, Madam, has obeyed the precept which you have judiciously
delivered. You may be interested, Madam, to know what are the
conclusions at which Mr. J. J. Flournoy of Athens, Georgia, has arrived.
You shall hear, Madam. He has gone to the Bible, and he has come back
from the Bible, bringing a remedy for existing social evils, which, if
it is the real specific, as it professes to be, is of great interest to
humanity, and to the female part of humanity in particular. It is what
he calls TRIGAMY, Madam, or the marrying of three wives, so that “good
old men” may be solaced at once by the companionship of the wisdom of
maturity, and of those less perfected but hardly less engaging qualities
which are found at an earlier period of life. He has followed your
precept, Madam; I hope you accept his conclusions.

The female boarder in black attire looked so puzzled, and, in fact, “all
abroad,” after the delivery of this “counter” of mine, that I left her
to recover her wits, and went on with the conversation, which I was
beginning to get pretty well in hand.

But in the mean time I kept my eye on the female boarder to see what
effect I had produced. First, she was a little stunned at having
her argument knocked over. Secondly, she was a little shocked at the
tremendous character of the triple matrimonial suggestion. Thirdly.--I
don't like to say what I thought. Something seemed to have pleased her
fancy. Whether it was, that, if trigamy should come into fashion, there
would be three times as many chances to enjoy the luxury of saying,
“No!” is more than I, can tell you. I may as well mention that B. F.
came to me after breakfast to borrow the pamphlet for “a lady,”--one of
the boarders, he said,--looking as if he had a secret he wished to be
relieved of.

--I continued.--If a human soul is necessarily to be trained up in the
faith of those from whom it inherits its body, why, there is the end of
all reason. If, sooner or later, every soul is to look for truth with
its own eyes, the first thing is to recognize that no presumption in
favor of any particular belief arises from the fact of our inheriting
it. Otherwise you would not give the Mahometan a fair chance to become a
convert to a better religion.

The second thing would be to depolarize every fixed religious idea in
the mind by changing the word which stands for it.

--I don't know what you mean by “depolarizing” an idea,--said the
divinity-student.

I will tell you,--I said.--When a given symbol which represents a
thought has lain for a certain length of time in the mind, it undergoes
a change like that which rest in a certain position gives to iron. It
becomes magnetic in its relations,--it is traversed by strange forces
which did not belong to it. The word, and consequently the idea it
represents, is polarized.

The religious currency of mankind, in thought, in speech, and in print,
consists entirely of polarized words. Borrow one of these from another
language and religion, and you will find it leaves all its magnetism
behind it. Take that famous word, O'm, of the Hindoo mythology. Even a
priest cannot pronounce it without sin; and a holy Pundit would shut his
ears and run away from you in horror, if you should say it aloud. What
do you care for O'm? If you wanted to get the Pundit to look at his
religion fairly, you must first depolarize this and all similar words
for him. The argument for and against new translations of the Bible
really turns on this. Skepticism is afraid to trust its truths in
depolarized words, and so cries out against a new translation. I think,
myself, if every idea our Book contains could be shelled out of its old
symbol and put into a new, clean, unmagnetic word, we should have some
chance of reading it as philosophers, or wisdom-lovers, ought to read
it,--which we do not and cannot now any more than a Hindoo can read the
“Gayatri” as a fair man and lover of truth should do. When society has
once fairly dissolved the New Testament, which it never has done yet, it
will perhaps crystallize it over again in new forms of language.

I did n't know you was a settled minister over this parish,--said the
young fellow near me.

A sermon by a lay-preacher may be worth listening--I replied, calmly.
--It gives the parallax of thought and feeling as they appear to the
observers from two very different points of view. If you wish to get
the distance of a heavenly body, you know that you must take two
observations from remote points of the earth's orbit,--in midsummer and
midwinter, for instance. To get the parallax of heavenly truths, you
must take an observation from the position of the laity as well as
of the clergy. Teachers and students of theology get a certain look,
certain conventional tones of voice, a clerical gait, a professional
neckcloth, and habits of mind as professional as their externals. They
are scholarly men and read Bacon, and know well enough what the “idols
of the tribe” are. Of course they have their false gods, as all men that
follow one exclusive calling are prone to do.--The clergy have played
the part of the flywheel in our modern civilization. They have never
suffered it to stop. They have often carried on its movement, when
other moving powers failed, by the momentum stored in their vast body.
Sometimes, too, they have kept it back by their vis inertia, when its
wheels were like to grind the bones of some old canonized error
into fertilizers for the soil that yields the bread of life. But the
mainspring of the world's onward religious movement is not in them, nor
in any one body of men, let me tell you. It is the people that makes
the clergy, and not the clergy that makes the people. Of course, the
profession reacts on its source with variable energy.--But there never
was a guild of dealers or a company of craftsmen that did not need sharp
looking after.

Our old friend, Dr. Holyoke, whom we gave the dinner to some time
since, must have known many people that saw the great bonfire in Harvard
College yard.

--Bonfire?--shrieked the little man.--The bonfire when Robert Calef's
book was burned?

The same,--I said,--when Robert Calef the Boston merchant's book was
burned in the yard of Harvard College, by order of Increase Mather,
President of the College and Minister of the Gospel. You remember the
old witchcraft revival of '92, and how stout Master Robert Calef, trader
of Boston, had the pluck to tell the ministers and judges what a set of
fools and worse than fools they were--

Remember it?--said the little man.--I don't think I shall forget it,
as long as I can stretch this forefinger to point with, and see what it
wears. There was a ring on it.

May I look at it?--I said.

Where it is,--said the little man;--it will never come off, till it
falls off from the bone in the darkness and in the dust.

He pushed the high chair on which he sat slightly back from the table,
and dropped himself, standing, to the floor,--his head being only a
little above the level of the table, as he stood. With pain and labor,
lifting one foot over the other, as a drummer handles his sticks, he
took a few steps from his place,--his motions and the deadbeat of the
misshapen boots announcing to my practised eye and ear the malformation
which is called in learned language talipes varus, or inverted
club-foot.

Stop! stop!--I said,--let me come to you.

The little man hobbled back, and lifted himself by the left arm, with
an ease approaching to grace which surprised me, into his high chair.
I walked to his side, and he stretched out the forefinger of his right
hand, with the ring upon it. The ring had been put on long ago, and
could not pass the misshapen joint. It was one of those funeral rings
which used to be given to relatives and friends after the decease of
persons of any note or importance. Beneath a round fit of glass was a
death's head. Engraved on one side of this, “L. B. AEt. 22,”--on the
other, “Ob. 1692”

My grandmother's grandmother,--said the little man.--Hanged for a witch.
It does n't seem a great while ago. I knew my grandmother, and loved
her. Her mother was daughter to the witch that Chief Justice Sewall
hanged and Cotton Mather delivered over to the Devil.--That was Salem,
though, and not Boston. No, not Boston. Robert Calef, the Boston
merchant, it was that blew them all to--

Never mind where he blew them to,--I said; for the little man was
getting red in the face, and I did n't know what might come next.

This episode broke me up, as the jockeys say, out of my square
conversational trot; but I settled down to it again.

--A man that knows men, in the street, at their work, human nature in
its shirt-sleeves, who makes bargains with deacons, instead of talking
over texts with them, a man who has found out that there are plenty of
praying rogues and swearing saints in the world,--above all, who has
found out, by living into the pith and core of life, that all of the
Deity which can be folded up between the sheets of any human book is to
the Deity of the firmament, of the strata, of the hot aortic flood of
throbbing human life, of this infinite, instantaneous consciousness in
which the soul's being consists,--an incandescent point in the filament
connecting the negative pole of a past eternity with the positive pole
of an eternity that is to come,--that all of the Deity which any human
book can hold is to this larger Deity of the working battery of the
universe only as the films in a book of gold-leaf are to the broad
seams and curdled lumps of ore that lie in unsunned mines and virgin
placers,--Oh!--I was saying that a man who lives out-of-doors, among
live people, gets some things into his head he might not find in the
index of his “Body of Divinity.”

I tell you what,--the idea of the professions' digging a moat round
their close corporations, like that Japanese one at Jeddo, on the bottom
of which, if travellers do not lie, you could put Park Street Church and
look over the vane from its side, and try to stretch another such spire
across it without spanning the chasm,--that idea, I say, is pretty
nearly worn out. Now when a civilization or a civilized custom falls
into senile dementia, there is commonly a judgment ripe for it, and it
comes as plagues come, from a breath,--as fires come, from a spark.

Here, look at medicine. Big wigs, gold-headed canes, Latin
prescriptions, shops full of abominations, recipes a yard long, “curing”
 patients by drugging as sailors bring a wind by whistling, selling lies
at a guinea apiece,--a routine, in short, of giving unfortunate sick
people a mess of things either too odious to swallow or too acrid to
hold, or, if that were possible, both at once.

--You don't know what I mean, indignant and not unintelligent
country-practitioner? Then you don't know the history of medicine,--and
that is not my fault. But don't expose yourself in any outbreak of
eloquence; for, by the mortar in which Anaxarchus was pounded! I did not
bring home Schenckius and Forestus and Hildanus, and all the old folios
in calf and vellum I will show you, to be bullied by the proprietor,
of a “Wood and Bache,” and a shelf of peppered sheepskin reprints by
Philadelphia Editors. Besides, many of the profession and I know
a little something of each other, and you don't think I am such a
simpleton as to lose their good opinion by saying what the better heads
among them would condemn as unfair and untrue? Now mark how the great
plague came on the generation of drugging doctors, and in what form it
fell.

A scheming drug-vender, (inventive genius,) an utterly untrustworthy and
incompetent observer, (profound searcher of Nature,) a shallow dabbler
in erudition, (sagacious scholar,) started the monstrous fiction
(founded the immortal system) of Homoeopathy. I am very fair, you
see,--you can help yourself to either of these sets of phrases.

All the reason in the world would not have had so rapid and general an
effect on the public mind to disabuse it of the idea that a drug is a
good thing in itself, instead of being, as it is, a bad thing, as was
produced by the trick (system) of this German charlatan (theorist). Not
that the wiser part of the profession needed him to teach them; but the
routinists and their employers, the “general practitioners,” who lived
by selling pills and mixtures, and their drug-consuming customers, had
to recognize that people could get well, unpoisoned. These dumb cattle
would not learn it of themselves, and so the murrain of Homoeopathy fell
on them.

--You don't know what plague has fallen on the practitioners of
theology? I will tell you, then. It is Spiritualism. While some are
crying out against it as a delusion of the Devil, and some are laughing
at it as an hysteric folly, and some are getting angry with it as a
mere trick of interested or mischievous persons, Spiritualism is quietly
undermining the traditional ideas of the future state which have been
and are still accepted,--not merely in those who believe in it, but in
the general sentiment of the community, to a larger extent than most
good people seem to be aware of. It need n't be true, to do this, any
more than Homoeopathy need, to do its work. The Spiritualists have some
pretty strong instincts to pry over, which no doubt have been roughly
handled by theologians at different times. And the Nemesis of the pulpit
comes, in a shape it little thought of, beginning with the snap of a
toe-joint, and ending with such a crack of old beliefs that the roar
of it is heard in all the ministers' studies of Christendom? Sir, you
cannot have people of cultivation, of pure character, sensible enough in
common things, large-hearted women, grave judges, shrewd business-men,
men of science, professing to be in communication with the spiritual
world and keeping up constant intercourse with it, without its gradually
reacting on the whole conception of that other life. It is the folly of
the world, constantly, which confounds its wisdom. Not only out of
the mouths of babes and sucklings, but out of the mouths of fools and
cheats, we may often get our truest lessons. For the fool's judgment is
a dog-vane that turns with a breath, and the cheat watches the clouds
and sets his weathercock by them,--so that one shall often see by
their pointing which way the winds of heaven are blowing, when the
slow-wheeling arrows and feathers of what we call the Temples of Wisdom
are turning to all points of the compass.

--Amen!--said the young fellow called John--Ten minutes by the watch.
Those that are unanimous will please to signify by holding up their left
foot!

I looked this young man steadily in the face for about thirty seconds.
His countenance was as calm as that of a reposing infant. I think it was
simplicity, rather than mischief, with perhaps a youthful playfulness,
that led him to this outbreak. I have often noticed that even quiet
horses, on a sharp November morning, when their coats are beginning to
get the winter roughness, will give little sportive demi-kicks, with
slight sudden elevation of the subsequent region of the body, and a
sharp short whinny,--by no means intending to put their heels through
the dasher, or to address the driver rudely, but feeling, to use a
familiar word, frisky. This, I think, is the physiological condition
of the young person, John. I noticed, however, what I should call a
palpebral spasm, affecting the eyelid and muscles of one side, which, if
it were intended for the facial gesture called a wink, might lead me to
suspect a disposition to be satirical on his part.

--Resuming the conversation, I remarked,--I am, ex officio, as a
Professor, a conservative. For I don't know any fruit that clings to
its tree so faithfully, not even a “froze-'n'-thaw” winter-apple, as a
Professor to the bough of which his chair is made. You can't shake him
off, and it is as much as you can do to pull him off. Hence, by a chain
of induction I need not unwind, he tends to conservatism generally.

But then, you know, if you are sailing the Atlantic, and all at once
find yourself in a current, and the sea covered with weeds, and drop
your Fahrenheit over the side and find it eight or ten degrees higher
than in the ocean generally, there is no use in flying in the face of
facts and swearing there is no such thing as a Gulf-Stream, when you are
in it.

You can't keep gas in a bladder, and you can't keep knowledge tight in
a profession. Hydrogen will leak out, and air will leak in, through
India-rubber; and special knowledge will leak out, and general knowledge
will leak in, though a profession were covered with twenty thicknesses
of sheepskin diplomas.

By Jove, Sir, till common sense is well mixed up with medicine, and
common manhood with theology, and common honesty with law, We the
people, Sir, some of us with nut-crackers, and some of us with
trip-hammers, and some of us with pile-drivers, and some of us coming
with a whish! like air-stones out of a lunar volcano, will crash down
on the lumps of nonsense in all of them till we have made powder of
them--like Aaron's calf.

If to be a conservative is to let all the drains of thought choke up and
keep all the soul's windows down,--to shut out the sun from the east and
the wind from the west,--to let the rats run free in the cellar, and the
moths feed their fill in the chambers, and the spiders weave their lace
before the mirrors, till the soul's typhus is bred out of our neglect,
and we begin to snore in its coma or rave in its delirium,--I, Sir, am
a bonnet-rouge, a red cap of the barricades, my friends, rather than a
conservative.

--Were you born in Boston, Sir?--said the little man,--looking eager and
excited.

I was not,--I replied.

It's a pity,--it's a pity,--said the little man;--it 's the place to be
born in. But if you can't fix it so as to be born here, you can come
and live here. Old Ben Franklin, the father of American science and the
American Union, was n't ashamed to be born here. Jim Otis, the father
of American Independence, bothered about in the Cape Cod marshes awhile,
but he came to Boston as soon as he got big enough. Joe Warren, the
first bloody ruffed-shirt of the Revolution, was as good as born here.
Parson Charming strolled along this way from Newport, and stayed
here. Pity old Sam Hopkins hadn't come, too;--we'd have made a man of
him,--poor, dear, good old Christian heathen! There he lies, as peaceful
as a young baby, in the old burying-ground! I've stood on the slab
many a time. Meant well,--meant well. Juggernaut. Parson Charming put
a little oil on one linchpin, and slipped it out so softly, the first
thing they knew about it was the wheel of that side was down. T'
other fellow's at work now, but he makes more noise about it. When the
linchpin comes out on his side, there'll be a jerk, I tell you! Some
think it will spoil the old cart, and they pretend to say that there are
valuable things in it which may get hurt. Hope not,--hope not. But this
is the great Macadamizing place,--always cracking up something.

Cracking up Boston folks,--said the gentleman with the diamond-pin,
whom, for convenience' sake, I shall hereafter call the Koh-i-noor.

The little man turned round mechanically towards him, as Maelzel's Turk
used to turn, carrying his head slowly and horizontally, as if it went
by cogwheels.--Cracking up all sorts of things,--native and foreign
vermin included,--said the little man.

This remark was thought by some of us to have a hidden personal
application, and to afford a fair opening for a lively rejoinder, if
the Koh-i-noor had been so disposed. The little man uttered it with the
distinct wooden calmness with which the ingenious Turk used to exclaim,
E-chec! so that it must have been heard. The party supposed to be
interested in the remark was, however, carrying a large knife-bladeful
of something to his mouth just then, which, no doubt, interfered with
the reply he would have made.

--My friend who used to board here was accustomed sometimes, in a
pleasant way, to call himself the Autocrat of the table,--meaning, I
suppose, that he had it all his own way among the boarders. I think our
small boarder here is like to prove a refractory subject, if I undertake
to use the sceptre my friend meant to bequeath me, too magisterially.
I won't deny that sometimes, on rare occasions, when I have been in
company with gentlemen who preferred listening, I have been guilty of
the same kind of usurpation which my friend openly justified. But I
maintain, that I, the Professor, am a good listener. If a man can tell
me a fact which subtends an appreciable angle in the horizon of thought,
I am as receptive as the contribution-box in a congregation of colored
brethren. If, when I am exposing my intellectual dry-goods, a man will
begin a good story, I will have them all in, and my shutters up, before
he has got to the fifth “says he,” and listen like a three-years' child,
as the author of the “Old Sailor” says. I had rather hear one of those
grand elemental laughs from either of our two Georges, (fictitious
names, Sir or Madam,) glisten to one of those old playbills of our
College days, in which “Tom and Jerry” (“Thomas and Jeremiah,” as the
old Greek Professor was said to call it) was announced to be brought on
the stage with whole force of the Faculty, read by our Frederick, (no
such person, of course,) than say the best things I might by any chance
find myself capable of saying. Of course, if I come across a real
thinker, a suggestive, acute, illuminating, informing talker, I enjoy
the luxury of sitting still for a while as much as another.

Nobody talks much that does n't say unwise things,--things he did not
mean to say; as no person plays much without striking a false note
sometimes. Talk, to me, is only spading up the ground for crops of
thought. I can't answer for what will turn up. If I could, it would
n't be talking, but “speaking my piece.” Better, I think, the hearty
abandonment of one's self to the suggestions of the moment at the risk
of an occasional slip of the tongue, perceived the instant it escapes,
but just one syllable too late, than the royal reputation of never
saying a foolish thing.

--What shall I do with this little man?--There is only one thing
to do,--and that is to let him talk when he will. The day of the
“Autocrat's” monologues is over.

--My friend,--said I to the young fellow whom, as I have said,
the boarders call “John,”--My friend,--I said, one morning, after
breakfast,--can you give me any information respecting the deformed
person who sits at the other end of the table?

What! the Sculpin?--said the young fellow.

The diminutive person, with angular curvature of the spine,--I said,
--and double talipes varus,--I beg your pardon,--with two club-feet.

Is that long word what you call it when a fellah walks so?--said the
young man, making his fists revolve round an imaginary axis, as you may
have seen youth of tender age and limited pugilistic knowledge, when
they show how they would punish an adversary, themselves protected by
this rotating guard,--the middle knuckle, meantime, thumb-supported,
fiercely prominent, death-threatening.

It is,--said I.--But would you have the kindness to tell me if you know
anything about this deformed person?

About the Sculpin?--said the young fellow.

My good friend,--said I,--I am sure, by your countenance, you would not
hurt the feelings of one who has been hardly enough treated by Nature
to be spared by his fellows. Even in speaking of him to others, I could
wish that you might not employ a term which implies contempt for what
should inspire only pity.

A fellah 's no business to be so crooked,--said the young man called
John.

Yes, yes,--I said, thoughtfully,--the strong hate the weak. It's
all right. The arrangement has reference to the race, and not to
the individual. Infirmity must be kicked out, or the stock run down.
Wholesale moral arrangements are so different from retail!--I understand
the instinct, my friend,--it is cosmic,--it is planetary,--it is a
conservative principle in creation.

The young fellow's face gradually lost its expression as I was speaking,
until it became as blank of vivid significance as the countenance of a
gingerbread rabbit with two currants in the place of eyes. He had not
taken my meaning.

Presently the intelligence came back with a snap that made him wink, as
he answered,--Jest so. All right. A 1. Put her through. That's the way
to talk. Did you speak to me, Sir?--Here the young man struck up that
well-known song which I think they used to sing at Masonic
festivals, beginning, “Aldiborontiphoscophornio, Where left you
Chrononhotonthologos?”

I beg your pardon,--I said;--all I meant was, that men, as temporary
occupants of a permanent abode called human life, which is improved or
injured by occupancy, according to the style of tenant, have a natural
dislike to those who, if they live the life of the race as well as of
the individual, will leave lasting injurious effects upon the abode
spoken of, which is to be occupied by countless future generations. This
is the final cause of the underlying brute instinct which we have in
common with the herds.

--The gingerbread-rabbit expression was coming on so fast, that I
thought I must try again.--It's a pity that families are kept up, where
there are such hereditary infirmities. Still, let us treat this poor man
fairly, and not call him names. Do you know what his name is?

I know what the rest of 'em call him,--said the young fellow.--They call
him Little Boston. There's no harm in that, is there?

It is an honorable term,--I replied.--But why Little Boston, in a place
where most are Bostonians?

Because nobody else is quite so Boston all over as he is,--said the
young fellow.

“L. B. Ob. 1692.”--Little Boston let him be, when we talk about him. The
ring he wears labels him well enough. There is stuff in the little man,
or he would n't stick so manfully by this crooked, crotchety old town.
Give him a chance.--You will drop the Sculpin, won't you?--I said to the
young fellow.

Drop him?--he answered,--I ha'n't took him up yet.

No, no,--the term,--I said,--the term. Don't call him so any more, if
you please. Call him Little Boston, if you like.

All right,--said the young fellow.--I would n't be hard on the poor
little--

The word he used was objectionable in point of significance and of
grammar. It was a frequent termination of certain adjectives among the
Romans,--as of those designating a person following the sea, or given to
rural pursuits. It is classed by custom among the profane words; why, it
is hard to say,--but it is largely used in the street by those who speak
of their fellows in pity or in wrath.

I never heard the young fellow apply the name of the odious pretended
fish to the little man from that day forward.

--Here we are, then, at our boarding--house. First, myself, the
Professor, a little way from the head of the table, on the right,
looking down, where the “Autocrat” used to sit. At the further end sits
the Landlady. At the head of the table, just now, the Koh-i-noor, or the
gentleman with the diamond. Opposite me is a Venerable Gentleman with a
bland countenance, who as yet has spoken little. The Divinity Student is
my neighbor on the right,--and further down, that Young Fellow of whom
I have repeatedly spoken. The Landlady's Daughter sits near the
Koh-i-noor, as I said. The Poor Relation near the Landlady. At the right
upper corner is a fresh-looking youth of whose name and history I have
as yet learned nothing. Next the further left-hand corner, near the
lower end of the table, sits the deformed person. The chair at his side,
occupying that corner, is empty. I need not specially mention the other
boarders, with the exception of Benjamin Franklin, the landlady's son,
who sits near his mother. We are a tolerably assorted set,--difference
enough and likeness enough; but still it seems to me there is something
wanting. The Landlady's Daughter is the prima donna in the way of
feminine attractions. I am not quite satisfied with this young lady. She
wears more “jewelry,” as certain young ladies call their trinkets, than
I care to see on a person in her position. Her voice is strident, her
laugh too much like a giggle, and she has that foolish way of dancing
and bobbing like a quill-float with a “minnum” biting the hook below it,
which one sees and weeps over sometimes in persons of more pretensions.
I can't help hoping we shall put something into that empty chair yet
which will add the missing string to our social harp. I hear talk of a
rare Miss who is expected. Something in the schoolgirl way, I believe.
We shall see.

--My friend who calls himself The Autocrat has given me a caution which
I am going to repeat, with my comment upon it, for the benefit of all
concerned.

Professor,--said he, one day,--don't you think your brain will run dry
before a year's out, if you don't get the pump to help the cow? Let me
tell you what happened to me once. I put a little money into a bank,
and bought a check-book, so that I might draw it as I wanted, in sums
to suit. Things went on nicely for a time; scratching with a pen was as
easy as rubbing Aladdin's Lamp; and my blank check-book seemed to be a
dictionary of possibilities, in which I could find all the synonymes of
happiness, and realize any one of them on the spot. A check came back
to me at last with these two words on it,--NO FUNDS. My check-book was a
volume of waste-paper.

Now, Professor,--said he,--I have drawn something out of your bank,
you know; and just so sure as you keep drawing out your soul's currency
without making new deposits, the next thing will be, NO FUNDS,--and then
where will you be, my boy? These little bits of paper mean your gold and
your silver and your copper, Professor; and you will certainly break up
and go to pieces, if you don't hold on to your metallic basis.

There is something in that,--said I.--Only I rather think life can coin
thought somewhat faster than I can count it off in words. What if one
shall go round and dry up with soft napkins all the dew that falls of a
June evening on the leaves of his garden? Shall there be no more dew on
those leaves thereafter? Marry, yea,--many drops, large and round and
full of moonlight as those thou shalt have absterged!

Here am I, the Professor,--a man who has lived long enough to have
plucked the flowers of life and come to the berries,--which are not
always sad-colored, but sometimes golden-hued as the crocus of April, or
rosy-cheeked as the damask of June; a man who staggered against books as
a baby, and will totter against them, if he lives to decrepitude; with
a brain full of tingling thoughts, such as they are, as a limb which
we call “asleep,” because it is so particularly awake, is of pricking
points; presenting a key-board of nerve-pulps, not as yet tanned or
ossified, to finger-touch of all outward agencies; knowing nothing of
the filmy threads of this web of life in which we insects buzz awhile,
waiting for the gray old spider to come along; contented enough with
daily realities, but twirling on his finger the key of a private Bedlam
of ideals; in knowledge feeding with the fox oftener than with the
stork,--loving better the breadth of a fertilizing inundation than
the depth of narrow artesian well; finding nothing too small for his
contemplation in the markings of the grammatophora subtilissima, and
nothing too large in the movement of the solar system towards the star
Lambda of the constellation Hercules;--and the question is, whether
there is anything left for me, the Professor, to suck out of creation,
after my lively friend has had his straw in the bung-hole of the
Universe!

A man's mental reactions with the atmosphere of life must go on, whether
he will or no, as between his blood and the air he breathes. As to
catching the residuum of the process, or what we call thought,--the
gaseous ashes of burned-out thinking,--the excretion of mental
respiration,--that will depend on many things, as, on having a favorable
intellectual temperature about one, and a fitting receptacle.--I sow
more thought-seeds in twenty-four hours' travel over the desert-sand
along which my lonely consciousness paces day and night, than I shall
throw into soil where it will germinate, in a year. All sorts of bodily
and mental perturbations come between us and the due projection of our
thought. The pulse-like “fits of easy and difficult transmission” seem
to reach even the transparent medium through which our souls are
seen. We know our humanity by its often intercepted rays, as we tell
a revolving light from a star or meteor by its constantly recurring
obscuration.

An illustrious scholar once told me, that, in the first lecture he ever
delivered, he spoke but half his allotted time, and felt as if he had
told all he knew. Braham came forward once to sing one of his most
famous and familiar songs, and for his life could not recall the first
line of it;--he told his mishap to the audience, and they screamed it
at him in a chorus of a thousand voices. Milton could not write to suit
himself, except from the autumnal to the vernal equinox. One in the
clothing-business, who, there is reason to suspect, may have inherited,
by descent, the great poet's impressible temperament, let a customer
slip through his fingers one day without fitting him with a new garment.
“Ah!” said he to a friend of mine, who was standing by, “if it hadn't
been for that confounded headache of mine this morning, I'd have had
a coat on that man, in spite of himself, before he left-the store.” A
passing throb, only,--but it deranged the nice mechanism required
to persuade the accidental human being, X, into a given piece of
broadcloth, A.

We must take care not to confound this frequent difficulty of
transmission of our ideas with want of ideas. I suppose that a man's
mind does in time form a neutral salt with the elements in the universe
for which it has special elective affinities. In fact, I look upon a
library as a kind of mental chemist's shop filled with the crystals of
all forms and hues which have come from the union of individual thought
with local circumstances or universal principles.

When a man has worked out his special affinities in this way, there
is an end of his genius as a real solvent. No more effervescence and
hissing tumult--as he pours his sharp thought on the world's biting
alkaline unbeliefs! No more corrosion of the old monumental tablets
covered with lies! No more taking up of dull earths, and turning them,
first into clear solutions, and then into lustrous prisms!

I, the Professor, am very much like other men: I shall not find out when
I have used up my affinities. What a blessed thing it is, that Nature,
when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to
make critics out of the chips that were left! Painful as the task is,
they never fail to warn the author, in the most impressive manner,
of the probabilities of failure in what he has undertaken. Sad as the
necessity is to their delicate sensibilities, they never hesitate to
advertise him of the decline of his powers, and to press upon him the
propriety of retiring before he sinks into imbecility. Trusting to their
kind offices, I shall endeavor to fulfil--

--Bridget enters and begins clearing the table.

--The following poem is my (The Professor's) only contribution to the
great department of Ocean-Cable literature. As all the poets of this
country will be engaged for the next six weeks in writing for the
premium offered by the Crystal-Palace Company for the Burns Centenary,
(so called, according to our Benjamin Franklin, because there will
be nary a cent for any of us,) poetry will be very scarce and dear.
Consumers may, consequently, be glad to take the present article, which,
by the aid of a Latin tutor--and a Professor of Chemistry, will be found
intelligible to the educated classes.



                       DE SAUTY

              AN ELECTRO-CHEMICAL ECLOGUE.

              Professor.       Blue-Nose.

     PROFESSOR.

     Tell me, O Provincial! speak, Ceruleo-Nasal!
     Lives there one De Sauty extant now among you,
     Whispering Boanerges, son of silent thunder,
     Holding talk with nations?

     Is there a De Sauty, ambulant on Tellus,
     Bifid-cleft like mortals, dormient in night-cap,
     Having sight, smell, hearing, food-receiving feature
     Three times daily patent?

     Breathes there such a being, O Ceruleo-Nasal?
     Or is he a mythus,--ancient word for “humbug,”
      --Such as Livy told about the wolf that wet-nursed
     Romulus and Remus?

     Was he born of woman, this alleged De Sauty?
     Or a living product of galvanic action,
     Like the status bred in Crosses flint-solution?
     Speak, thou Cyano-Rhinal!


     BLUE-NOSE.

     Many things thou askest, jackknife-bearing stranger,
     Much-conjecturing mortal, pork-and-treacle-waster!
     Pretermit thy whittling, wheel thine ear-flap toward me,
     Thou shalt hear them answered.

     When the charge galvanic tingled through the cable,
     At the polar focus of the wire electric
     Suddenly appeared a white-faced man among us
     Called himself “DE SAUTY.”

     As the small opossum held in pouch maternal
     Grasps the nutrient organ whence the term mammalia,
     So the unknown stranger held the wire electric,
     Sucking in the current.

     When the current strengthened, bloomed the pale-faced stranger,
     Took no drink nor victual, yet grew fat and rosy,
     And from time to time, in sharp articulation,
     Said, “All right!  DE SAUTY.”

     From the lonely station passed the utterance, spreading
     Through the pines and hemlocks to the groves of steeples
     Till the land was filled with loud reverberations
     Of “All right!  DE SAUTY.”

     When the current slackened, drooped the mystic stranger,
     Faded, faded, faded, as the stream grew weaker,
     Wasted to a shadow, with a hartshorn odor
     Of disintegration.

     Drops of deliquescence glistened on his forehead,
     Whitened round his feet the dust of efflorescence,
     Till one Monday morning, when the flow suspended,
     There was no De Sauty.

     Nothing but a cloud of elements organic,
     C. O. H. N. Ferrum, Chor.  Flu.  Sil.  Potassa,
     Calc.  Sod.  Phosph.  Mag.  Sulphur, Mang.(?) Alumin.(?) Cuprum,(?)
     Such as man is made of.

     Born of stream galvanic, with it he had perished!
     There is no De Sauty now there is no current!
     Give us a new cable, then again we'll hear him
     Cry, “All right!  DE SAUTY.”




II

Back again!--A turtle--which means a tortoise--is fond of his shell;
but if you put a live coal on his back, he crawls out of it. So the boys
say.

It is a libel on the turtle. He grows to his shell, and his shell is in
his body as much as his body is in his shell.--I don't think there
is one of our boarders quite so testudineous as I am. Nothing but a
combination of motives, more peremptory than the coal on the turtle's
back, could have got me to leave the shelter of my carapace; and after
memorable interviews, and kindest hospitalities, and grand sights, and
huge influx of patriotic pride,--for every American owns all America,--

          “Creation's heir,--the world, the world is”

his, if anybody's,--I come back with the feeling which a boned turkey
might experience, if, retaining his consciousness, he were allowed to
resume his skeleton.

Welcome, O Fighting Gladiator, and Recumbent Cleopatra, and Dying
Warrior, whose classic outlines (reproduced in the calcined mineral of
Lutetia) crown my loaded shelves! Welcome, ye triumphs of pictorial art
(repeated by the magic graver) that look down upon me from the walls of
my sacred cell! Vesalius, as Titian drew him, high-fronted, still-eyed,
thick-bearded, with signet-ring, as beseems a gentleman, with book and
carelessly-held eyeglass, marking him a scholar; thou, too, Jan Kuyper,
commonly called Jan Praktiseer, old man of a century and seven years
besides, father of twenty sons and two daughters, cut in copper by
Houbraken, bought from a portfolio on one of the Paris quais; and ye
Three Trees of Rembrandt, black in shadow against the blaze of light;
and thou Rosy Cottager of Sir Joshua, roses hinted by the peppery burin
of Bartolozzi; ye, too, of lower grades in nature, yet not unlovely for
unrenowned, Young Bull of Paulus Potter, and sleeping Cat of Cornelius
Visscher; welcome once more to my eyes! The old books look out from
the shelves, and I seem to read on their backs something asides their
titles,--a kind of solemn greeting. The crimson carpet flushes warm
under my feet. The arm-chair hugs me; the swivel-chair spins round
with me, as if it were giddy with pleasure; the vast recumbent fauteuil
stretches itself out under my weight, as one joyous with food and wine
stretches in after-dinner laughter.

The boarders were pleased to say that they were glad to get me back. One
of them ventured a compliment, namely,--that I talked as if I believed
what I said.--This was apparently considered something unusual, by its
being mentioned.

One who means to talk with entire sincerity,--I said,--always feels
himself in danger of two things, namely,--an affectation of bluntness,
like that of which Cornwall accuses Kent in “Lear,” and actual rudeness.
What a man wants to do, in talking with a stranger, is to get and to
give as much of the best and most real life that belongs to the two
talkers as the time will let him. Life is short, and conversation apt
to run to mere words. Mr. Hue I think it is, who tells us some very good
stories about the way in which two Chinese gentlemen contrive to keep up
a long talk without saying a word which has any meaning in it. Something
like this is occasionally heard on this side of the Great Wall. The best
Chinese talkers I know are some pretty women whom I meet from time
to time. Pleasant, airy, complimentary, the little flakes of flattery
glimmering in their talk like the bits of gold-leaf in eau-de-vie de
Dantzic; their accents flowing on in a soft ripple,--never a wave,
and never a calm; words nicely fitted, but never a colored phrase or
a highly-flavored epithet; they turn air into syllables so gracefully,
that we find meaning for the music they make as we find faces in the
coals and fairy palaces in the clouds. There is something very odd,
though, about this mechanical talk.

You have sometimes been in a train on the railroad when the engine was
detached a long way from the station you were approaching? Well, you
have noticed how quietly and rapidly the cars kept on, just as if the
locomotive were drawing them? Indeed, you would not have suspected that
you were travelling on the strength of a dead fact, if you had not seen
the engine running away from you on a side-track. Upon my conscience,
I believe some of these pretty women detach their minds entirely,
sometimes, from their talk,--and, what is more, that we never know the
difference. Their lips let off the fluty syllables just as their fingers
would sprinkle the music-drops from their pianos; unconscious habit
turns the phrase of thought into words just as it does that of
music into notes.--Well, they govern the world for all that, these
sweet-lipped women,--because beauty is the index of a larger fact than
wisdom.

--The Bombazine wanted an explanation.

Madam,--said I,--wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the
promise of the future.

--All this, however, is not what I was going to say. Here am I, suppose,
seated--we will say at a dinner-table--alongside of an intelligent
Englishman. We look in each other's faces,--we exchange a dozen words.
One thing is settled: we mean not to offend each other,--to be perfectly
courteous,--more than courteous; for we are the entertainer and the
entertained, and cherish particularly amiable feelings, to each other.
The claret is good; and if our blood reddens a little with its warm
crimson, we are none the less kind for it.

I don't think people that talk over their victuals are like to say
anything very great, especially if they get their heads muddled with
strong drink before they begin jabberin'.

The Bombazine uttered this with a sugary sourness, as if the words had
been steeped in a solution of acetate of lead.--The boys of my time used
to call a hit like this a “side-winder.”

--I must finish this woman.--

Madam,--I said,--the Great Teacher seems to have been fond of talking as
he sat at meat. Because this was a good while ago, in a far-off place,
you forget what the true fact of it was,--that those were real
dinners, where people were hungry and thirsty, and where you met a very
miscellaneous company. Probably there was a great deal of loose talk
among the guests; at any rate, there was always wine, we may believe.

Whatever may be the hygienic advantages or disadvantages of wine,--and
I for one, except for certain particular ends, believe in water, and,
I blush to say it, in black tea,--there is no doubt about its being the
grand specific against dull dinners. A score of people come together in
all moods of mind and body. The problem is, in the space of one hour,
more or less, to bring them all into the same condition of slightly
exalted life. Food alone is enough for one person, perhaps,--talk,
alone, for another; but the grand equalizer and fraternizer, which works
up the radiators to their maximum radiation, and the absorbents to their
maximum receptivity, is now just where it was when

          The conscious water saw its Lord and blushed,

--when six great vessels containing water, the whole amounting to more
than a hogshead-full, were changed into the best of wine. I once wrote
a song about wine, in which I spoke so warmly of it, that I was afraid
some would think it was written inter pocula; whereas it was composed
in the bosom of my family, under the most tranquillizing domestic
influences.

--The divinity-student turned towards me, looking mischievous.--Can you
tell me,--he said,--who wrote a song for a temperance celebration once,
of which the following is a verse?

     Alas for the loved one, too gentle and fair
     The joys of the banquet to chasten and share!
     Her eye lost its light that his goblet might shine,
     And the rose of her cheek was dissolved in his wine!

I did,--I answered.--What are you going to do about it?--I will tell you
another line I wrote long ago:--

     Don't be “consistent,”--but be simply true.

The longer I live, the more I am satisfied of two things: first, that
the truest lives are those that are cut rose-diamond-fashion, with many
facets answering to the many-planed aspects of the world about them;
secondly, that society is always trying in some way or other to grind
us down to a single flat surface. It is hard work to resist this
grinding-down action.--Now give me a chance. Better eternal and
universal abstinence than the brutalities of those days that made wives
and mothers and daughters and sisters blush for those whom they should
have honored, as they came reeling home from their debauches! Yet
better even excess than lying and hypocrisy; and if wine is upon all
our tables, let us praise it for its color and fragrance and social
tendency, so far as it deserves, and not hug a bottle in the closet and
pretend not to know the use of a wine-glass at a public dinner! I think
you will find that people who honestly mean to be true really contradict
themselves much more rarely than those who try to be “consistent.” But
a great many things we say can be made to appear contradictory, simply
because they are partial views of a truth, and may often look unlike at
first, as a front view of a face and its profile often do.

Here is a distinguished divine, for whom I have great respect, for I
owe him a charming hour at one of our literary anniversaries, and he
has often spoken noble words; but he holds up a remark of my friend the
“Autocrat,”--which I grieve to say he twice misquotes, by omitting the
very word which gives it its significance,--the word fluid, intended to
typify the mobility of the restricted will,--holds it up, I say, as if
it attacked the reality of the self-determining principle, instead of
illustrating its limitations by an image. Now I will not explain any
farther, still less defend, and least of all attack, but simply quote
a few lines from one of my friend's poems, printed more than ten years
ago, and ask the distinguished gentleman where he has ever asserted more
strongly or absolutely the independent will of the “subcreative centre,”
 as my heretical friend has elsewhere called man.

   --Thought, conscience, will, to make them all thy own
     He rent a pillar from the eternal throne!
   --Made in His image, thou must nobly dare
     The thorny crown of sovereignty to share.
   --Think not too meanly of thy low estate;
     Thou hast a choice; to choose is to create!

If he will look a little closely, he will see that the profile and the
full-face views of the will are both true and perfectly consistent!

Now let us come back, after this long digression, to the conversation
with the intelligent Englishman. We begin skirmishing with a few light
ideas,--testing for thoughts,--as our electro-chemical friend, De Sauty,
if there were such a person, would test for his current; trying a little
litmus-paper for acids, and then a slip of turmeric-paper for alkalies,
as chemists do with unknown compounds; flinging the lead, and looking
at the shells and sands it brings up to find out whether we are like
to keep in shallow water, or shall have to drop the deep-sea line;--in
short, seeing what we have to deal with. If the Englishman gets his
H's pretty well placed, he comes from one of the higher grades of the
British social order, and we shall find him a good companion.

But, after all, here is a great fact between us. We belong to two
different civilizations, and, until we recognize what separates us, we
are talking like Pyramus and Thisbe, without any hole in the wall to
talk through. Therefore, on the whole, if he were a superior fellow,
incapable of mistaking it for personal conceit, I think I would let out
the fact of the real American feeling about Old-World folks. They are
children to us in certain points of view. They are playing with toys we
have done with for whole-generations.

--------FOOTNOTE: The more I have observed and reflected, the more
limited seems to me the field of action of the human will. Every act of
choice involves a special relation between the ego and the conditions
before it. But no man knows what forces are at work in the determination
of his ego. The bias which decides his choice between two or more
motives may come from some unsuspected ancestral source, of which he
knows nothing at all. He is automatic in virtue of that hidden spring
of reflex action, all the time having the feeling that he is
self-determining. The Story of Elsie Yenner, written-soon after this
book was published, illustrates the direction in which my thought was
moving. 'The imaginary subject of the story obeyed her will, but her
will Obeyed the mysterious antenatal poisoning influence.

*****

That silly little drum they are always beating on, and the trumpet and
the feather they make so much noise and cut such a figure with, we have
not quite outgrown, but play with much less seriously and constantly
than they do. Then there is a whole museum of wigs, and masks, and
lace-coats, and gold-sticks, and grimaces, and phrases, which we laugh
at honestly, without affectation, that are still used in the Old-World
puppet-shows. I don't think we on our part ever understand the
Englishman's concentrated loyalty and specialized reverence. But then we
do think more of a man, as such, (barring some little difficulties about
race and complexion which the Englishman will touch us on presently,)
than any people that ever lived did think of him. Our reverence is a
great deal wider, if it is less intense. We have caste among us, to some
extent; it is true; but there is never a collar on the American wolf-dog
such as you often see on the English mastiff, notwithstanding his
robust, hearty individuality.

This confronting of two civilizations is always a grand sensation to me;
it is like cutting through the isthmus and letting the two oceans swim
into each other's laps. The trouble is, it is so difficult to let out
the whole American nature without its self-assertion seeming to take a
personal character. But I never enjoy the Englishman so much as when he
talks of church and king like Manco Capac among the Peruvians. Then you
get the real British flavor, which the cosmopolite Englishman loses.

How much better this thorough interpenetration of ideas than a barren
interchange of courtesies, or a bush-fighting argument, in which each
man tries to cover as much of himself and expose as much of his opponent
as the tangled thicket of the disputed ground will let him!

--My thoughts flow in layers or strata, at least three deep. I follow
a slow person's talk, and keep a perfectly clear under-current of my
own beneath it. Under both runs obscurely a consciousness belonging to a
third train of reflections, independent of the two others. I will try to
write out a Mental movement in three parts.

A.--First voice, or Mental Soprano,--thought follows a woman talking.

B.--Second voice, or Mental Barytone,--my running accompaniment.

C.--Third voice, or Mental Basso,--low grumble of importunate
self-repeating idea.

A.--White lace, three skirts, looped with flowers, wreath of
apple-blossoms, gold bracelets, diamond pin and ear-rings, the most
delicious berthe you ever saw, white satin slippers--

B.--Deuse take her! What a fool she is! Hear her chatter! (Look out of
window just here.--Two pages and a half of description, if it were
all written out, in one tenth of a second.)--Go ahead, old lady! (Eye
catches picture over fireplace.) There's that infernal family nose! Came
over in the “Mayflower” on the first old fool's face. Why don't they
wear a ring in it?

C.--You 'll be late at lecture,--late at lecture,--late,--late--

I observe that a deep layer of thought sometimes makes itself felt
through the superincumbent strata, thus:--The usual single or double
currents shall flow on, but there shall be an influence blending with
them, disturbing them in an obscure way, until all at once I say,--Oh,
there! I knew there was something troubling me,--and the thought which
had been working through comes up to the surface clear, definite, and
articulates itself,--a disagreeable duty, perhaps, or an unpleasant
recollection.

The inner world of thought and the outer world of events are alike in
this, that they are both brimful. There is no space between consecutive
thoughts, or between the never-ending series of actions. All pack tight,
and mould their surfaces against each other, so that in the long run
there is a wonderful average uniformity in the forms of both thoughts
and actions, just as you find that cylinders crowded all become
hexagonal prisms, and spheres pressed together are formed into regular
polyhedra.

Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no
man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped by him.
So, to carry out, with another comparison, my remark about the layers of
thought, we may consider the mind as it moves among thoughts or events,
like a circus-rider whirling round with a great troop of horses. He can
mount a fact or an idea, and guide it more or less completely, but he
cannot stop it. So, as I said in another way at the beginning, he can
stride two or three thoughts at once, but not break their steady walk,
trot, or gallop. He can only take his foot from the saddle of one
thought and put it on that of another.

--What is the saddle of a thought? Why, a word, of course.--Twenty years
after you have dismissed a thought, it suddenly wedges up to you through
the press, as if it had been steadily galloping round and round all that
time without a rider.

The will does not act in the interspaces of thought, for there are no
such interspaces, but simply steps from the back of one moving thought
upon that of another.

--I should like to ask,--said the divinity-student,--since we are
getting into metaphysics, how you can admit space, if all things are in
contact, and how you can admit time, if it is always now to something?

--I thought it best not to hear this question.

--I wonder if you know this class of philosophers in books or elsewhere.
One of them makes his bow to the public, and exhibits an unfortunate
truth bandaged up so that it cannot stir hand or foot,--as helpless,
apparently, and unable to take care of itself, as an Egyptian mummy.
He then proceeds, with the air and method of a master, to take off the
bandages. Nothing can be neater than the way in which he does it. But
as he takes off layer after layer, the truth seems to grow smaller and
smaller, and some of its outlines begin to look like something we have
seen before. At last, when he has got them all off, and the truth struts
out naked, we recognize it as a diminutive and familiar acquaintance
whom we have known in the streets all our lives. The fact is, the
philosopher has coaxed the truth into his study and put all those
bandages on; or course it is not very hard for him to take them off.
Still, a great many people like to watch the process,--he does it so
neatly!

Dear! dear! I am ashamed to write and talk, sometimes, when I see how
those functions of the large-brained, thumb-opposing plantigrade are
abused by my fellow-vertebrates,--perhaps by myself. How they spar for
wind, instead of hitting from the shoulder!

--The young fellow called John arose and placed himself in a neat
fighting attitude.--Fetch on the fellah that makes them long words!--he
said,--and planted a straight hit with the right fist in the concave
palm of the left hand with a click like a cup and ball.--You small boy
there, hurry up that “Webster's Unabridged!”

The little gentleman with the malformation, before described, shocked
the propriety of the breakfast-table by a loud utterance of three words,
of which the two last were “Webster's Unabridged,” and the first was an
emphatic monosyllable.--Beg pardon,--he added,--forgot myself. But let
us have an English dictionary, if we are to have any. I don't believe in
clipping the coin of the realm, Sir! If I put a weathercock on my house,
Sir, I want it to tell which way the wind blows up aloft,--off from the
prairies to the ocean, or off from the ocean to the prairies, or any
way it wants to blow! I don't want a weathercock with a winch in an old
gentleman's study that he can take hold of and turn, so that the vane
shall point west when the great wind overhead is blowing east with all
its might, Sir! Wait till we give you a dictionary; Sir! It takes Boston
to do that thing, Sir!

--Some folks think water can't run down-hill anywhere out of Boston,
--remarked the Koh-i-noor.

I don't know what some folks think so well as I know what some fools
say,--rejoined the Little Gentleman.--If importing most dry goods made
the best scholars, I dare say you would know where to look for 'em.--Mr.
Webster could n't spell, Sir, or would n't spell, Sir,--at any rate, he
did n't spell; and the end of it was a fight between the owners of
some copyrights and the dignity of this noble language which we have
inherited from our English fathers. Language!--the blood of the soul,
Sir! into which our thoughts run and out of which they grow! We know
what a word is worth here in Boston. Young Sam Adams got up on the stage
at Commencement, out at Cambridge there, with his gown on, the Governor
and Council looking on in the name of his Majesty, King George the
Second, and the girls looking down out of the galleries, and taught
people how to spell a word that was n't in the Colonial dictionaries!
R-e, re, s-i-s, sis, t-a-n-c-e, tance, Resistance! That was in '43, and
it was a good many years before the Boston boys began spelling it with
their muskets;--but when they did begin, they spelt it so loud that the
old bedridden women in the English almshouses heard every syllable! Yes,
yes, yes,--it was a good while before those other two Boston boys
got the class so far along that it could spell those two hard words,
Independence and Union! I tell you what, Sir, there are a thousand
lives, aye, sometimes a million, go to get a new word into a language
that is worth speaking. We know what language means too well here in
Boston to play tricks with it. We never make a new word til we have made
a new thing or a new thought, Sir! then we shaped the new mould of this
continent, we had to make a few. When, by God's permission, we abrogated
the primal curse of maternity, we had to make a word or two. The
cutwater of this great Leviathan clipper, the OCCIDENTAL,--this
thirty-wasted wind-and-steam wave-crusher,--must throw a little spray
over the human vocabulary as it splits the waters of a new world's
destiny!

He rose as he spoke, until his stature seemed to swell into the fair
human proportions. His feet must have been on the upper round of his
high chair; that was the only way I could account for it.

Puts her through fast-rate,--said the young fellow whom the boarders
call John.

The venerable and kind-looking old gentleman who sits opposite said he
remembered Sam Adams as Governor. An old man in a brown coat. Saw him
take the Chair on Boston Common. Was a boy then, and remembers sitting
on the fence in front of the old Hancock house. Recollects he had a
glazed 'lectionbun, and sat eating it and looking down on to the Common.
Lalocks flowered late that year, and he got a great bunch off from the
bushes in the Hancock front-yard.

Them 'lection-buns are no go,--said the young man John, so called.--I
know the trick. Give a fellah a fo'penny bun in the mornin', an' he
downs the whole of it. In about an hour it swells up in his stomach as
big as a football, and his feedin' 's spilt for that day. That's the way
to stop off a young one from eatin' up all the 'lection dinner.

Salem! Salem! not Boston,--shouted the little man.

But the Koh-i-noor laughed a great rasping laugh, and the boy
Benjamin Franklin looked sharp at his mother, as if he remembered the
bun-experiment as a part of his past personal history.

The Little Gentleman was holding a fork in his left hand. He stabbed a
boulder of home-made bread with it, mechanically, and looked at it as if
it ought to shriek. It did not,--but he sat as if watching it.

--Language is a solemn thing,--I said.--It grows out of life,--out of
its agonies and ecstasies, its wants and its weariness. Every language
is a temple, in which the soul of those who speak it is enshrined.
Because time softens its outlines and rounds the sharp angles of its
cornices, shall a fellow take a pickaxe to help time? Let me tell you
what comes of meddling with things that can take care of themselves.--A
friend of mine had a watch given him, when he was a boy,--a “bull's
eye,” with a loose silver case that came off like an oyster-shell from
its contents; you know them,--the cases that you hang on your thumb,
while the core, or the real watch, lies in your hand as naked as a
peeled apple. Well, he began with taking off the case, and so on from
one liberty to another, until he got it fairly open, and there were the
works, as good as if they were alive,--crown-wheel, balance-wheel, and
all the rest. All right except one thing,--there was a confounded little
hair had got tangled round the balance-wheel. So my young Solomon got a
pair of tweezers, and caught hold of the hair very nicely, and pulled it
right out, without touching any of the wheels,--when,--buzzzZZZ! and
the watch had done up twenty-four hours in double magnetic-telegraph
time!--The English language was wound up to run some thousands of years,
I trust; but if everybody is to be pulling at everything he thinks is
a hair, our grandchildren will have to make the discovery that it is a
hair-spring, and the old Anglo-Norman soul's-timekeeper will run down,
as so many other dialects have done before it. I can't stand this
meddling any better than you, Sir. But we have a great deal to be proud
of in the lifelong labors of that old lexicographer, and we must n't
be ungrateful. Besides, don't let us deceive ourselves,--the war of
the dictionaries is only a disguised rivalry of cities, colleges, and
especially of publishers. After all, it is likely that the language will
shape itself by larger forces than phonography and dictionary-making.
You may spade up the ocean as much as you like, and harrow it
afterwards, if you can,--but the moon will still lead the tides, and the
winds will form their surface.

--Do you know Richardson's Dictionary?--I said to my neighbor the
divinity-student.

Haow?--said the divinity-student.--He colored, as he noticed on my face
a twitch in one of the muscles which tuck up the corner of the mouth,
(zygomaticus major,) and which I could not hold back from making a
little movement on its own account.

It was too late.--A country-boy, lassoed when he was a half-grown colt.
Just as good as a city-boy, and in some ways, perhaps, better,--but
caught a little too old not to carry some marks of his earlier ways of
life. Foreigners, who have talked a strange tongue half their lives,
return to the language of their childhood in their dying hours.
Gentlemen in fine linen, and scholars in large libraries, taken by
surprise, or in a careless moment, will sometimes let slip a word they
knew as boys in homespun and have not spoken since that time,--but it
lay there under all their culture. That is one way you may know the
country-boys after they have grown rich or celebrated; another is by the
odd old family names, particularly those of the Hebrew prophets, which
the good old people have saddled them with.

--Boston has enough of England about it to make a good English
dictionary,--said that fresh-looking youth whom I have mentioned as
sitting at the right upper corner of the table.

I turned and looked him full in the face,--for the pure, manly
intonations arrested me. The voice was youthful, but full of
character.--I suppose some persons have a peculiar susceptibility in the
matter of voice.--Hear this.

Not long after the American Revolution, a young lady was sitting in
her father's chaise in a street of this town of Boston. She overheard a
little girl talking or singing, and was mightily taken with the tones of
her voice. Nothing would satisfy her but she must have that little girl
come and live in her father's house. So the child came, being then nine
years old. Until her marriage she remained under the same roof with
the young lady. Her children became successively inmates of the lady's
dwelling; and now, seventy years, or thereabouts, since the young lady
heard the child singing, one of that child's children and one of her
grandchildren are with her in that home, where she, no longer young,
except in heart, passes her peaceful days.--Three generations linked
together by so light a breath of accident!

I liked--the sound of this youth's voice, I said, and his look when I
came to observe him a little more closely. His complexion had something
better than the bloom and freshness which had first attracted me;--it
had that diffused tone which is a sure index of wholesome, lusty life.
A fine liberal style of nature seemed to be: hair crisped, moustache
springing thick and dark, head firmly planted, lips finished, as is
commonly sees them in gentlemen's families, a pupil well contracted, and
a mouth that opened frankly with a white flash of teeth that looked as
if they could serve him as they say Ethan Allen's used to serve their
owner,--to draw nails with. This is the kind of fellow to walk a
frigate's deck and bowl his broadsides into the “Gadlant Thudnder-bomb,”
 or any forty-port-holed adventurer who would like to exchange a few tons
of iron compliments.--I don't know what put this into my head, for it
was not till some time afterward I learned the young fellow had been in
the naval school at Annapolis. Something had happened to change his plan
of life, and he was now studying engineering and architecture in Boston.

When the youth made the short remark which drew my attention to him, the
little deformed gentleman turned round and took a long look at him.

Good for the Boston boy!--he said.

I am not a Boston boy,--said the youth, smiling,--I am a Marylander.

I don't care where you come from,--we'll make a Boston man of you,--said
the little gentleman. Pray, what part of Maryland did you come from, and
how shall I call you?

The poor youth had to speak pretty loud, as he was at the right upper
corner of the table, and the little gentleman next the lower left-hand
corner. His face flushed a little, but he answered pleasantly, telling
who he was, as if the little man's infirmity gave him a right to ask any
questions he wanted to.

Here is the place for you to sit,--said the little gentleman, pointing
to the vacant chair next his own, at the corner.

You're go'n' to have a young lady next you, if you wait till
to-morrow,--said the landlady to him.

He did not reply, but I had a fancy that he changed color. It can't be
that he has susceptibilities with reference to a contingent young lady!
It can't be that he has had experiences which make him sensitive! Nature
could not be quite so cruel as to set a heart throbbing in that poor
little cage of ribs! There is no use in wasting notes of admiration. I
must ask the landlady about him.

These are some of the facts she furnished.--Has not been long with her.
Brought a sight of furniture,--could n't hardly get some of it upstairs.
Has n't seemed particularly attentive to the ladies. The Bombazine
(whom she calls Cousin something or other) has tried to enter into
conversation with him, but retired with the impression that he was
indifferent to ladies' society. Paid his bill the other day without
saying a word about it. Paid it in gold,--had a great heap of
twenty-dollar pieces. Hires her best room. Thinks he is a very nice
little man, but lives dreadful lonely up in his chamber. Wants the care
of some capable nuss. Never pitied anybody more in her life--never see a
more interestin' person.

--My intention was, when I began making these notes, to let them consist
principally of conversations between myself and the other boarders. So
they will, very probably; but my curiosity is excited about this little
boarder of ours, and my reader must not be disappointed, if I sometimes
interrupt a discussion to give an account of whatever fact or traits I
may discover about him. It so happens that his room is next to mine, and
I have the opportunity of observing many of his ways without any active
movements of curiosity. That his room contains heavy furniture, that
he is a restless little body and is apt to be up late, that he talks
to himself, and keeps mainly to himself, is nearly all I have yet found
out.

One curious circumstance happened lately which I mention without drawing
an absolute inference. Being at the studio of a sculptor with whom I am
acquainted, the other day, I saw a remarkable cast of a left arm. On my
asking where the model came from, he said it was taken direct from the
arm of a deformed person, who had employed one of the Italian moulders
to make the cast. It was a curious case, it should seem, of one
beautiful limb upon a frame otherwise singularly imperfect--I have
repeatedly noticed this little gentleman's use of his left arm. Can he
have furnished the model I saw at the sculptor's?

--So we are to have a new boarder to-morrow. I hope there will be
something pretty and pleasing about her. A woman with a creamy
voice, and finished in alto rilievo, would be a variety in the
boarding-house,--a little more marrow and a little less sinew than our
landlady and her daughter and the bombazine-clad female, all of whom are
of the turkey-drumstick style of organization. I don't mean that these
are our only female companions; but the rest being conversational
non-combatants, mostly still, sad feeders, who take in their food as
locomotives take in wood and water, and then wither away from the table
like blossoms that never came to fruit, I have not yet referred to them
as individuals.

I wonder what kind of young person we shall see in that empty chair
to-morrow!

--I read this song to the boarders after breakfast the other morning. It
was written for our fellows;--you know who they are, of course.



                         THE BOYS.

     Has there any old fellow got mixed with the boys?
     If there has, take him out, without making a noise!
     Hang the Almanac's cheat and the Catalogue's spite!
     Old Time is a liar!  We're twenty to-night!

     We're twenty!  We're twenty!  Who says we are more?
     He's tipsy,--young jackanapes!--show him the door!
     --“Gray temples at twenty?”--Yes! white, if we please;
     Where the snow-flakes fall thickest there's nothing can freeze!

     Was it snowing I spoke of?  Excuse the mistake!
     Look close,--you will see not a sign of a flake;
     We want some new garlands for those we have shed,
     And these are white roses in place of the red!

     We've a trick, we young fellows, you may have been told.
     Of talking (in public) as if we were old;
     That boy we call Doctor, (1) and this we call Judge (2)
     --It's a neat little fiction,--of course it's all fudge.

     That fellow's the Speaker, (3)--the one on the right;
     Mr. Mayor, (4) my young one, how are you to-night?
     That's our “Member of Congress," (5) we say when we chaff;
     There's the “Reverend” (6) What's his name?--don't make me laugh!

     That boy with the grave mathematical look(7)
     Made believe he had written a wonderful book,
     And the ROYAL SOCIETY thought it was true!
     So they chose him right in; a good joke it was, too.

     There's a boy,--we pretend,--with a three-decker-brain
     That could harness a team with a logical chain:
     When he spoke for our manhood in syllabled fire,
     We called him “The Justice,”--but now he's “The Squire." (1)

     And there's a nice youngster of excellent pith,(2)
     Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith,
     But he shouted a song for the brave and the free,
     --Just read on his medal,--“My country,--of thee!”

     You hear that boy laughing?--you think he's all fun,
     But the angels laugh, too, at the good he has done;
     The children laugh loud as they troop to his call,
     And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest of all!(3)

     Yes, we're boys,--always playing with tongue or with pen,
     --And I sometimes have asked,--Shall we ever be men?
     Shall we always be youthful and laughing and gay,
     Till the last dear companion drops smiling away?

     Then here's to our boyhood, its gold and its gray!
     The stars of its Winter, the dews of its May!
     And when we have done with our life-lasting toys,
     Dear Father, take care of thy children, the Boys!

     1 Francis Thomas.
     2 George Tyler Bigelow.
     3 Francis Boardman Crowninshield.
     4 G. W. Richardson.
     5 George Thomas Davis.
     6 James Freeman Clarke.
     7 Benjamin Peirce.




III

[The Professor talks with the Reader. He tells a Young Girl's Story.]

When the elements that went to the making of the first man, father of
mankind, had been withdrawn from the world of unconscious matter, the
balance of creation was disturbed. The materials that go to the making
of one woman were set free by the abstraction from inanimate nature of
one man's-worth of masculine constituents. These combined to make our
first mother, by a logical necessity involved in the previous creation
of our common father. All this, mythically, illustratively, and by no
means doctrinally or polemically.

The man implies the woman, you will understand. The excellent gentleman
whom I had the pleasure of setting right in a trifling matter a few
weeks ago believes in the frequent occurrence of miracles at the present
day. So do I. I believe, if you could find an uninhabited coral-reef
island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, with plenty of cocoa-palms
and bread-fruit on it, and put a handsome young fellow, like our
Marylander, ashore upon it, if you touched there a year afterwards, you
would find him walking under the palm-trees arm in arm with a pretty
woman.

Where would she come from?

Oh, that 's the miracle!

--I was just as certain, when I saw that fine, high-colored youth at
the upper right-hand corner of our table, that there would appear some
fitting feminine counterpart to him, as if I had been a clairvoyant,
seeing it all beforehand.

--I have a fancy that those Marylanders are just about near enough to
the sun to ripen well.--How some of us fellows remember Joe and Harry,
Baltimoreans, both! Joe, with his cheeks like lady-apples, and his eyes
like black-heart cherries, and his teeth like the whiteness of the
flesh of cocoanuts, and his laugh that set the chandelier-drops rattling
overhead, as we sat at our sparkling banquets in those gay times!
Harry, champion, by acclamation, of the college heavy-weights,
broad-shouldered, bull-necked, square-jawed, six feet and trimmings,
a little science, lots of pluck, good-natured as a steer in peace,
formidable as a red-eyed bison in the crack of hand-to-hand battle! Who
forgets the great muster-day, and the collision of the classic with the
democratic forces? The huge butcher, fifteen stone,--two hundred and ten
pounds,--good weight,--steps out like Telamonian Ajax, defiant. No words
from Harry, the Baltimorean,--one of the quiet sort, who strike first;
and do the talking, if there is any, afterwards. No words, but, in the
place thereof, a clean, straight, hard hit, which took effect with a
spank like the explosion of a percussion-cap, knocking the slayer of
beeves down a sand-bank,--followed, alas! by the too impetuous youth,
so that both rolled down together, and the conflict terminated in one of
those inglorious and inevitable Yankee clinches, followed by a general
melee, which make our native fistic encounters so different from such
admirably-ordered contests as that which I once saw at an English fair,
where everything was done decently and in order; and the fight began and
ended with such grave propriety, that a sporting parson need hardly have
hesitated to open it with a devout petition, and, after it was over,
dismiss the ring with a benediction.

I can't help telling one more story about this great field-day, though
it is the most wanton and irrelevant digression. But all of us have a
little speck of fight underneath our peace and good-will to men, just
a speck, for revolutions and great emergencies, you know,--so that we
should not submit to be trodden quite flat by the first heavy-heeled
aggressor that came along. You can tell a portrait from an ideal head,
I suppose, and a true story from one spun out of the writer's invention.
See whether this sounds true or not.

Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin sent out two fine blood-horses, Barefoot and
Serab by name, to Massachusetts, something before the time I am talking
of. With them came a Yorkshire groom, a stocky little fellow, in velvet
breeches, who made that mysterious hissing noise, traditionary in
English stables, when he rubbed down the silken-skinned racers, in great
perfection. After the soldiers had come from the muster-field, and
some of the companies were on the village-common, there was still some
skirmishing between a few individuals who had not had the fight taken
out of them. The little Yorkshire groom thought he must serve out
somebody. So he threw himself into an approved scientific attitude, and,
in brief, emphatic language, expressed his urgent anxiety to accommodate
any classical young gentleman who chose to consider himself a candidate
for his attentions. I don't suppose there were many of the college boys
that would have been a match for him in the art which Englishmen know
so much more of than Americans, for the most part. However, one of the
Sophomores, a very quiet, peaceable fellow, just stepped out of the
crowd, and, running straight at the groom, as he stood there, sparring
away, struck him with the sole of his foot, a straight blow, as if it
had been with his fist, and knocked him heels over head and senseless,
so that he had to be carried off from the field. This ugly way of
hitting is the great trick of the French gavate, which is not commonly
thought able to stand its ground against English pugilistic science.
These are old recollections, with not much to recommend them, except,
perhaps, a dash of life, which may be worth a little something.

The young Marylander brought them all up, you may remember. He recalled
to my mind those two splendid pieces of vitality I told you of. Both
have been long dead. How often we see these great red-flaring flambeaux
of life blown out, as it were, by a puff of wind,--and the little,
single-wicked night-lamp of being, which some white-faced and attenuated
invalid shades with trembling fingers, flickering on while they go out
one after another, until its glimmer is all that is left to us of the
generation to which it belonged!

I told you that I was perfectly sure, beforehand, we should find some
pleasing girlish or womanly shape to fill the blank at our table and
match the dark-haired youth at the upper corner.

There she sits, at the very opposite corner, just as far off as accident
could put her from this handsome fellow, by whose side she ought, of
course, to be sitting. One of the “positive” blondes, as my friend,
you may remember, used to call them. Tawny-haired, amber-eyed,
full-throated, skin as white as a blanched almond. Looks dreamy to me,
not self-conscious, though a black ribbon round her neck sets it off
as a Marie-Antoinette's diamond-necklace could not do. So in her dress,
there is a harmony of tints that looks as if an artist had run his eye
over her and given a hint or two like the finishing touch to a picture.
I can't help being struck with her, for she is at once rounded and fine
in feature, looks calm, as blondes are apt to, and as if she might run
wild, if she were trifled with. It is just as I knew it would be,--and
anybody can see that our young Marylander will be dead in love with her
in a week.

Then if that little man would only turn out immensely rich and have the
good-nature to die and leave them all his money, it would be as nice as
a three-volume novel.

The Little Gentleman is in a flurry, I suspect, with the excitement
of having such a charming neighbor next him. I judge so mainly by his
silence and by a certain rapt and serious look on his face, as if he
were thinking of something that had happened, or that might happen, or
that ought to happen,--or how beautiful her young life looked, or how
hardly Nature had dealt with him, or something which struck him silent,
at any rate. I made several conversational openings for him, but he did
not fire up as he often does. I even went so far as to indulge in, a
fling at the State House, which, as we all know, is in truth a very
imposing structure, covering less ground than St. Peter's, but of
similar general effect. The little man looked up, but did not reply to
my taunt. He said to the young lady, however, that the State House was
the Parthenon of our Acropolis, which seemed to please her, for she
smiled, and he reddened a little,--so I thought. I don't think it right
to watch persons who are the subjects of special infirmity,--but we all
do it.

I see that they have crowded the chairs a little at that end of
the table, to make room for another newcomer of the lady sort. A
well-mounted, middle-aged preparation, wearing her hair without a
cap, --pretty wide in the parting, though,--contours vaguely hinted,
--features very quiet,--says little as yet, but seems to keep her eye on
the young lady, as if having some responsibility for her My record is
a blank for some days after this. In the mean time I have contrived to
make out the person and the story of our young lady, who, according to
appearances, ought to furnish us a heroine for a boarding-house romance
before a year is out. It is very curious that she should prove connected
with a person many of us have heard of. Yet, curious as it is, I have
been a hundred times struck with the circumstance that the most remote
facts are constantly striking each other; just as vessels starting from
ports thousands of miles apart pass close to each other in the naked
breadth of the ocean, nay, sometimes even touch, in the dark, with a
crack of timbers, a gurgling of water, a cry of startled sleepers,--a
cry mysteriously echoed in warning dreams, as the wife of some
Gloucester fisherman, some coasting skipper, wakes with a shriek, calls
the name of her husband, and sinks back to uneasy slumbers upon her
lonely pillow,--a widow.

Oh, these mysterious meetings! Leaving all the vague, waste, endless
spaces of the washing desert, the ocean-steamer and the fishing-smack
sail straight towards each other as if they ran in grooves ploughed for
them in the waters from the beginning of creation! Not only things and
events, but our own thoughts, are so full of these surprises, that,
if there were a reader in my parish who did not recognize the familiar
occurrence of what I am now going to mention, I should think it a case
for the missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of Intelligence
among the Comfortable Classes. There are about as many twins in the
births of thought as of children. For the first time in your lives you
learn some fact or come across some idea. Within an hour, a day, a week,
that same fact or idea strikes you from another quarter. It seems as if
it had passed into space and bounded back upon you as an echo from
the blank wall that shuts in the world of thought. Yet no possible
connection exists between the two channels by which the thought or the
fact arrived. Let me give an infinitesimal illustration.

One of the Boys mentioned, the other evening, in the course of a very
pleasant poem he read us, a little trick of the Commons-table boarders,
which I, nourished at the parental board, had never heard of. Young
fellows being always hungry--Allow me to stop dead-short, in order to
utter an aphorism which has been forming itself in one of the blank
interior spaces of my intelligence, like a crystal in the cavity of a
geode.

               Aphorism by the Professor.

In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food
of different kinds at short intervals. If young, it will eat anything
at any hour of the day or night. If old, it observes stated periods, and
you might as well attempt to regulate the time of highwater to suit
a fishing-party as to change these periods. The crucial experiment is
this. Offer a bulky and boggy bun to the suspected individual just ten
minutes before dinner. If this is eagerly accepted and devoured, the
fact of youth is established. If the subject of the question starts back
and expresses surprise and incredulity, as if you could not possibly be
in earnest, the fact of maturity is no less clear.

--Excuse me,--I return to my story of the Commons-table.--Young fellows
being always hungry, and tea and dry toast being the meagre fare of the
evening meal, it was a trick of some of the Boys to impale a slice of
meat upon a fork, at dinner-time, and stick the fork holding it beneath
the table, so that they could get it at tea-time. The dragons that
guarded this table of the Hesperides found out the trick at last, and
kept a sharp look-out for missing forks;--they knew where to find one,
if it was not in its place.--Now the odd thing was, that, after waiting
so many years to hear of this college trick, I should hear it mentioned
a second time within the same twenty-four hours by a college youth of
the present generation. Strange, but true. And so it has happened to me
and to every person, often and often, to be hit in rapid succession by
these twinned facts or thoughts, as if they were linked like chain-shot.

I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it
as an unexplained marvel. I think, however, I will turn over a furrow
of subsoil in it.--The explanation is, of course, that in a great many
thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these instantly arrest
our attention. Now we shall probably never have the least idea of the
enormous number of impressions which pass through our consciousness,
until in some future life we see the photographic record of our thoughts
and the stereoscopic picture of our actions. There go more pieces to
make up a conscious life or a living body than you think for. Why,
some of you were surprised when a friend of mine told you there
were fifty-eight separate pieces in a fiddle. How many “swimming
glands”--solid, organized, regularly formed, rounded disks taking an
active part in all your vital processes, part and parcel, each one of
them, of your corporeal being--do you suppose are whirled along, like
pebbles in a stream, with the blood which warms your frame and colors
your cheeks?--A noted German physiologist spread out a minute drop
of blood, under the microscope, in narrow streaks, and counted the
globules, and then made a calculation. The counting by the micrometer
took him a week.--You have, my full-grown friend, of these little
couriers in crimson or scarlet livery, running on your vital errands
day and night as long as you live, sixty-five billions, five hundred and
seventy thousand millions. Errors excepted.--Did I hear some gentleman
say, “Doubted? “--I am the Professor. I sit in my chair with a petard
under it that will blow me through the skylight of my lecture-room, if I
do not know what I am talking about and whom I am quoting.

Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads, and
saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you had been
waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is it possible
that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of all that I
have been saying, and its bearing on what is now to come? Listen,
then. The number of these living elements in our bodies illustrates
the incalculable multitude of our thoughts; the number of our thoughts
accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of; these coincidences
in the world of thought illustrate those which we constantly observe in
the world of outward events, of which the presence of the young girl now
at our table, and proving to be the daughter of an old acquaintance some
of us may remember, is the special example which led me through this
labyrinth of reflections, and finally lands me at the commencement of
this young girl's story, which, as I said, I have found the time and
felt the interest to learn something of, and which I think I can tell
without wronging the unconscious subject of my brief delineation. IRIS.

You remember, perhaps, in some papers published awhile ago, an odd poem
written by an old Latin tutor? He brought up at the verb amo, I love,
as all of us do, and by and by Nature opened her great living dictionary
for him at the word filia, a daughter. The poor man was greatly
perplexed in choosing a name for her. Lucretia and Virginia were the
first that he thought of; but then came up those pictured stories of
Titus Livius, which he could never read without crying, though he had
read them a hundred times.

--Lucretia sending for her husband and her father, each to bring one
friend with him, and awaiting them in her chamber. To them her wrongs
briefly. Let them see to the wretch,--she will take care of herself.
Then the hidden knife flashes out and sinks into her heart. She
slides from her seat, and falls dying. “Her husband and her father cry
aloud.”--No, not Lucretia.

-Virginius,--a brown old soldier, father of a nice girl. She engaged
to a very promising young man. Decemvir Appius takes a violent fancy to
her,--must have her at any rate. Hires a lawyer to present the arguments
in favor of the view that she was another man's daughter. There used to
be lawyers in Rome that would do such things.--All right. There are two
sides to everything. Audi alteram partem. The legal gentleman has no
opinion,--he only states the evidence.--A doubtful case. Let the young
lady be under the protection of the Honorable Decemvir until it can be
looked up thoroughly.--Father thinks it best, on the whole, to give in.
Will explain the matter, if the young lady and her maid will step this
way. That is the explanation,--a stab with a butcher's knife, snatched
from a stall, meant for other lambs than this poor bleeding Virginia.

The old man thought over the story. Then he must have one look at the
original. So he took down the first volume and read it over. When he
came to that part where it tells how the young gentleman she was engaged
to and a friend of his took up the poor girl's bloodless shape and
carried it through the street, and how all the women followed, wailing,
and asking if that was what their daughters were coming to,--if that
was what they were to get for being good girls,--he melted down into his
accustomed tears of pity and grief, and, through them all, of delight at
the charming Latin of the narrative. But it was impossible to call his
child Virginia. He could never look at her without thinking she had a
knife sticking in her bosom.

Dido would be a good name, and a fresh one. She was a queen, and the
founder of a great city. Her story had been immortalized by the greatest
of poets,--for the old Latin tutor clove to “Virgilius Maro,” as he
called him, as closely as ever Dante did in his memorable journey. So he
took down his Virgil, it was the smooth-leafed, open-lettered quarto of
Baskerville,--and began reading the loves and mishaps of Dido. It would
n't do. A lady who had not learned discretion by experience, and came to
an evil end. He shook his head, as he sadly repeated,

    “--misera ante diem, subitoque accensa furore;”

but when he came to the lines,

    “Ergo Iris croceis per coelum roscida pennis
     Mille trahens varios adverso Sole colores,”

he jumped up with a great exclamation, which the particular recording
angel who heard it pretended not to understand, or it might have gone
hard with the Latin tutor some time or other.

“Iris shall be her name!”--he said. So her name was Iris.

--The natural end of a tutor is to perish by starvation. It is only a
question of time, just as with the burning of college libraries. These
all burn up sooner or later, provided they are not housed in brick or
stone and iron. I don't mean that you will see in the registry of deaths
that this or that particular tutor died of well-marked, uncomplicated
starvation. They may, even, in extreme cases, be carried off by a thin,
watery kind of apoplexy, which sounds very well in the returns, but
means little to those who know that it is only debility settling on
the head. Generally, however, they fade and waste away under various
pretexts,--calling it dyspepsia, consumption, and so on, to put a decent
appearance upon the case and keep up the credit of the family and the
institution where they have passed through the successive stages of
inanition.

In some cases it takes a great many years to kill a tutor by the
process in question. You see they do get food and clothes and fuel, in
appreciable quantities, such as they are. You will even notice rows of
books in their rooms, and a picture or two,--things that look as if
they had surplus money; but these superfluities are the water of
crystallization to scholars, and you can never get them away till
the poor fellows effloresce into dust. Do not be deceived. The tutor
breakfasts on coffee made of beans, edulcorated with milk watered to the
verge of transparency; his mutton is tough and elastic, up to the
moment when it becomes tired out and tasteless; his coal is a sullen,
sulphurous anthracite, which rusts into ashes, rather than burns, in
the shallow grate; his flimsy broadcloth is too thin for winter and too
thick for summer. The greedy lungs of fifty hot-blooded boys suck the
oxygen from the air he breathes in his recitation-room. In short, he
undergoes a process of gentle and gradual starvation.

--The mother of little Iris was not called Electra, like hers of the old
story, neither was her grandfather Oceanus. Her blood-name, which she
gave away with her heart to the Latin tutor, was a plain old English
one, and her water-name was Hannah, beautiful as recalling the mother
of Samuel, and admirable as reading equally well from the initial letter
forwards and from the terminal letter backwards. The poor lady, seated
with her companion at the chessboard of matrimony, had but just pushed
forward her one little white pawn upon an empty square, when the Black
Knight, that cares nothing for castles or kings or queens, swooped down
upon her and swept her from the larger board of life.

The old Latin tutor put a modest blue stone at the head of his late
companion, with her name and age and Eheu! upon it,--a smaller one
at her feet, with initials; and left her by herself, to be rained and
snowed on,--which is a hard thing to do for those whom we have cherished
tenderly.

About the time that the lichens, falling on the stone, like drops of
water, had spread into fair, round rosettes, the tutor had starved into
a slight cough. Then he began to draw the buckle of his black trousers
a little tighter, and took in another reef in his never-ample waistcoat.
His temples got a little hollow, and the contrasts of color in his
cheeks more vivid than of old. After a while his walks fatigued him,
and he was tired, and breathed hard after going up a flight or two of
stairs. Then came on other marks of inward trouble and general waste,
which he spoke of to his physician as peculiar, and doubtless owing to
accidental causes; to all which the doctor listened with deference, as
if it had not been the old story that one in five or six of mankind in
temperate climates tells, or has told for him, as if it were something
new. As the doctor went out, he said to himself,--“On the rail at last.
Accommodation train. A good many stops, but will get to the station
by and by.” So the doctor wrote a recipe with the astrological sign of
Jupiter before it, (just as your own physician does, inestimable reader,
as you will see, if you look at his next prescription,) and departed,
saying he would look in occasionally. After this, the Latin tutor began
the usual course of “getting better,” until he got so much better that
his face was very sharp, and when he smiled, three crescent lines
showed at each side of his lips, and when he spoke; it was in a muffled
whisper, and the white of his eye glistened as pearly as the purest
porcelain, --so much better, that he hoped--by spring--he--might be
able--to--attend------to his class again.--But he was recommended not
to expose himself, and so kept his chamber, and occasionally, not having
anything to do, his bed. The unmarried sister with whom he lived took
care of him; and the child, now old enough to be manageable and even
useful in trifling offices, sat in the chamber, or played, about.

Things could not go on so forever, of course. One morning his face
was sunken and his hands were very, very cold. He was “better,” he
whispered, but sadly and faintly. After a while he grew restless and
seemed a little wandering. His mind ran on his classics, and fell back
on the Latin grammar.

“Iris!” he said,--“filiola mea!”--The child knew this meant my dear
little daughter as well as if it had been English.--“Rainbow!” for he
would translate her name at times,--“come to me,--veni”--and his lips
went on automatically, and murmured, “vel venito!”--The child came and
sat by his bedside and took his hand, which she could not warm, but
which shot its rays of cold all through her slender frame. But there she
sat, looking steadily at him. Presently he opened his lips feebly, and
whispered, “Moribundus.” She did not know what that meant, but she saw
that there was something new and sad. So she began to cry; but presently
remembering an old book that seemed to comfort him at times, got up and
brought a Bible in the Latin version, called the Vulgate. “Open it,” he
said,--“I will read, segnius irritant,--don't put the light out,--ah!
hoeret lateri,--I am going,--vale, vale, vale, goodbye, good-bye,--the
Lord take care of my child! Domine, audi--vel audito!” His face whitened
suddenly, and he lay still, with open eyes and mouth. He had taken his
last degree.

--Little Miss Iris could not be said to begin life with a very brilliant
rainbow over her, in a worldly point of view. A limited wardrobe of
man's attire, such as poor tutors wear,--a few good books, principally
classics,--a print or two, and a plaster model of the Pantheon, with
some pieces of furniture which had seen service,--these, and a child's
heart full of tearful recollections and strange doubts and questions,
alternating with the cheap pleasures which are the anodynes of childish
grief; such were the treasures she inherited.--No,--I forgot. With
that kindly sentiment which all of us feel for old men's first
children,--frost-flowers of the early winter season, the old tutor's
students had remembered him at a time when he was laughing and crying
with his new parental emotions, and running to the side of the plain
crib in which his alter egg, as he used to say, was swinging, to hang
over the little heap of stirring clothes, from which looked the minute,
red, downy, still, round face, with unfixed eyes and working lips,--in
that unearthly gravity which has never yet been broken by a smile, and
which gives to the earliest moon-year or two of an infant's life the
character of a first old age, to counterpoise that second childhood
which there is one chance in a dozen it may reach by and by. The boys
had remembered the old man and young father at that tender period of his
hard, dry life. There came to him a fair, silver goblet, embossed with
classical figures, and bearing on a shield the graver words, Ex dono
pupillorum. The handle on its side showed what use the boys had meant it
for; and a kind letter in it, written with the best of feeling, in
the worst of Latin, pointed delicately to its destination. Out of this
silver vessel, after a long, desperate, strangling cry, which marked
her first great lesson in the realities of life, the child took the blue
milk, such as poor tutors and their children get, tempered with
water, and sweetened a little, so as to bring it nearer the standard
established by the touching indulgence and partiality of Nature,--who
had mingled an extra allowance of sugar in the blameless food of the
child at its mother's breast, as compared with that of its infant
brothers and sisters of the bovine race.

But a willow will grow in baked sand wet with rainwater. An air-plant
will grow by feeding on the winds. Nay, those huge forests that
overspread great continents have built themselves up mainly from the
air-currents with which they are always battling. The oak is but a
foliated atmospheric crystal deposited from the aerial ocean that holds
the future vegetable world in solution. The storm that tears its leaves
has paid tribute to its strength, and it breasts the tornado clad in the
spoils of a hundred hurricanes.

Poor little Iris! What had she in common with the great oak in the
shadow of which we are losing sight of her?--She lived and grew like
that,--this was all. The blue milk ran into her veins and filled them
with thin, pure blood. Her skin was fair, with a faint tinge, such as
the white rosebud shows before it opens. The doctor who had attended
her father was afraid her aunt would hardly be able to “raise”
 her,--“delicate child,”--hoped she was not consumptive,--thought there
was a fair chance she would take after her father.

A very forlorn-looking person, dressed in black, with a white neckcloth,
sent her a memoir of a child who died at the age of two years and eleven
months, after having fully indorsed all the doctrines of the particular
persuasion to which he not only belonged himself, but thought it very
shameful that everybody else did not belong. What with foreboding looks
and dreary death-bed stories, it was a wonder the child made out to live
through it. It saddened her early years, of course,--it distressed
her tender soul with thoughts which, as they cannot be fully taken in,
should be sparingly used as instruments of torture to break down the
natural cheerfulness of a healthy child, or, what is infinitely worse,
to cheat a dying one out of the kind illusions with which the Father of
All has strewed its downward path.

The child would have died, no doubt, and, if properly managed, might
have added another to the long catalogue of wasting children who have
been as cruelly played upon by spiritual physiologists, often with the
best intentions, as ever the subject of a rare disease by the curious
students of science.

Fortunately for her, however, a wise instinct had guided the late Latin
tutor in the selection of the partner of his life, and the future mother
of his child. The deceased tutoress was a tranquil, smooth woman, easily
nourished, as such people are,--a quality which is inestimable in a
tutor's wife,--and so it happened that the daughter inherited enough
vitality from the mother to live through childhood and infancy and fight
her way towards womanhood, in spite of the tendencies she derived from
her other parent.

--Two and two do not always make four, in this matter of hereditary
descent of qualities. Sometimes they make three, and sometimes five. It
seems as if the parental traits at one time showed separate, at another
blended,--that occasionally, the force of two natures is represented in
the derivative one by a diagonal of greater value than either original
line of living movement,--that sometimes there is a loss of vitality
hardly to be accounted for, and again a forward impulse of variable
intensity in some new and unforeseen direction.

So it was with this child. She had glanced off from her parental
probabilities at an unexpected angle. Instead of taking to classical
learning like her father, or sliding quietly into household duties like
her mother, she broke out early in efforts that pointed in the direction
of Art. As soon as she could hold a pencil she began to sketch outlines
of objects round her with a certain air and spirit. Very extraordinary
horses, but their legs looked as if they could move. Birds unknown to
Audubon, yet flying, as it were, with a rush. Men with impossible legs,
which did yet seem to have a vital connection with their most improbable
bodies. By-and-by the doctor, on his beast,--an old man with a face
looking as if Time had kneaded it like dough with his knuckles, with a
rhubarb tint and flavor pervading himself and his sorrel horse and all
their appurtenances. A dreadful old man! Be sure she did not forget
those saddle-bags that held the detestable bottles out of which he used
to shake those loathsome powders which, to virgin childish palates that
find heaven in strawberries and peaches, are--Well, I suppose I had
better stop. Only she wished she was dead sometimes when she heard him
coming. On the next leaf would figure the gentleman with the black coat
and white cravat, as he looked when he came and entertained her with
stories concerning the death of various little children about her age,
to encourage her, as that wicked Mr. Arouet said about shooting Admiral
Byng. Then she would take her pencil, and with a few scratches there
would be the outline of a child, in which you might notice how one
sudden sweep gave the chubby cheek, and two dots darted at the paper
looked like real eyes.

By-and-by she went to school, and caricatured the schoolmaster on
the leaves of her grammars and geographies, and drew the faces of her
companions, and, from time to time, heads and figures from her fancy,
with large eyes, far apart, like those of Raffaelle's mothers and
children, sometimes with wild floating hair, and then with wings and
heads thrown back in ecstasy. This was at about twelve years old, as the
dates of these drawings show, and, therefore, three or four years before
she came among us. Soon after this time, the ideal figures began to take
the place of portraits and caricatures, and a new feature appeared in
her drawing-books in the form of fragments of verse and short poems.

It was dull work, of course, for such a young girl to live with an old
spinster and go to a village school. Her books bore testimony to this;
for there was a look of sadness in the faces she drew, and a sense of
weariness and longing for some imaginary conditions of blessedness
or other, which began to be painful. She might have gone through this
flowering of the soul, and, casting her petals, subsided into a sober,
human berry, but for the intervention of friendly assistance and
counsel.

In the town where she lived was a lady of honorable condition, somewhat
past middle age, who was possessed of pretty ample means, of cultivated
tastes, of excellent principles, of exemplary character, and of more
than common accomplishments. The gentleman in black broadcloth and white
neckerchief only echoed the common voice about her, when he called her,
after enjoying, beneath her hospitable roof, an excellent cup of tea,
with certain elegancies and luxuries he was unaccustomed to, “The Model
of all the Virtues.”

She deserved this title as well as almost any woman. She did really
bristle with moral excellences. Mention any good thing she had not done;
I should like to see you try! There was no handle of weakness to take
hold of her by; she was as unseizable, except in her totality, as a
billiard-ball; and on the broad, green, terrestrial table, where she had
been knocked about, like all of us, by the cue of Fortune, she glanced
from every human contact, and “caromed” from one relation to another,
and rebounded from the stuffed cushion of temptation, with such exact
and perfect angular movements, that the Enemy's corps of Reporters had
long given up taking notes of her conduct, as there was no chance for
their master.

What an admirable person for the patroness and directress of a slightly
self-willed child, with the lightning zigzag line of genius running like
a glittering vein through the marble whiteness of her virgin nature! One
of the lady-patroness's peculiar virtues was calmness. She was resolute
and strenuous, but still. You could depend on her for every duty; she
was as true as steel. She was kind-hearted and serviceable in all
the relations of life. She had more sense, more knowledge, more
conversation, as well as more goodness, than all the partners you have
waltzed with this winter put together.

Yet no man was known to have loved her, or even to have offered
himself to her in marriage. It was a great wonder. I am very anxious
to vindicate my character as a philosopher and an observer of Nature by
accounting for this apparently extraordinary fact.

You may remember certain persons who have the misfortune of presenting
to the friends whom they meet a cold, damp hand. There are states of
mind in which a contact of this kind has a depressing effect on the
vital powers that makes us insensible to all the virtues and graces of
the proprietor of one of these life-absorbing organs. When they touch
us, virtue passes out of us, and we feel as if our electricity had been
drained by a powerful negative battery, carried about by an overgrown
human torpedo.

“The Model of all the Virtues” had a pair of searching eyes as clear as
Wenham ice; but they were slower to melt than that fickle jewelry. Her
features disordered themselves slightly at times in a surface-smile, but
never broke loose from their corners and indulged in the riotous tumult
of a laugh,--which, I take it, is the mob-law of the features;--and
propriety the magistrate who reads the riot-act. She carried the
brimming cup of her inestimable virtues with a cautious, steady hand,
and an eye always on them, to see that they did not spill. Then she was
an admirable judge of character. Her mind was a perfect laboratory of
tests and reagents; every syllable you put into breath went into
her intellectual eudiometer, and all your thoughts were recorded on
litmus-paper. I think there has rarely been a more admirable woman.
Of course, Miss Iris was immensely and passionately attached
to her.--Well,--these are two highly oxygenated adverbs,
--grateful,--suppose we say,--yes,--grateful, dutiful, obedient to her
wishes for the most part,--perhaps not quite up to the concert pitch of
such a perfect orchestra of the virtues.

We must have a weak spot or two in a character before we can love it
much. People that do not laugh or cry, or take more of anything than
is good for them, or use anything but dictionary-words, are admirable
subjects for biographies. But we don't always care most for those
flat-pattern flowers that press best in the herbarium.

This immaculate woman,--why could n't she have a fault or two? Is n't
there any old whisper which will tarnish that wearisome aureole of
saintly perfection? Does n't she carry a lump of opium in her pocket? Is
n't her cologne-bottle replenished oftener than its legitimate use would
require? It would be such a comfort!

Not for the world would a young creature like Iris have let such words
escape her, or such thoughts pass through her mind. Whether at the
bottom of her soul lies any uneasy consciousness of an oppressive
presence, it is hard to say, until we know more about her. Iris sits
between the Little Gentleman and the “Model of all the Virtues,” as the
black-coated personage called her.--I will watch them all.

--Here I stop for the present. What the Professor said has had to make
way this time for what he saw and heard.

-And now you may read these lines, which were written for gentle souls
who love music, and read in even tones, and, perhaps, with something
like a smile upon the reader's lips, at a meeting where these musical
friends had gathered. Whether they were written with smiles or not, you
can guess better after you have read them.


                    THE OPENING OF THE PIANO.

     In the little southern parlor of the house you may have seen
     With the gambrel-roof, and the gable looking westward to the green,
     At the side toward the sunset, with the window on its right,
     Stood the London-made piano I am dreaming of to-night.

     Ah me! how I remember the evening when it came!
     What a cry of eager voices, what a group of cheeks in flame,
     When the wondrous boa was opened that had come from over seas,
     With its smell of mastic-varnish and its flash of ivory keys!

     Then the children all grew fretful in the restlessness of joy,
     For the boy would push his sister, and the sister crowd the boy,
     Till the father asked for quiet in his grave paternal way,
     But the mother hushed the tumult with the words, “Now, Mary, play.”

     For the dear soul knew that music was a very sovereign balm;
     She had sprinkled it over Sorrow and seen its brow grow calm,
     In the days of slender harpsichords with tapping tinkling quills,
     Or caroling to her spinet with its thin metallic thrills.

     So Mary, the household minstrel, who always loved to please,
     Sat down to the new “Clementi,” and struck the glittering keys.
     Hushed were the children's voices, and every eye grew dim,
     As, floating from lip and finger, arose the “Vesper Hymn.”

     --Catharine, child of a neighbor, curly and rosy-red,
     (Wedded since, and a widow,--something like ten years dead,)
     Hearing a gush of music such as none before,
     Steals from her mother's chamber and peeps at the open door.

     Just as the “Jubilate” in threaded whisper dies,
     --“Open it! open it, lady!” the little maiden cries,
     (For she thought 't was a singing creature caged in a box she heard,)
     “Open it! open it, lady! and let me see the bird!”




IV

I don't know whether our literary or professional people are more
amiable than they are in other places, but certainly quarrelling is out
of fashion among them. This could never be, if they were in the habit of
secret anonymous puffing of each other. That is the kind of underground
machinery which manufactures false reputations and genuine hatreds. On
the other hand, I should like to know if we are not at liberty to have
a good time together, and say the pleasantest things we can think of to
each other, when any of us reaches his thirtieth or fortieth or fiftieth
or eightieth birthday.

We don't have “scenes,” I warrant you, on these occasions. No “surprise”
 parties! You understand these, of course. In the rural districts, where
scenic tragedy and melodrama cannot be had, as in the city, at the
expense of a quarter and a white pocket-handkerchief, emotional
excitement has to be sought in the dramas of real life. Christenings,
weddings, and funerals, especially the latter, are the main dependence;
but babies, brides, and deceased citizens cannot be had at a day's
notice. Now, then, for a surprise-party!

A bag of flour, a barrel of potatoes, some strings of onions, a basket
of apples, a big cake and many little cakes, a jug of lemonade, a purse
stuffed with bills of the more modest denominations, may, perhaps,
do well enough for the properties in one of these private theatrical
exhibitions. The minister of the parish, a tender-hearted, quiet,
hard-working man, living on a small salary, with many children,
sometimes pinched to feed and clothe them, praying fervently every day
to be blest in his “basket and store,” but sometimes fearing he asks
amiss, to judge by the small returns, has the first role,--not,
however, by his own choice, but forced upon him. The minister's wife,
a sharp-eyed, unsentimental body, is first lady; the remaining parts by
the rest of the family. If they only had a playbill, it would run thus:

                     ON TUESDAY NEXT
                    WILL BE PRESENTED
                   THE AFFECTING SCENE
                         CALLED

                   THE SURPRISE-PARTY

                           OR

                  THE OVERCOME FAMILY;

WITH THE FOLLOWING STRONG CAST OF CHARACTERS.

     The Rev.  Mr. Overcome, by the Clergyman of this Parish.
     Mrs.  Overcome, by his estimable lady.
     Masters Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John Overcome,
     Misses Dorcas, Tabitha, Rachel, and Hannah, Overcome, by their
     interesting children.
     Peggy, by the female help.

The poor man is really grateful;--it is a most welcome and unexpected
relief. He tries to express his thanks,--his voice falters,--he
chokes,--and bursts into tears. That is the great effect of the evening.
The sharp-sighted lady cries a little with one eye, and counts the
strings of onions, and the rest of the things, with the other. The
children stand ready for a spring at the apples. The female help weeps
after the noisy fashion of untutored handmaids.

Now this is all very well as charity, but do let the kind visitors
remember they get their money's worth. If you pay a quarter for dry
crying, done by a second-rate actor, how much ought you to pay for real
hot, wet tears, out of the honest eyes of a gentleman who is not acting,
but sobbing in earnest?

All I meant to say, when I began, was, that this was not a
surprise-party where I read these few lines that follow:

     We will not speak of years to-night;
     For what have years to bring,
     But larger floods of love and light
     And sweeter songs to sing?

     We will not drown in wordy praise
     The kindly thoughts that rise;
     If friendship owns one tender phrase,
     He reads it in our eyes.

     We need not waste our schoolboy art
     To gild this notch of time;
     Forgive me, if my wayward heart
     Has throbbed in artless rhyme.

     Enough for him the silent grasp
     That knits us hand in hand,
     And he the bracelet's radiant clasp
     That locks our circling band.

     Strength to his hours of manly toil!
     Peace to his starlit dreams!
     Who loves alike the furrowed soil,
     The music-haunted streams!

     Sweet smiles to keep forever bright
     The sunshine on his lips,
     And faith, that sees the ring of light
     Round Nature's last eclipse!

--One of our boarders has been talking in such strong language that I am
almost afraid to report it. However, as he seems to be really honest and
is so very sincere in his local prejudices, I don't believe anybody will
be very angry with him.

It is here, Sir! right here!--said the little deformed gentleman,--in
this old new city of Boston,--this remote provincial corner of a
provincial nation, that the Battle of the Standard is fighting, and was
fighting before we were born, and will be fighting when we are dead
and gone,--please God! The battle goes on everywhere throughout
civilization; but here, here, here is the broad white flag flying which
proclaims, first of all, peace and good-will to men, and, next to
that, the absolute, unconditional spiritual liberty of each individual
immortal soul! The three-hilled city against the seven-hilled city! That
is it, Sir,--nothing less than that; and if you know what that means, I
don't think you'll ask for anything more. I swear to you, Sir, I believe
that these two centres of civilization are just exactly the two points
that close the circuit in the battery of our planetary intelligence! And
I believe there are spiritual eyes looking out from Uranus and
unseen Neptune,--ay, Sir, from the systems of Sirius and Arcturus and
Aldebaran, and as far as that faint stain of sprinkled worlds confluent
in the distance that we call the nebula of Orion,--looking on, Sir, with
what organs I know not, to see which are going to melt in that fiery
fusion, the accidents and hindrances of humanity or man himself,
Sir,--the stupendous abortion, the illustrious failure that he is,
if the three-hilled city does not ride down and trample out the
seven-hilled city!

--Steam 's up!--said the young man John, so called, in a low tone.
--Three hundred and sixty-five tons to the square inch. Let him blow her
off, or he'll bu'st his b'iler.

The divinity-student took it calmly, only whispering that he thought
there was a little confusion of images between a galvanic battery and a
charge of cavalry.

But the Koh-i-noor--the gentleman, you remember, with a very large
diamond in his shirt-front laughed his scornful laugh, and made as if to
speak.

Sail in, Metropolis!--said that same young man John, by name. And then,
in a lower lane, not meaning to be heard,--Now, then, Ma'am Allen!

But he was heard,--and the Koh-i-noor's face turned so white with rage,
that his blue-black moustache and beard looked fearful, seen against
it. He grinned with wrath, and caught at a tumbler, as if he would have
thrown it or its contents at the speaker. The young Marylander fixed
his clear, steady eye upon him, and laid his hand on his arm, carelessly
almost, but the Jewel found it was held so that he could not move it.
It was of no use. The youth was his master in muscle, and in that deadly
Indian hug in which men wrestle with their eyes;--over in five seconds,
but breaks one of their two backs, and is good for threescore years and
ten;--one trial enough,--settles the whole matter,--just as when
two feathered songsters of the barnyard, game and dunghill, come
together,-after a jump or two at each other, and a few sharp kicks,
there is the end of it; and it is, Apres vous, Monsieur, with the beaten
party in all the social relations for all the rest of his days.

I cannot philosophically account for the Koh-i-noor's wrath. For though
a cosmetic is sold, bearing the name of the lady to whom reference
was made by the young person John, yet, as it is publicly asserted in
respectable prints that this cosmetic is not a dye, I see no reason why
he should have felt offended by any suggestion that he was indebted to
it or its authoress.

I have no doubt that there are certain exceptional complexions to which
the purple tinge, above alluded to, is natural. Nature is fertile in
variety. I saw an albiness in London once, for sixpence, (including the
inspection of a stuffed boa-constrictor,) who looked as if she had been
boiled in milk. A young Hottentot of my acquaintance had his hair all in
little pellets of the size of marrow-fat peas. One of my own classmates
has undergone a singular change of late years,--his hair losing its
original tint, and getting a remarkable discolored look; and another
has ceased to cultivate any hair at all over the vertex or crown of the
head. So I am perfectly willing to believe that the purple-black of
the Koh-i-noor's moustache and whiskers is constitutional and not
pigmentary. But I can't think why he got so angry.

The intelligent reader will understand that all this pantomime of the
threatened onslaught and its suppression passed so quickly that it was
all over by the time the other end of the table found out there was a
disturbance; just as a man chopping wood half a mile off may be seen
resting on his axe at the instant you hear the last blow he struck.
So you will please to observe that the Little Gentleman was not,
interrupted during the time implied by these ex-post-facto remarks of
mine, but for some ten or fifteen seconds only.

He did not seem to mind the interruption at all, for he started again.
The “Sir” of his harangue was no doubt addressed to myself more than
anybody else, but he often uses it in discourse as if he were talking
with some imaginary opponent.

--America, Sir,--he exclaimed,--is the only place where man is
full-grown!

He straightened himself up, as he spoke, standing on the top round
of his high chair, I suppose, and so presented the larger part of his
little figure to the view of the boarders.

It was next to impossible to keep from laughing. The commentary was so
strange an illustration of the text! I thought it was time to put in
a word; for I have lived in foreign parts, and am more or less
cosmopolitan.

I doubt if we have more practical freedom in America than they have in
England,--I said.--An Englishman thinks as he likes in religion and
politics. Mr. Martineau speculates as freely as ever Dr. Channing did,
and Mr. Bright is as independent as Mr. Seward.

Sir,--said he,--it is n't what a man thinks or says; but when and where
and to whom he thinks and says it. A man with a flint and steel striking
sparks over a wet blanket is one thing, and striking them over a
tinder-box is another. The free Englishman is born under protest; he
lives and dies under protest,--a tolerated, but not a welcome fact. Is
not freethinker a term of reproach in England? The same idea in the
soul of an Englishman who struggled up to it and still holds it
antagonistically, and in the soul of an American to whom it is
congenital and spontaneous, and often unrecognized, except as an element
blended with all his thoughts, a natural movement, like the drawing of
his breath or the beating of his heart, is a very different thing. You
may teach a quadruped to walk on his hind legs, but he is always wanting
to be on all fours. Nothing that can be taught a growing youth is like
the atmospheric knowledge he breathes from his infancy upwards. The
American baby sucks in freedom with the milk of the breast at which he
hangs.

--That's a good joke,--said the young fellow John,--considerin' it
commonly belongs to a female Paddy.

I thought--I will not be certain--that the Little Gentleman winked, as
if he had been hit somewhere--as I have no doubt Dr. Darwin did when the
wooden-spoon suggestion upset his theory about why, etc. If he winked,
however, he did not dodge.

A lively comment!--he said.--But Rome, in her great founder, sucked the
blood of empire out of the dugs of a brute, Sir! The Milesian wet-nurse
is only a convenient vessel through which the American infant gets the
life-blood of this virgin soil, Sir, that is making man over again, on
the sunset pattern! You don't think what we are doing and going to
do here. Why, Sir, while commentators are bothering themselves with
interpretation of prophecies, we have got the new heavens and the new
earth over us and under us! Was there ever anything in Italy, I should
like to know, like a Boston sunset?

--This time there was a laugh, and the little man himself almost smiled.

Yes,--Boston sunsets;--perhaps they're as good in some other places,
but I know 'em best here. Anyhow, the American skies are different from
anything they see in the Old World. Yes, and the rocks are different,
and the soil is different, and everything that comes out of the soil,
from grass up to Indians, is different. And now that the provisional
races are dying out--

--What do you mean by the provisional races, Sir?--said the
divinity-student, interrupting him.

Why, the aboriginal bipeds, to be sure,--he answered,--the red-crayon
sketch of humanity laid on the canvas before the colors for the real
manhood were ready.

I hope they will come to something yet,--said the divinity-student.

Irreclaimable, Sir,--irreclaimable!--said the Little Gentleman.--Cheaper
to breed white men than domesticate a nation of red ones. When you can
get the bitter out of the partridge's thigh, you can make an enlightened
commonwealth of Indians. A provisional race, Sir,--nothing more.
Exhaled carbonic acid for the use of vegetation, kept down the bears and
catamounts, enjoyed themselves in scalping and being scalped, and then
passed away or are passing away, according to the programme.

Well, Sir, these races dying out, the white man has to acclimate
himself. It takes him a good while; but he will come all right
by-and-by, Sir,--as sound as a woodchuck,--as sound as a musquash!

A new nursery, Sir, with Lake Superior and Huron and all the rest of
'em for wash-basins! A new race, and a whole new world for the new-born
human soul to work in! And Boston is the brain of it, and has been any
time these hundred years! That's all I claim for Boston,--that it is the
thinking centre of the continent, and therefore of the planet.

--And the grand emporium of modesty,--said the divinity-student, a
little mischievously.

Oh, don't talk to me of modesty!--answered the Little Gentleman,--I 'm
past that! There is n't a thing that was ever said or done in Boston,
from pitching the tea overboard to the last ecclesiastical lie it
tore into tatters and flung into the dock, that was n't thought very
indelicate by some fool or tyrant or bigot, and all the entrails of
commercial and spiritual conservatism are twisted into colics as often
as this revolutionary brain of ours has a fit of thinking come over
it.--No, Sir,--show me any other place that is, or was since the
megalosaurus has died out, where wealth and social influence are so
fairly divided between the stationary and the progressive classes! Show
me any other place where every other drawing-room is not a chamber of
the Inquisition, with papas and mammas for inquisitors,--and the cold
shoulder, instead of the “dry pan and the gradual fire,” the punishment
of “heresy”!

--We think Baltimore is a pretty civilized kind of a village,--said the
young Marylander, good-naturedly.--But I suppose you can't forgive it
for always keeping a little ahead of Boston in point of numbers,--tell
the truth now. Are we not the centre of something?

Ah, indeed, to be sure you are. You are the gastronomic metropolis
of the Union. Why don't you put a canvas-back-duck on the top of the
Washington column? Why don't you get that lady off from Battle Monument
and plant a terrapin in her place? Why will you ask for other glories
when you have soft crabs? No, Sir,--you live too well to think as hard
as we do in Boston. Logic comes to us with the salt-fish of Cape Ann;
rhetoric is born of the beans of Beverly; but you--if you open your
mouths to speak, Nature stops them with a fat oyster, or offers a slice
of the breast of your divine bird, and silences all your aspirations.

And what of Philadelphia?--said the Marylander.

Oh, Philadelphia?--Waterworks,--killed by the Croton and Cochituate;
--Ben Franklin,--borrowed from Boston;--David Rittenhouse,--made an
orrery;--Benjamin Rush,--made a medical system;--both interesting to
antiquarians;--great Red-river raft of medical students,--spontaneous
generation of professors to match;--more widely known through the
Moyamensing hose-company, and the Wistar parties;-for geological section
of social strata, go to The Club.--Good place to live in,--first-rate
market,--tip-top peaches.--What do we know about Philadelphia, except
that the engine-companies are always shooting each other?

And what do you say to New York?--asked the Koh-i-noor.

A great city, Sir,--replied the Little Gentleman,--a very opulent,
splendid city. A point of transit of much that is remarkable, and of
permanence for much that is respectable. A great money-centre. San
Francisco with the mines above-ground,--and some of 'em under the
sidewalks. I have seen next to nothing grandiose, out of New York,
in all our cities. It makes 'em all look paltry and petty. Has many
elements of civilization. May stop where Venice did, though, for
aught we know.--The order of its development is just this:--Wealth;
architecture; upholstery; painting; sculpture. Printing, as a mechanical
art,--just as Nicholas Jepson and the Aldi, who were scholars too, made
Venice renowned for it. Journalism, which is the accident of business
and crowded populations, in great perfection. Venice got as far as
Titian and Paul Veronese and Tintoretto,--great colorists, mark you,
magnificent on the flesh-and-blood side of Art,--but look over to
Florence and see who lie in Santa Crocea, and ask out of whose loins
Dante sprung!

Oh, yes, to be sure, Venice built her Ducal Palace, and her Church of
St. Mark, and her Casa d' Or, and the rest of her golden houses; and
Venice had great pictures and good music; and Venice had a Golden Book,
in which all the large tax-payers had their names written;--but all that
did not make Venice the brain of Italy.

I tell you what, Sir,--with all these magnificent appliances of
civilization, it is time we began to hear something from the djinnis
donee whose names are on the Golden Book of our sumptuous, splendid,
marble-placed Venice,--something in the higher walks of literature,
--something in the councils of the nation. Plenty of Art, I grant you,
Sir; now, then, for vast libraries, and for mighty scholars and thinkers
and statesmen,--five for every Boston one, as the population is to
ours,--ten to one more properly, in virtue of centralizing attraction as
the alleged metropolis, and not call our people provincials, and have to
come begging to us to write the lives of Hendrik Hudson and Gouverneur
Morris!

--The Little Gentleman was on his hobby, exalting his own city at the
expense of every other place. I have my doubts if he had been in
either of the cities he had been talking about. I was just going to say
something to sober him down, if I could, when the young Marylander spoke
up.

Come, now,--he said,--what's the use of these comparisons? Did n't I
hear this gentleman saying, the other day, that every American owns all
America? If you have really got more brains in Boston than other folks,
as you seem to think, who hates you for it, except a pack of scribbling
fools? If I like Broadway better than Washington Street, what then? I
own them both, as much as anybody owns either. I am an American,--and
wherever I look up and see the stars and stripes overhead, that is home
to me!

He spoke, and looked up as if he heard the emblazoned folds crackling
over him in the breeze. We all looked up involuntarily, as if we should
see the national flag by so doing. The sight of the dingy ceiling and
the gas-fixture depending therefrom dispelled the illusion.

Bravo! bravo!--said the venerable gentleman on the other side of the
table.--Those are the sentiments of Washington's Farewell Address.
Nothing better than that since the last chapter in Revelations.
Five-and-forty years ago there used to be Washington societies, and
little boys used to walk in processions, each little boy having a copy
of the Address, bound in red, hung round his neck by a ribbon. Why don't
they now? Why don't they now? I saw enough of hating each other in the
old Federal times; now let's love each other, I say,--let's love each
other, and not try to make it out that there is n't any place fit to
live in except the one we happen to be born in.

It dwarfs the mind, I think,--said I,--to feed it on any localism. The
full stature of manhood is shrivelled--

The color burst up into my cheeks. What was I saying,--I, who would not
for the world have pained our unfortunate little boarder by an allusion?

I will go,--he said,--and made a movement with his left arm to let
himself down from his high chair.

No,--no,--he does n't mean it,--you must not go,--said a kind voice next
him; and a soft, white hand was laid upon his arm.

Iris, my dear!--exclaimed another voice, as of a female, in accents
that might be considered a strong atmospheric solution of duty with very
little flavor of grace.

She did not move for this address, and there was a tableau that lasted
some seconds. For the young girl, in the glory of half-blown womanhood,
and the dwarf, the cripple, the misshapen little creature covered with
Nature's insults, looked straight into each other's eyes.

Perhaps no handsome young woman had ever looked at him so in his life.
Certainly the young girl never had looked into eyes that reached
into her soul as these did. It was not that they were in themselves
supernaturally bright,--but there was the sad fire in them that flames
up from the soul of one who looks on the beauty of woman without hope,
but, alas! not without emotion. To him it seemed as if those amber gates
had been translucent as the brown water of a mountain brook, and through
them he had seen dimly into a virgin wilderness, only waiting for the
sunrise of a great passion for all its buds to blow and all its bowers
to ring with melody.

That is my image, of course,--not his. It was not a simile that was
in his mind, or is in anybody's at such a moment,--it was a pang of
wordless passion, and then a silent, inward moan.

A lady's wish,--he said, with a certain gallantry of manner,--makes
slaves of us all.--And Nature, who is kind to all her children, and
never leaves the smallest and saddest of all her human failures
without one little comfit of self-love at the bottom of his poor ragged
pocket,--Nature suggested to him that he had turned his sentence well;
and he fell into a reverie, in which the old thoughts that were always
hovering dust outside the doors guarded by Common Sense, and watching
for a chance to squeeze in, knowing perfectly well they would be
ignominiously kicked out again as soon as Common Sense saw them, flocked
in pell-mell,--misty, fragmentary, vague, half-ashamed of themselves,
but still shouldering up against his inner consciousness till it
warmed with their contact:--John Wilkes's--the ugliest man's in
England--saying, that with half-an-hour's start he would cut out the
handsomest man in all the land in any woman's good graces; Cadenus--old
and savage--leading captive Stella and Vanessa; and then the stray line
of a ballad, “And a winning tongue had he,”--as much as to say, it is
n't looks, after all, but cunning words, that win our Eves over,--just
as of old when it was the worst-looking brute of the lot that got our
grandmother to listen to his stuff and so did the mischief.

Ah, dear me! We rehearse the part of Hercules with his club, subjugating
man and woman in our fancy, the first by the weight of it, and the
second by our handling of it,--we rehearse it, I say, by our own
hearth-stones, with the cold poker as our club, and the exercise is
easy. But when we come to real life, the poker is in the fore, and, ten
to one, if we would grasp it, we find it too hot to hold;--lucky for
us, if it is not white-hot, and we do not have to leave the skin of our
hands sticking to it when we fling it down or drop it with a loud or
silent cry!

--I am frightened when I find into what a labyrinth of human character
and feeling I am winding. I meant to tell my thoughts, and to throw in
a few studies of manner and costume as they pictured themselves for
me from day to day. Chance has thrown together at the table with me a
number of persons who are worth studying, and I mean not only to look
on them, but, if I can, through them. You can get any man's or woman's
secret, whose sphere is circumscribed by your own, if you will only look
patiently on them long enough. Nature is always applying her reagents
to character, if you will take the pains to watch her. Our studies
of character, to change the image, are very much like the surveyor's
triangulation of a geographical province. We get a base-line in
organization, always; then we get an angle by sighting some distant
object to which the passions or aspirations of the subject of our
observation are tending; then another;--and so we construct our first
triangle. Once fix a man's ideals, and for the most part the rest is
easy. A wants to die worth half a million. Good. B (female) wants to
catch him,--and outlive him. All right. Minor details at our leisure.

What is it, of all your experiences, of all your thoughts, of all your
misdoings, that lies at the very bottom of the great heap of acts of
consciousness which make up your past life? What should you most dislike
to tell your nearest friend?--Be so good as to pause for a brief space,
and shut the volume you hold with your finger between the pages.--Oh,
that is it!

What a confessional I have been sitting at, with the inward ear of my
soul open, as the multitudinous whisper of my involuntary confidants
came back to me like the reduplicated echo of a cry among the craggy
bills!

At the house of a friend where I once passed the night was one of those
stately upright cabinet desks and cases of drawers which were not rare
in prosperous families during the last century. It had held the clothes
and the books and the papers of generation after generation. The hands
that opened its drawers had grown withered, shrivelled, and at last been
folded in death. The children that played with the lower handles had
got tall enough to open the desk, to reach the upper shelves behind the
folding-doors,--grown bent after a while,--and then followed those
who had gone before, and left the old cabinet to be ransacked by a new
generation.

A boy of ten or twelve was looking at it a few years ago, and, being a
quick-witted fellow, saw that all the space was not accounted for by the
smaller drawers in the part beneath the lid of the desk. Prying about
with busy eyes and fingers, he at length came upon a spring, on pressing
which, a secret drawer flew from its hiding-place. It had never been
opened but by the maker. The mahogany shavings and dust were lying in it
as when the artisan closed it,--and when I saw it, it was as fresh as if
that day finished.

Is there not one little drawer in your soul, my sweet reader, which no
hand but yours has ever opened, and which none that have known you
seem to have suspected? What does it hold?--A sin?--I hope not. What a
strange thing an old dead sin laid away in a secret drawer of the soul
is! Must it some time or other be moistened with tears, until it comes
to life again and begins to stir in our consciousness,--as the dry
wheel-animalcule, looking like a grain of dust, becomes alive, if it is
wet with a drop of water?

Or is it a passion? There are plenty of withered men and women walking
about the streets who have the secret drawer in their hearts, which,
if it were opened, would show as fresh as it was when they were in the
flush of youth and its first trembling emotions.

What it held will, perhaps, never be known, until they are dead and
gone, and same curious eye lights on an old yellow letter with the
fossil footprints of the extinct passion trodden thick all over it.

There is not a boarder at our table, I firmly believe, excepting the
young girl, who has not a story of the heart to tell, if one could only
get the secret drawer open. Even this arid female, whose armor of black
bombazine looks stronger against the shafts of love than any cuirass of
triple brass, has had her sentimental history, if I am not mistaken. I
will tell you my reason for suspecting it.

Like many other old women, she shows a great nervousness and
restlessness whenever I venture to express any opinion upon a class of
subjects which can hardly be said to belong to any man or set of men
as their strictly private property,--not even to the clergy, or the
newspapers commonly called “religious.” Now, although it would be a
great luxury to me to obtain my opinions by contract, ready-made, from a
professional man, and although I have a constitutional kindly feeling
to all sorts of good people which would make me happy to agree with all
their beliefs, if that were possible, still I must have an idea, now and
then, as to the meaning of life; and though the only condition of peace
in this world is to have no ideas, or, at least, not to express them,
with reference to such subjects, I can't afford to pay quite so much as
that even for peace.

I find that there is a very prevalent opinion among the dwellers on the
shores of Sir Isaac Newton's Ocean of Truth, that salt, fish, which have
been taken from it a good while ago, split open, cured and dried, are
the only proper and allowable food for reasonable people. I maintain, on
the other hand, that there are a number of live fish still swimming in
it, and that every one of us has a right to see if he cannot catch some
of them. Sometimes I please myself with the idea that I have landed
an actual living fish, small, perhaps, but with rosy gills and silvery
scales. Then I find the consumers of nothing but the salted and dried
article insist that it is poisonous, simply because it is alive, and cry
out to people not to touch it. I have not found, however, that people
mind them much.

The poor boarder in bombazine is my dynamometer. I try every
questionable proposition on her. If she winces, I must be prepared for
an outcry from the other old women. I frightened her, the other day, by
saying that faith, as an intellectual state, was self-reliance, which,
if you have a metaphysical turn, you will find is not so much of a
paradox as it sounds at first. So she sent me a book to read which was
to cure me of that error. It was an old book, and looked as if it had
not been opened for a long time. What should drop out of it, one day,
but a small heart-shaped paper, containing a lock of that straight,
coarse, brown hair which sets off the sharp faces of so many
thin-flanked, large-handed bumpkins! I read upon the paper the name
“Hiram.”--Love! love! love!--everywhere! everywhere!--under diamonds and
housemaids' “jewelry,”--lifting the marrowy camel's-hair, and rustling
even the black bombazine!--No, no,--I think she never was pretty, but
she was young once, and wore bright ginghams, and, perhaps, gay merinos.
We shall find that the poor little crooked man has been in love, or is
in love, or will be in love before we have done with him, for aught that
I know!

Romance! Was there ever a boarding-house in the world where the
seemingly prosaic table had not a living fresco for its background,
where you could see, if you had eyes, the smoke and fire of some
upheaving sentiment, or the dreary craters of smouldering or burnt-out
passions? You look on the black bombazine and high-necked decorum of
your neighbor, and no more think of the real life that underlies this
despoiled and dismantled womanhood than you think of a stone trilobite
as having once been full of the juices and the nervous thrills of
throbbing and self-conscious being. There is a wild creature under that
long yellow pin which serves as brooch for the bombazine cuirass,--a
wild creature, which I venture to say would leap in his cage, if
I should stir him, quiet as you think him. A heart which has been
domesticated by matrimony and maternity is as tranquil as a tame
bullfinch; but a wild heart which has never been fairly broken in
flutters fiercely long after you think time has tamed it down,--like
that purple finch I had the other day, which could not be approached
without such palpitations and frantic flings against the bars of his
cage, that I had to send him back and get a little orthodox canary
which had learned to be quiet and never mind the wires or his keeper's
handling. I will tell you my wicked, but half involuntary experiment on
the wild heart under the faded bombazine.

Was there ever a person in the room with you, marked by any special
weakness or peculiarity, with whom you could be two hours and not touch
the infirm spot? I confess the most frightful tendency to do just this
thing. If a man has a brogue, I am sure to catch myself imitating it.
If another is lame, I follow him, or, worse than that, go before him,
limping.

I could never meet an Irish gentleman--if it had been the Duke of
Wellington himself--without stumbling upon the word “Paddy,”--which I
use rarely in my common talk.

I have been worried to know whether this was owing to some innate
depravity of disposition on my part, some malignant torturing instinct,
which, under different circumstances, might have made a Fijian
anthropophagus of me, or to some law of thought for which I was
not answerable. It is, I am convinced, a kind of physical fact like
endosmosis, with which some of you are acquainted. A thin film of
politeness separates the unspoken and unspeakable current of thought
from the stream of conversation. After a time one begins to soak through
and mingle with the other.

We were talking about names, one day.--Was there ever anything,--I
said,--like the Yankee for inventing the most uncouth, pretentious,
detestable appellations,--inventing or finding them,--since the time of
Praise-God Barebones? I heard a country-boy once talking of another whom
he called Elpit, as I understood him. Elbridge is common enough, but
this sounded oddly. It seems the boy was christened Lord Pitt,--and
called for convenience, as above. I have heard a charming little
girl, belonging to an intelligent family in the country, called Anges
invariably; doubtless intended for Agnes. Names are cheap. How can a
man name an innocent new-born child, that never did him any harm,
Hiram?--The poor relation, or whatever she is, in bombazine, turned
toward me, but I was stupid, and went on.--To think of a man going
through life saddled with such an abominable name as that!--The poor
relation grew very uneasy.--I continued; for I never thought of all this
till afterwards.--I knew one young fellow, a good many years ago, by the
name of Hiram--What's got into you, Cousin,--said our landlady,--to look
so?--There! you 've upset your teacup!

It suddenly occurred to me what I had been doing, and I saw the
poor woman had her hand at her throat; she was half-choking with the
“hysteric ball,”--a very odd symptom, as you know, which nervous women
often complain of. What business had I to be trying experiments on this
forlorn old soul? I had a great deal better be watching that young girl.

Ah, the young girl! I am sure that she can hide nothing from me. Her
skin is so transparent that one can almost count her heart-beats by the
flushes they send into her cheeks. She does not seem to be shy, either.
I think she does not know enough of danger to be timid. She seems to
me like one of those birds that travellers tell of, found in remote,
uninhabited islands, who, having never received any wrong at the hand
of man, show no alarm at and hardly any particular consciousness of his
presence.

The first thing will be to see how she and our little deformed gentleman
get along together; for, as I have told you, they sit side by side. The
next thing will be to keep an eye on the duenna,--the “Model” and
so forth, as the white-neck-cloth called her. The intention of that
estimable lady is, I understand, to launch her and leave her. I suppose
there is no help for it, and I don't doubt this young lady knows how to
take care of herself, but I do not like to see young girls turned loose
in boarding-houses. Look here now! There is that jewel of his race,
whom I have called for convenience the Koh-i-noor, (you understand it
is quite out of the question for me to use the family names of our
boarders, unless I want to get into trouble,)--I say, the gentleman with
the diamond is looking very often and very intently, it seems to me,
down toward the farther corner of the table, where sits our amber-eyed
blonde. The landlady's daughter does not look pleased, it seems to me,
at this, nor at those other attentions which the gentleman referred to
has, as I have learned, pressed upon the newly-arrived young person. The
landlady made a communication to me, within a few days after the arrival
of Miss Iris, which I will repeat to the best of my remembrance.

He, (the person I have been speaking of,)--she said,--seemed to
be kinder hankerin' round after that young woman. It had hurt her
daughter's feelin's a good deal, that the gentleman she was a-keepin'
company with should be offerin' tickets and tryin' to send presents to
them that he'd never know'd till jest a little spell ago,--and he as
good as merried, so fur as solemn promises went, to as respectable a
young lady, if she did say so, as any there was round, whosomever they
might be.

Tickets! presents!--said I.--What tickets, what presents has he had the
impertinence to be offering to that young lady?

Tickets to the Museum,--said the landlady. There is them that's glad
enough to go to the Museum, when tickets is given 'em; but some of 'em
ha'n't had a ticket sence Cenderilla was played,--and now he must be
offerin' 'em to this ridiculous young paintress, or whatever she is,
that's come to make more mischief than her board's worth. But it a'n't
her fault,--said the landlady, relenting;--and that aunt of hers, or
whatever she is, served him right enough.

Why, what did she do?

Do? Why, she took it up in the tongs and dropped it out o' winder.

Dropped? dropped what?--I said.

Why, the soap,--said the landlady.

It appeared that the Koh-i-noor, to ingratiate himself, had sent an
elegant package of perfumed soap, directed to Miss Iris, as a delicate
expression of a lively sentiment of admiration, and that, after having
met with the unfortunate treatment referred to, it was picked up by
Master Benjamin Franklin, who appropriated it, rejoicing, and indulged
in most unheard-of and inordinate ablutions in consequence, so that his
hands were a frequent subject of maternal congratulation, and he smelt
like a civet-cat for weeks after his great acquisition.

After watching daily for a time, I think I can see clearly into the
relation which is growing up between the little gentleman and the young
lady. She shows a tenderness to him that I can't help being interested
in. If he was her crippled child, instead of being more than old enough
to be her father, she could not treat him more kindly. The landlady's
daughter said, the other day, she believed that girl was settin' her cap
for the Little Gentleman.

Some of them young folks is very artful,--said her mother,--and there is
them that would merry Lazarus, if he'd only picked up crumbs enough.
I don't think, though, this is one of that sort; she's kinder
childlike,--said the landlady,--and maybe never had any dolls to play
with; for they say her folks was poor before Ma'am undertook to see to
her teachin' and board her and clothe her.

I could not help overhearing this conversation. “Board her and clothe
her!”--speaking of such a young creature! Oh, dear!--Yes,--she must
be fed,--just like Bridget, maid-of-all-work at this establishment.
Somebody must pay for it. Somebody has a right to watch her and see how
much it takes to “keep” her, and growl at her, if she has too good an
appetite. Somebody has a right to keep an eye on her and take care that
she does not dress too prettily. No mother to see her own youth over
again in these fresh features and rising reliefs of half-sculptured
womanhood, and, seeing its loveliness, forget her lessons of
neutral-tinted propriety, and open the cases that hold her own ornaments
to find for her a necklace or a bracelet or a pair of ear-rings,--those
golden lamps that light up the deep, shadowy dimples on the cheeks of
young beauties,--swinging in a semi-barbaric splendor that carries the
wild fancy to Abyssinian queens and musky Odalisques! I don't believe
any woman has utterly given up the great firm of Mundus & Co., so long
as she wears ear-rings.

I think Iris loves to hear the Little Gentleman talk. She smiles
sometimes at his vehement statements, but never laughs at him. When he
speaks to her, she keeps her eye always steadily upon him. This may be
only natural good-breeding, so to speak, but it is worth noticing.
I have often observed that vulgar persons, and public audiences of
inferior collective intelligence, have this in common: the least thing
draws off their minds, when you are speaking to them. I love this
young creature's rapt attention to her diminutive neighbor while he is
speaking.

He is evidently pleased with it. For a day or two after she came, he
was silent and seemed nervous and excited. Now he is fond of getting the
talk into his own hands, and is obviously conscious that he has at least
one interested listener. Once or twice I have seen marks of special
attention to personal adornment, a ruffled shirt-bosom, one day, and
a diamond pin in it,--not so very large as the Koh-i-noor's, but more
lustrous. I mentioned the death's-head ring he wears on his right hand.
I was attracted by a very handsome red stone, a ruby or carbuncle or
something of the sort, to notice his left hand, the other day. It is
a handsome hand, and confirms my suspicion that the cast mentioned was
taken from his arm. After all, this is just what I should expect. It is
not very uncommon to see the upper limbs, or one of them, running away
with the whole strength, and, therefore, with the whole beauty, which
we should never have noticed, if it had been divided equally between all
four extremities. If it is so, of course he is proud of his one strong
and beautiful arm; that is human nature. I am afraid he can hardly help
betraying his favoritism, as people who have any one showy point are apt
to do,--especially dentists with handsome teeth, who always smile back
to their last molars.

Sitting, as he does, next to the young girl, and next but one to the
calm lady who has her in charge, he cannot help seeing their relations
to each other.

That is an admirable woman, Sir,--he said to me one day, as we sat alone
at the table after breakfast,--an admirable woman, Sir,--and I hate her.

Of course, I begged an explanation.

An admirable woman, Sir, because she does good things, and even kind
things,--takes care of this--this--young lady--we have here, talks like
a sensible person, and always looks as if she was doing her duty with
all her might. I hate her because her voice sounds as if it never
trembled and her eyes look as if she never knew what it was to cry.
Besides, she looks at me, Sir, stares at me, as if she wanted to get
an image of me for some gallery in her brain,--and we don't love to be
looked at in this way, we that have--I hate her,--I hate her,--her eyes
kill me,--it is like being stabbed with icicles to be looked at so,--the
sooner she goes home, the better. I don't want a woman to weigh me in
a balance; there are men enough for that sort of work. The judicial
character is n't captivating in females, Sir. A woman fascinates a man
quite as often by what she overlooks as by what she sees. Love prefers
twilight to daylight; and a man doesn't think much of, nor care much
for, a woman outside of his household, unless he can couple the idea
of love, past, present, or future, with her. I don't believe the Devil
would give half as much for the services of a sinner as he would for
those of one of these folks that are always doing virtuous acts in a
way to make them unpleasing.--That young girl wants a tender nature to
cherish her and give her a chance to put out her leaves,--sunshine, and
not east winds.

He was silent,--and sat looking at his handsome left hand with the red
stone ring upon it.--Is he going to fall in love with Iris?

Here are some lines I read to the boarders the other day:--

           THE CROOKED FOOTPATH

     Ah, here it is! the sliding rail
     That marks the old remembered spot,
     --The gap that struck our schoolboy trail,
     --The crooked path across the lot.

     It left the road by school and church,
     A pencilled shadow, nothing more,
     That parted from the silver birch
     And ended at the farmhouse door.

     No line or compass traced its plan;
     With frequent bends to left or right,
     In aimless, wayward curves it ran,
     But always kept the door in sight.

     The gabled porch, with woodbine green,
     --The broken millstone at the sill,
     --Though many a rood might stretch between,
     The truant child could see them still.

     No rocks, across the pathway lie,
     --No fallen trunk is o'er it thrown,
     --And yet it winds, we know not why,
     And turns as if for tree or stone.

     Perhaps some lover trod the way
     With shaking knees and leaping heart,
     --And so it often runs astray
     With sinuous sweep or sudden start.

     Or one, perchance, with clouded brain
     From some unholy banquet reeled,
     --And since, our devious steps maintain
     His track across the trodden field.

     Nay, deem not thus,--no earthborn will
     Could ever trace a faultless line;
     Our truest steps are human still,
     --To walk unswerving were divine!

     Truants from love, we dream of wrath;
     --Oh, rather let us trust the more!
     Through all the wanderings of the path,
     We still can see our Father's door!




V

The Professor finds a Fly in his Teacup.

I have a long theological talk to relate, which must be dull reading to
some of my young and vivacious friends. I don't know, however, that any
of them have entered into a contract to read all that I write, or that I
have promised always to write to please them. What if I should sometimes
write to please myself?

Now you must know that there are a great many things which interest me,
to some of which this or that particular class of readers may be totally
indifferent. I love Nature, and human nature, its thoughts, affections,
dreams, aspirations, delusions,--Art in all its forms,--virtu in all
its eccentricities,--old stories from black-letter volumes and yellow
manuscripts, and new projects out of hot brains not yet imbedded in the
snows of age. I love the generous impulses of the reformer; but not less
does my imagination feed itself upon the old litanies, so often warmed
by the human breath upon which they were wafted to Heaven that they glow
through our frames like our own heart's blood. I hope I love good men
and women; I know that they never speak a word to me, even if it be of
question or blame, that I do not take pleasantly, if it is expressed
with a reasonable amount of human kindness.

I have before me at this time a beautiful and affecting letter, which
I have hesitated to answer, though the postmark upon it gave its
direction, and the name is one which is known to all, in some of its
representatives. It contains no reproach, only a delicately-hinted fear.
Speak gently, as this dear lady has spoken, and there is no heart so
insensible that it does not answer to the appeal, no intellect so
virile that it does not own a certain deference to the claims of age, of
childhood, of sensitive and timid natures, when they plead with it not
to look at those sacred things by the broad daylight which they see in
mystic shadow. How grateful would it be to make perpetual peace with
these pleading saints and their confessors, by the simple act
that silences all complainings! Sleep, sleep, sleep! says the
Arch-Enchantress of them all,--and pours her dark and potent anodyne,
distilled over the fires that consumed her foes,--its large, round drops
changing, as we look, into the beads of her convert's rosary! Silence!
the pride of reason! cries another, whose whole life is spent in
reasoning down reason.

I hope I love good people, not for their sake, but for my own. And most
assuredly, if any deed of wrong or word of bitterness led me into an act
of disrespect towards that enlightened and excellent class of men who
make it their calling to teach goodness and their duty to practise it,
I should feel that I had done myself an injury rather than them. Go
and talk with any professional man holding any of the medieval creeds,
choosing one who wears upon his features the mark of inward and outward
health, who looks cheerful, intelligent, and kindly, and see how all
your prejudices melt away in his presence! It is impossible to come into
intimate relations with a large, sweet nature, such as you may often
find in this class, without longing to be at one with it in all its
modes of being and believing. But does it not occur to you that one may
love truth as he sees it, and his race as he views it, better than even
the sympathy and approbation of many good men whom he honors,--better
than sleeping to the sound of the Miserere or listening to the
repetition of an effete Confession of Faith?

The three learned professions have but recently emerged from a state
of quasi-barbarism. None of them like too well to be told of it, but it
must be sounded in their ears whenever they put on airs. When a man has
taken an overdose of laudanum, the doctors tell us to place him between
two persons who shall make him walk up and down incessantly; and if he
still cannot be kept from going to sleep, they say that a lash or two
over his back is of great assistance.

So we must keep the doctors awake by telling them that they have not yet
shaken off astrology and the doctrine of signatures, as is shown by the
form of their prescriptions, and their use of nitrate of silver, which
turns epileptics into Ethiopians. If that is not enough, they must be
given over to the scourgers, who like their task and get good fees for
it. A few score years ago, sick people were made to swallow burnt
toads and powdered earthworms and the expressed juice of wood-lice. The
physician of Charles I. and II. prescribed abominations not to be named.
Barbarism, as bad as that of Congo or Ashantee. Traces of this barbarism
linger even in the greatly improved medical science of our century. So
while the solemn farce of over-drugging is going on, the world over,
the harlequin pseudo-science jumps on to the stage, whip in hand, with
half-a-dozen somersets, and begins laying about him.

In 1817, perhaps you remember, the law of wager by battle was
unrepealed, and the rascally murderous, and worse than murderous, clown,
Abraham Thornton, put on his gauntlet in open court and defied the
appellant to lift the other which he threw down. It was not until the
reign of George II. that the statutes against witchcraft were repealed.
As for the English Court of Chancery, we know that its antiquated abuses
form one of the staples of common proverbs and popular literature.
So the laws and the lawyers have to be watched perpetually by public
opinion as much as the doctors do.

I don't think the other profession is an exception. When the Reverend
Mr. Cauvin and his associates burned my distinguished scientific
brother,--he was burned with green fagots, which made it rather slow and
painful,--it appears to me they were in a state of religious barbarism.
The dogmas of such people about the Father of Mankind and his creatures
are of no more account in my opinion than those of a council of Aztecs.
If a man picks your pocket, do you not consider him thereby disqualified
to pronounce any authoritative opinion on matters of ethics? If a man
hangs my ancient female relatives for sorcery, as they did in this
neighborhood a little while ago, or burns my instructor for not
believing as he does, I care no more for his religious edicts than I
should for those of any other barbarian.

Of course, a barbarian may hold many true opinions; but when the ideas
of the healing art, of the administration of justice, of Christian love,
could not exclude systematic poisoning, judicial duelling, and murder
for opinion's sake, I do not see how we can trust the verdict of
that time relating to any subject which involves the primal instincts
violated in these abominations and absurdities.--What if we are even now
in a state of semi-barbarism?

     [Note: This physician believes we “are even now in a state
     of semi-barbarism”: invasive procedures for the prolongation
     of death rather than prolongation of life; “faith” as slimly
     based as medieval faith in minute differences between
     control and treated groups; statistical manipulation to
     prove a prejudice.  Medicine has a good deal to answer for!
     D.W.]

Perhaps some think we ought not to talk at table about such things.--I
am not so sure of that. Religion and government appear to me the two
subjects which of all others should belong to the common talk of people
who enjoy the blessings of freedom. Think, one moment. The earth is a
great factory-wheel, which, at every revolution on its axis, receives
fifty thousand raw souls and turns off nearly the same number worked
up more or less completely. There must be somewhere a population of
two hundred thousand million, perhaps ten or a hundred times as many,
earth-born intelligences. Life, as we call it, is nothing but the edge
of the boundless ocean of existence where it comes on soundings. In
this view, I do not see anything so fit to talk about, or half so
interesting, as that which relates to the innumerable majority of our
fellow-creatures, the dead-living, who are hundreds of thousands to one
of the live-living, and with whom we all potentially belong, though we
have got tangled for the present in some parcels of fibrine, albumen,
and phosphates, that keep us on the minority side of the house. In
point of fact, it is one of the many results of Spiritualism to make
the permanent destiny of the race a matter of common reflection and
discourse, and a vehicle for the prevailing disbelief of the Middle-Age
doctrines on the subject. I cannot help thinking, when I remember how
many conversations my friend and myself have sported, that it would be
very extraordinary, if there were no mention of that class of subjects
which involves all that we have and all that we hope, not merely for
ourselves, but for the dear people whom we love best,--noble men, pure
and lovely women, ingenuous children, about the destiny of nine tenths
of whom you know the opinions that would have been taught by those
old man-roasting, woman-strangling dogmatists.--However, I fought this
matter with one of our boarders the other day, and I am going to report
the conversation.

The divinity-student came down, one morning, looking rather more serious
than usual. He said little at breakfast-time, but lingered after the
others, so that I, who am apt to be long at the table, found myself
alone with him.

When the rest were all gone, he turned his chair round towards mine, and
began.

I am afraid,--he said,--you express yourself a little too freely on a
most important class of subjects. Is there not danger in introducing
discussions or allusions relating to matters of religion into common
discourse?

Danger to what?--I asked.

Danger to truth,--he replied, after a slight pause.

I didn't know Truth was such an invalid,' I said.--How long is it since
she could only take the air in a close carriage, with a gentleman in
a black coat on the box? Let me tell you a story, adapted to young
persons, but which won't hurt older ones.

--There was a very little boy who had one of those balloons you may have
seen, which are filled with light gas, and are held by a string to keep
them from running off in aeronautic voyages on their own account. This
little boy had a naughty brother, who said to him, one day,--Brother,
pull down your balloon, so that I can look at it and take hold of it.
Then the little boy pulled it down. Now the naughty brother had a sharp
pin in his hand, and he thrust it into the balloon, and all the gas
oozed out, so that there was nothing left but a shrivelled skin.

One evening, the little boy's father called him to the window to see the
moon, which pleased him very much; but presently he said,--Father, do
not pull the string and bring down the moon, for my naughty brother will
prick it, and then it will all shrivel up and we shall not see it any
more.

Then his father laughed, and told him how the moon had been shining a
good while, and would shine a good while longer, and that all we could
do was to keep our windows clean, never letting the dust get too thick
on them, and especially to keep our eyes open, but that we could not
pull the moon down with a string, nor prick it with a pin.--Mind you
this, too, the moon is no man's private property, but is seen from a
good many parlor-windows.

--Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay,
you may kick it about all day, like a football, and it will be round and
full at evening. Does not Mr. Bryant say, that Truth gets well if she is
run over by a locomotive, while Error dies of lockjaw if she scratches
her finger? [Would that this was so:--error, superstition, mysticism,
authoritarianism, pseudo-science all have a tenacity that survives
inexplicably. D.W.] I never heard that a mathematician was alarmed for
the safety of a demonstrated proposition. I think, generally, that fear
of open discussion implies feebleness of inward conviction, and great
sensitiveness to the expression of individual opinion is a mark of
weakness.

--I am not so much afraid for truth,--said the divinity-student,--as for
the conceptions of truth in the minds of persons not accustomed to judge
wisely the opinions uttered before them.

Would you, then, banish all allusions to matters of this nature from the
society of people who come together habitually?

I would be very careful in introducing them,--said the divinity-student.

Yes, but friends of yours leave pamphlets in people's entries, to be
picked up by nervous misses and hysteric housemaids, full of doctrines
these people do not approve. Some of your friends stop little children
in the street, and give them books, which their parents, who have had
them baptized into the Christian fold and give them what they consider
proper religious instruction, do not think fit for them. One would
say it was fair enough to talk about matters thus forced upon people's
attention.

The divinity-student could not deny that this was what might be called
opening the subject to the discussion of intelligent people.

But,--he said,--the greatest objection is this, that persons who have
not made a professional study of theology are not competent to speak on
such subjects. Suppose a minister were to undertake to express opinions
on medical subjects, for instance, would you not think he was going
beyond his province?

I laughed,--for I remembered John Wesley's “sulphur and supplication,”
 and so many other cases where ministers had meddled with
medicine,--sometimes well and sometimes ill, but, as a general rule,
with a tremendous lurch to quackery, owing to their very loose way of
admitting evidence,--that I could not help being amused.

I beg your pardon,--I said,--I do not wish to be impolite, but I was
thinking of their certificates to patent medicines. Let us look at this
matter.

If a minister had attended lectures on the theory and practice of
medicine, delivered by those who had studied it most deeply, for thirty
or forty years, at the rate of from fifty to one hundred a year,--if
he had been constantly reading and hearing read the most approved
text-books on the subject,--if he had seen medicine actually practised
according to different methods, daily, for the same length of time,--I
should think, that if a person of average understanding, he was entitled
to express an opinion on the subject of medicine, or else that his
instructors were a set of ignorant and incompetent charlatans.

If, before a medical practitioner would allow me to enjoy the full
privileges of the healing art, he expected me to affirm my belief in a
considerable number of medical doctrines, drugs, and formulae, I should
think that he thereby implied my right to discuss the same, and my
ability to do so, if I knew how to express myself in English.

Suppose, for instance, the Medical Society should refuse to give us an
opiate, or to set a broken limb, until we had signed our belief in a
certain number of propositions,--of which we will say this is the first:

I. All men's teeth are naturally in a state of total decay or caries,
and, therefore, no man can bite until every one of them is extracted and
a new set is inserted according to the principles of dentistry adopted
by this Society.

I, for one, should want to discuss that before signing my name to it,
and I should say this:--Why, no, that is n't true. There are a good many
bad teeth, we all know, but a great many more good ones. You must n't
trust the dentists; they are all the time looking at the people who have
bad teeth, and such as are suffering from toothache. The idea that
you must pull out every one of every nice young man and young woman's
natural teeth! Poh, poh! Nobody believes that. This tooth must be
straightened, that must be filled with gold, and this other perhaps
extracted, but it must be a very rare case, if they are all so bad as to
require extraction; and if they are, don't blame the poor soul for it!
Don't tell us, as some old dentists used to, that everybody not only
always has every tooth in his head good for nothing, but that he ought
to have his head cut off as a punishment for that misfortune! No, I
can't sign Number One. Give us Number Two.

II. We hold that no man can be well who does not agree with our views
of the efficacy of calomel, and who does not take the doses of it
prescribed in our tables, as there directed.

To which I demur, questioning why it should be so, and get for answer
the two following:

III. Every man who does not take our prepared calomel, as prescribed
by us in our Constitution and By-Laws, is and must be a mass of disease
from head to foot; it being self-evident that he is simultaneously
affected with Apoplexy, Arthritis, Ascites, Asphyxia, and Atrophy; with
Borborygmus, Bronchitis, and Bulimia; with Cachexia, Carcinoma, and
Cretinismus; and so on through the alphabet, to Xerophthahnia and Zona,
with all possible and incompatible diseases which are necessary to make
up a totally morbid state; and he will certainly die, if he does not
take freely of our prepared calomel, to be obtained only of one of our
authorized agents.

IV. No man shall be allowed to take our prepared calomel who does not
give in his solemn adhesion to each and all of the above-named and the
following propositions (from ten to a hundred) and show his mouth to
certain of our apothecaries, who have not studied dentistry, to examine
whether all his teeth have been extracted and a new set inserted
according to our regulations.

Of course, the doctors have a right to say we sha'n't have any rhubarb,
if we don't sign their articles, and that, if, after signing them, we
express doubts (in public), about any of them, they will cut us off
from our jalap and squills,--but then to ask a fellow not to discuss the
propositions before he signs them is what I should call boiling it down
a little too strong!

If we understand them, why can't we discuss them? If we can't understand
them, because we have n't taken a medical degree, what the Father of
Lies do they ask us to sign them for?

Just so with the graver profession. Every now and then some of its
members seem to lose common sense and common humanity. The laymen have
to keep setting the divines right constantly. Science, for instance,--in
other words, knowledge,--is not the enemy of religion; for, if so,
then religion would mean ignorance: But it is often the antagonist of
school-divinity.

Everybody knows the story of early astronomy and the school-divines.
Come down a little later, Archbishop Usher, a very learned Protestant
prelate, tells us that the world was created on Sunday, the twenty-third
of October, four thousand and four years before the birth of Christ.
Deluge, December 7th, two thousand three hundred and forty-eight years
B. C. Yes, and the earth stands on an elephant, and the elephant on a
tortoise. One statement is as near the truth as the other.

Again, there is nothing so brutalizing to some natures as moral surgery.
I have often wondered that Hogarth did not add one more picture to
his four stages of Cruelty. Those wretched fools, reverend divines and
others, who were strangling men and women for imaginary crimes a little
more than a century ago among us, were set right by a layman, and very
angry it made them to have him meddle.

The good people of Northampton had a very remarkable man for their
clergyman,--a man with a brain as nicely adjusted for certain mechanical
processes as Babbage's calculating machine. The commentary of the laymen
on the preaching and practising of Jonathan Edwards was, that, after
twenty-three years of endurance, they turned him out by a vote of twenty
to one, and passed a resolve that he should never preach for them again.
A man's logical and analytical adjustments are of little consequence,
compared to his primary relations with Nature and truth: and people have
sense enough to find it out in the long ran; they know what “logic” is
worth.

In that miserable delusion referred to above, the reverend Aztecs and
Fijians argued rightly enough from their premises, no doubt, for many
men can do this. But common sense and common humanity were unfortunately
left out from their premises, and a layman had to supply them. A hundred
more years and many of the barbarisms still lingering among us will, of
course, have disappeared like witch-hanging. But people are sensitive
now, as they were then. You will see by this extract that the Rev.
Cotton Mather did not like intermeddling with his business very well.

“Let the Levites of the Lord keep close to their Instructions,” he says,
“and God will smite thro' the loins of those that rise up against them.
I will report unto you a Thing which many Hundreds among us know to be
true. The Godly Minister of a certain Town in Connecticut, when he had
occasion to be absent on a Lord's Day from his Flock, employ'd an honest
Neighbour of some small Talents for a Mechanick, to read a Sermon out
of some good Book unto 'em. This Honest, whom they ever counted also a
Pious Man, had so much conceit of his Talents, that instead of Reading
a Sermon appointed, he to the Surprize of the People, fell to preaching
one of his own. For his Text he took these Words, 'Despise not
Prophecyings'; and in his Preachment he betook himself to bewail the
Envy of the Clergy in the Land, in that they did not wish all the Lord's
People to be Prophets, and call forth Private Brethren publickly to
pro

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