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Over the Teacups

by Oliver Wendell Holmes · English · Gutenberg #2689 · 526,464 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Over the Teacups

Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes


        
Release date: September 29, 2004 [eBook #2689]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2689

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OVER THE TEACUPS ***



Produced by David Widger





OVER THE TEACUPS

By Oliver W. Holmes




PREFACE.


The kind way in which this series of papers has been received has been
a pleasure greater than I dared to anticipate. I felt that I was a late
comer in the midst of a crowd of ardent and eager candidates for
public attention, that I had already had my day, and that if, like the
unfortunate Frenchman we used read about, I had “come again,” I ought
not to surprised if I received the welcome of “Monsieur Tonson.”

It has not proved so. My old readers have come forward in the
pleasantest possible way and assured me that they were glad to see me
again. There is no need, therefore, of apologies or explanations. I
thought I had something left to say and I have found listeners. In
writing these papers I have had occupation and kept myself in relation
with my fellow-beings. New sympathies, new sources of encouragement,
if not of inspiration, have opened themselves before me and cheated the
least promising season of life of much that seemed to render it dreary
and depressing. What particularly pleased me has been the freedom of
criticisms which I have seen from disadvantageous comparisons of my
later with my earlier writings.

I should like a little rest from literary work before the requiescat
ensures my repose from earthly labors, but I will not be rash enough to
promise that I will not even once again greet my old and new readers if
the impulse becomes irresistible to renew a companionship which has been
to me such a source of happiness.

BEVERLY FARM, Mass., August, 1891.

O. W. H.




OVER THE TEACUPS.




I


INTRODUCTION

This series of papers was begun in March, 1888. A single number was
printed, when it was interrupted the course of events, and not resumed
until nearly years later, in January, 1890. The plan of the series was
not formed in my mind when I wrote the number. In returning to my task
I found that my original plan had shaped itself in the underground
laboratory of my thought so that some changes had to be made in what I
had written. As I proceeded, the slight story which formed a part of my
programme eloped itself without any need of much contrivance on my part.
Given certain characters in a writer's conception, if they are real to
him, as they ought to be they will act in such or such a way, according
to the law of their nature. It was pretty safe to assume that intimate
relations would spring up between some members of our mixed company; and
it was not rash conjecture that some of these intimacies might end in
such attachment as would furnish us hints, at least, of a love-story.

As to the course of the conversations which would take place, very
little could be guessed beforehand. Various subjects of interest would
be likely to present themselves, without definite order, oftentimes
abruptly and, as it would seem, capriciously. Conversation in such a
mixed company as that of “The Teacups” is likely to be suggestive
rather than exhaustive. Continuous discourse is better adapted to the
lecture-room than to the tea-table. There is quite enough of it, I fear
too much,--in these pages. But the reader must take the reports of our
talks as they were jotted down. A patchwork quilt is not like a piece of
Gobelin tapestry; but it has its place and its use.

Some will feel a temptation to compare these conversations with those
earlier ones, and remark unamiably upon their difference. This is hardly
fair, and is certainly not wise. They are produced under very different
conditions, and betray that fact in every line. It is better to take
them by themselves; and, if my reader finds anything to please or profit
from, I shall be contented, and he, I feel sure, will not be ungrateful.

The readers who take up this volume may recollect a series of
conversations held many years ago over the breakfast-table, and reported
for their more or less profitable entertainment. Those were not very
early breakfasts at which the talks took place, but at any rate the
sun was rising, and the guests had not as yet tired themselves with the
labors of the day. The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about
it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea
cannot be expected to reproduce. The toils of the forenoon, the heats of
midday, in the warm season, the slanting light of the descending sun,
or the sobered translucency of twilight have subdued the vivacity of the
early day. Yet under the influence of the benign stimulant many trains
of thought which will bear recalling, may suggest themselves to some
of our quiet circle and prove not uninteresting to a certain number of
readers.

How early many of my old breakfast companions went off to bed! I am
thinking not merely of those who sat round our table, but of that larger
company of friends who listened to our conversations as reported. Dear
girl with the silken ringlets, dear boy with the down-shadowed cheek,
your grandfather, your grandmother, turned over the freshly printed
leaves that told the story of those earlier meetings around the plain
board where so many things were said and sung, not all of which have
quite faded from memory of this overburdened and forgetful time. Your
father, your mother, found the scattered leaves gathered in a volume,
and smiled upon them as not uncompanionable acquaintances. My tea-table
makes no promises. There is no programme of exercises to studied
beforehand. What if I should content myself with a single report of what
was said and done over our teacups? Perhaps my young reader would be
glad to let me off, for there are talkers enough who have not yet
left their breakfast-tables; and nobody can blame the young people for
preferring the thoughts and the language of their own generation, with
all its future before it, to those of their grandfathers contemporaries.

My reader, young or old, will please to observe that I have left myself
entire freedom as to the sources of what may be said over the teacups. I
have not told how many cups are commonly on the board, but by using
the plural I have implied that there is at least one other talker or
listener beside myself, and for all that appears there may be a dozen.
There will be no regulation length to my reports,--no attempt to make
out a certain number of pages. I have no contract to fill so many
columns, no pledge to contribute so many numbers. I can stop on this
first page if I do not care to say anything more, and let this article
stand by itself if so minded. What a sense of freedom it gives not to
write by the yard or the column!

When one writes for an English review or magazine at so many guineas a
sheet, the temptation is very great to make one's contribution cover
as many sheets as possible. We all know the metallic taste of articles
written under this powerful stimulus. If Bacon's Essays had been
furnished by a modern hand to the “Quarterly Review” at fifty guineas a
sheet, what a great book it would have taken to hold them!

The first thing which suggests itself to me, as I contemplate my slight
project, is the liability of repeating in the evening what I may have
said in the morning in one form or another, and printed in these or
other pages. When it suddenly flashes into the consciousness of a writer
who had been long before the public, “Why, I have said all that once
or oftener in my books or essays, and here it is again; the same old
thought, the same old image, the same old story!” it irritates him, and
is likely to stir up the monosyllables of his unsanctified vocabulary.
He sees in imagination a thousand readers, smiling or yawning as they
say to themselves, “We have had all that before,” and turn to another
writer's performance for something not quite so stale and superfluous.
This is what the writer says to himself about the reader.

The idiot! Does the simpleton really think that everybody has read all
he has written? Does he really believe that everybody remembers all of
his, writer's, words he may happen to have read? At one of those famous
dinners of the Phi Beta Kappa Society; where no reporter was ever
admitted, and which nothing ever leaks out about what is said and done,
Mr. Edward Everett, in his after-dinner speech, quoted these lines from
the AEneid, giving a liberal English version of them, which he applied
to the Oration just delivered by Mr. Emerson:

   Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosae
   Addiderant, rutili tres ignis, et alitis Austri.

His nephew, the ingenious, inventive, and inexhaustible. Edward Everett
Hale, tells the story of this quotation, and of the various uses to
which it might plied in after-dinner speeches. How often he ventured
to repeat it at the Phi Beta Kappa dinners I am not sure; but as he
reproduced it with his lively embellishments and fresh versions and
artful circumlocutions, not one person in ten remembered that he had
listened to those same words in those same accents only a twelvemonth
ago. The poor deluded creatures who take it for granted that all the
world remembers what they have said, and laugh at them when they say it
over again, may profit by this recollection. But what if one does say
the same things,--of course in a little different form each time,--over
her? If he has anything to say worth saying, that is just what he ought
to do. Whether he ought to or not, it is very certain that this is what
all who write much or speak much necessarily must and will do. Think of
the clergyman who preaches fifty or a hundred or more sermons every year
for fifty years! Think of the stump speaker who shouts before a hundred
audiences during the same political campaign, always using the same
arguments, illustrations, and catchwords! Think of the editor, as
Carlyle has pictured him, threshing the same straw every morning, until
we know what is coming when we see the first line, as we do when we read
the large capitals at the head of a thrilling story, which ends in an
advertisement of an all-cleansing soap or an all-curing remedy!

The latch-key which opens into the inner chambers of my consciousness
fits, as I have sufficient reason to believe, the private apartments
of a good many other people's thoughts. The longer we live, the more
we find we are like other persons. When I meet with any facts in my own
mental experience, I feel almost sure that I shall find them repeated or
anticipated in the writings or the conversation of others. This feeling
gives one a freedom in telling his own personal history he could not
have enjoyed without it. My story belongs to you as much as to me. De
te fabula narratur. Change the personal pronoun,--that is all. It gives
many readers a singular pleasure to find a writer telling them something
they have long known or felt, but which they have never before found any
one to put in words for them. An author does not always know when he
is doing the service of the angel who stirred the waters of the pool of
Bethesda. Many a reader is delighted to find his solitary thought has a
companion, and is grateful to the benefactor who has strengthened
him. This is the advantage of the humble reader over the ambitious and
self-worshipping writer. It is not with him pereant illi, but beati sunt
illi qui pro nobis nostra dixerunt,-Blessed are those who have said our
good things for us.

What I have been saying of repetitions leads me into a train of
reflections like which I think many readers will find something in their
own mental history. The area of consciousness is covered by layers of
habitual thoughts, as a sea-beach is covered with wave-worn, rounded
pebbles, shaped, smoothed, and polished by long attrition against each
other. These thoughts remain very much the same from day to day, from
week to week; and as we grow older, from month to month, and from year
to year. The tides of wakening consciousness roll in upon them daily as
we unclose our eyelids, and keep up the gentle movement and murmur of
ordinary mental respiration until we close them again in slumber. When
we think we are thinking, we are for the most part only listening to
sound of attrition between these inert elements of intelligence. They
shift their places a little, they change their relations to each other,
they roll over and turn up new surfaces. Now and then a new fragment is
cast in among them, to be worn and rounded and takes its place with the
others, but the pebbled floor of consciousness is almost as stationary
as the pavement of a city thoroughfare.

It so happens that at this particular tine I have something to tell
which I am quite sure is not one of rolled pebbles which my reader has
seen before in any of my pages, or, as I feel confident, in those of any
other writer.

If my reader asks why I do not send the statement I am going to make
to some one of the special periodicals that deal with such subjects,
my answer is, that I like to tell my own stories at my own time, in own
chosen columns, where they will be read by a class of readers with whom
I like to talk.

All men of letters or of science, all writers well known to the public,
are constantly tampered with, in these days, by a class of predaceous
and hungry fellow-laborers who may be collectively spoken of as the
brain-tappers. They want an author's ideas on the subjects which
interest them, the inquirers, from the gravest religious and moral
questions to the most trivial matters of his habits and his whims and
fancies. Some of their questions he cannot answer; some he does not
choose to answer; some he is not yet ready to answer, and when he is
ready he prefers to select his own organ of publication. I do not find
fault with all the brain-tappers. Some of them are doing excellent
service by accumulating facts which could not otherwise be attained.
Rut one gets tired of the strings of questions sent him, to which he is
expected to return an answer, plucked, ripe or unripe, from his private
tree of knowledge. The brain-tappers are like the owner of the goose
that laid the golden eggs. They would have the embryos and germs of
one's thoughts out of the mental oviducts, and cannot wait for their
spontaneous evolution and extrusion.

The story I have promised is, on the whole, the most remarkable of a
series which I may have told in part at some previous date, but which,
if I have not told, may be worth recalling at a future time.

Some few of my readers may remember that in a former paper I suggested
the possibility of the existence of an idiotic area in the human mind,
corresponding to the blind spot in the human retina. I trust that I
shall not be thought to have let my wits go wandering in that region of
my own intellectual domain, when I relate a singular coincidence which
very lately occurred in my experience, and add a few remarks made by
one of our company on the delicate and difficult but fascinating subject
which it forces upon our attention. I will first copy the memorandum
made at the time:

“Remarkable coincidence. On Monday, April 18th, being at table from 6.30
P. M. to 7.30, with ________and ________ the two ladies of my household,
I told them of the case of 'trial by battel' offered by Abraham Thornton
in 1817. I mentioned his throwing down his glove, which was not taken up
by the brother of his victim, and so he had to be let off, for the old
law was still in force. I mentioned that Abraham Thornton was said to
have come to this country, 'and [I added] he may be living near us, for
aught that I know.” I rose from the table, and found an English letter
waiting for me, left while I sat at dinner. A copy the first portion of
this letter:

'20 ALFRED PLACE, West (near Museum) South Kensington, LONDON, S. W.
April 7, 1887. DR. O. W. HOLMES:

DEAR SIR,--In travelling, the other day, I met with a reprint of the
very interesting case of Thornton for murder, 1817. The prisoner pleaded
successfully the old Wager of Battel. I thought you would like to read
the account, and send it with this....

Yours faithfully, FRED. RATHBONE.'

Mr. Rathbone is a well-known dealer in old Wedgwood and
eighteenth-century art. As a friend of my hospitable entertainer, Mr.
Willett, he had shown me many attentions in England, but I was
not expecting any communication from him; and when, fresh from my
conversation, I found this letter just arrived by mail, and left while
I was at table, and on breaking the seal read what I had a few moments
before been; telling, I was greatly surprised, and immediately made a
note of the occurrence, as given above.

I had long been familiar with all the details of this celebrated case,
but had not referred to it, so far as I can remember, for months or
years. I know of no train of thought which led me to speak of it on that
particular day. I had never alluded to it before in that company, nor
had I ever spoken of it with Mr. Rathbone.

I told this story over our teacups. Among the company at the table is a
young English girl. She seemed to be amused by the story. “Fancy!” she
said,--“how very very odd!” “It was a striking and curious coincidence,”
 said the professor who was with us at the table. “As remarkable as
two teaspoons in one saucer,” was the comment of a college youth who
happened to be one of the company. But the member of our circle whom the
reader will hereafter know as Number Seven, began stirring his tea in
a nervous sort of way, and I knew that he was getting ready to say
something about the case. An ingenious man he is, with a brain like a
tinder-box, its contents catching at any spark that is flying about. I
always like to hear what he says when his tinder brain has a spark fall
into it. It does not follow that because he is often wrong he may not
sometimes be right, for he is no fool. He treated my narrative very
seriously.

The reader need not be startled at the new terms he introduces. Indeed,
I am not quite sure that some thinking people will not adopt his view
of the matter, which seems to have a degree of plausibility as he states
and illustrates it.

“The impulse which led you to tell that story passed directly from the
letter, which came charged from the cells of the cerebral battery of
your correspondent. The distance at which the action took place [the
letter was left on a shelf twenty-four feet from the place where I was
sitting] shows this charge to have been of notable intensity.

“Brain action through space without material symbolism, such as speech,
expression, etc., is analogous to electrical induction. Charge the prime
conductor of an electrical machine, and a gold-leaf electrometer, far
off from it, will at once be disturbed. Electricity, as we all know, can
be stored and transported as if it were a measurable fluid.

“Your incident is a typical example of cerebral induction from a source
containing stored cerebricity. I use this word, not to be found in
my dictionaries, as expressing the brain-cell power corresponding to
electricity. Think how long it was before we had attained any real
conception of the laws that govern the wonderful agent, which now works
in harness with the other trained and subdued forces! It is natural
that cerebricity should be the last of the unweighable agencies to be
understood. The human eye had seen heaven and earth and all that in them
is before it saw itself as our instruments enable us to see it. This
fact of yours, which seems so strange to you, belongs to a great series
of similar facts familiarly known now to many persons, and before
long to be recognized as generally as those relating to the electric
telegraph and the slaving `dynamo.'

“What! you cannot conceive of a charge of cerebricity fastening itself
on a letter-sheet and clinging to it for weeks, while it was shuffling
about in mail-bags, rolling over the ocean, and shaken up in railroad
cars? And yet the odor of a grain of musk will hang round a note or a
dress for a lifetime. Do you not remember what Professor Silliman says,
in that pleasant journal of his, about the little ebony cabinet which
Mary, Queen of Scots, brought with her from France,--how 'its drawers
still exhale the sweetest perfumes'? If they could hold their sweetness
for more than two hundred years, why should not a written page retain
for a week or a month the equally mysterious effluence poured over
it from the thinking marrow, and diffuse its vibrations to another
excitable nervous centre?”

I have said that although our imaginative friend is given to wild
speculations, he is not always necessarily wrong. We know too little
about the laws of brain-force to be dogmatic with reference to it. I
am, myself, therefore, fully in sympathy with the psychological
investigators. When it comes to the various pretended sciences by which
men and women make large profits, attempts at investigation are very apt
to be used as lucrative advertisements for the charlatans. But a series
of investigations of the significance of certain popular beliefs and
superstitions, a careful study of the relations of certain facts to each
other,--whether that of cause and effect, or merely of coincidence,--is
a task not unworthy of sober-minded and well-trained students of nature.
Such a series of investigations has been recently instituted, and was
reported at a late meeting held in the rooms of the Boston Natural
History Society. The results were, mostly negative, and in one sense a
disappointment. A single case, related by Professor Royce, attracted
a good deal of attention. It was reported in the next morning's
newspapers, and will be given at full length, doubtless, in the next
number of the Psychological Journal. The leading facts were, briefly,
these: A lady in Hamburg, Germany, wrote, on the 22d of June last, that
she had what she supposed to be nightmare on the night of the 17th, five
days before. “It seemed,” she wrote, “to belong to you; to be a horrid
pain in your head, as if it were being forcibly jammed into an iron
casque, or some such pleasant instrument of torture.” It proved that on
that same 17th of June her sister was undergoing a painful operation at
the hands of a dentist. “No single case,” adds Professor Royce, “proves,
or even makes probable, the existence of telepathic toothaches; but if
there are any more cases of this sort, we want to hear of them, and that
all the more because no folk-lore and no supernatural horrors have as
yet mingled with the natural and well-known impressions that people
associate with the dentist's chair.”

The case I have given is, I am confident, absolutely free from every
source of error. I do not remember that Mr. Rathbone had communicated
with me since he sent me a plentiful supply of mistletoe a year ago last
Christmas. The account I received from him was cut out of “The Sporting
Times” of March 5, 1887. My own knowledge of the case came from “Kirby's
Wonderful Museum,” a work presented to me at least thirty years ago.
I had not looked at the account, spoken of it, nor thought of it for a
long time, when it came to me by a kind of spontaneous generation, as it
seemed, having no connection with any previous train of thought that I
was aware of. I consider the evidence of entire independence, apart
from possible “telepathic” causation, completely water-proof, airtight,
incombustible, and unassailable.

I referred, when first reporting this curious case of coincidence, with
suggestive circumstances, to two others, one of which I said was the
most picturesque and the other the most unlikely, as it would seem, to
happen. This is the first of those two cases:--

Grenville Tudor Phillips was a younger brother of George Phillips, my
college classmate, and of Wendell Phillips, the great orator. He lived
in Europe a large part of his life, but at last returned, and, in the
year 1863, died at the house of his brother George. I read his death
in the paper; but, having seen and heard very little of him during
his life, should not have been much impressed by the fact, but for the
following occurrence: between the time of Grenville Phillips's death and
his burial, I was looking in upon my brother, then living in the house
in which we were both born. Some books which had been my father's
were stored in shelves in the room I used to occupy when at Cambridge.
Passing my eye over them, an old dark quarto attracted my attention. It
must be a Bible, I said to myself, perhaps a rare one,--the “Breeches”
 Bible or some other interesting specimen. I took it from the shelves,
and, as I did so, an old slip of paper fell out and fluttered to the
floor. On lifting it I read these words:

The name is Grenville Tudor.

What was the meaning of this slip of paper coming to light at this time,
after reposing undisturbed so long? There was only one way of explaining
its presence in my father's old Bible;--a copy of the Scriptures which
I did not remember ever having handled or looked into before. In
christening a child the minister is liable to forget the name, just at
the moment when he ought to remember it. My father preached occasionally
at the Brattle Street Church. I take this for granted, for I remember
going with him on one occasion when he did so. Nothing was more likely
than that he should be asked to officiate at the baptism of the younger
son of his wife's first cousin, Judge Phillips. This slip was handed him
to remind him of the name: He brought it home, put it in that old Bible,
and there it lay quietly for nearly half a century, when, as if it had
just heard of Mr. Phillips's decease, it flew from its hiding-place
and startled the eyes of those who had just read his name in the daily
column of deaths. It would be hard to find anything more than a mere
coincidence here; but it seems curious enough to be worth telling.

The second of these two last stories must be told in prosaic detail to
show its whole value as a coincidence.

One evening while I was living in Charles Street, I received a call from
Dr. S., a well-known and highly respected Boston physician, a particular
friend of the late Alexander H. Stephens, vice-president of the Southern
Confederacy. It was with reference to a work which Mr. Stephens was
about to publish that Dr. S. called upon me. After talking that matter
over we got conversing on other subjects, among the rest a family
relationship existing between us,--not a very near one, but one which I
think I had seen mentioned in genealogical accounts. Mary S. (the
last name being the same as that of my visitant), it appeared, was
the great-great-grandmother of Mrs. H. and myself. After cordially
recognizing our forgotten relationship, now for the first time called
to mind, we parted, my guest leaving me for his own home. We had been
sitting in my library on the lower floor. On going up-stairs where Mrs.
H. was sitting alone, just as I entered the room she pushed a paper
across the table towards me, saying that perhaps it might interest me.
It was one of a number of old family papers which she had brought from
the house of her mother, recently deceased.

I opened the paper, which was an old-looking document, and found that it
was a copy, perhaps made in this century, of the will of that same Mary
S. about whom we had been talking down-stairs.

If there is such a thing as a purely accidental coincidence this must be
considered an instance of it.

All one can say about it is that it seems very unlikely that such a
coincidence should occur, but it did.

I have not tried to keep my own personality out of these stories.
But after all, how little difference it makes whether or not a writer
appears with a mask on which everybody can take off,--whether he bolts
his door or not, when everybody can look in at his windows, and all his
entrances are at the mercy of the critic's skeleton key and the jimmy of
any ill-disposed assailant!

The company have been silent listeners for the most part; but the reader
will have a chance to become better acquainted with some cf them by and
by.




II


TO THE READER.

I know that it is a hazardous experiment to address myself again to a
public which in days long past has given me a generous welcome. But my
readers have been, and are, a very faithful constituency. I think there
are many among them who would rather listen to an old voice they are
used to than to a new one of better quality, even if the “childish
treble” should betray itself now and then in the tones of the overtired
organ. But there must be others,--I am afraid many others,--who will
exclaim: “He has had his day, and why can't he be content? We don't
want literary revenants, superfluous veterans, writers who have worn out
their welcome and still insist on being attended to. Give us something
fresh, something that belongs to our day and generation. Your morning
draught was well enough, but we don't care for your evening slip-slop.
You are not in relation with us, with our time, our ideas, our aims, our
aspirations.”

Alas, alas! my friend,--my young friend, for your hair is not yet
whitened,--I am afraid you are too nearly right. No doubt,--no doubt.
Teacups are not coffee-cups. They do not hold so much. Their pallid
infusion is but a feeble stimulant compared with the black decoction
served at the morning board. And so, perhaps, if wisdom like yours
were compatible with years like mine, I should drop my pen and make no
further attempts upon your patience.

But suppose that a writer who has reached and passed the natural limit
of serviceable years feels that he has some things which he would
like to say, and which may have an interest for a limited class of
readers,--is he not right in trying his powers and calmly taking the
risk of failure? Does it not seem rather lazy and cowardly, because he
cannot “beat his record,” or even come up to the level of what he has
done in his prime, to shrink from exerting his talent, such as it is,
now that he has outlived the period of his greatest vigor? A singer who
is no longer equal to the trials of opera on the stage may yet please at
a chamber concert or in the drawing-room. There is one gratification
an old author can afford a certain class of critics: that, namely, of
comparing him as he is with what he was. It is a pleasure to mediocrity
to have its superiors brought within range, so to speak; and if the
ablest of them will only live long enough, and keep on writing, there is
no pop-gun that cannot reach him. But I fear that this is an unamiable
reflection, and I am at this time in a very amiable mood.

I confess that there is something agreeable to me in renewing my
relations with the reading public. Were it but a single appearance,
it would give me a pleasant glimpse of the time when I was known as a
frequent literary visitor. Many of my readers--if I can lure any from
the pages of younger writers will prove to be the children, or the
grandchildren, of those whose acquaintance I made something more than
a whole generation ago. I could depend on a kind welcome from my
contemporaries,--my coevals. But where are those contemporaries? Ay de
mi! as Carlyle used to exclaim,--Ah, dear me! as our old women say,--I
look round for them, and see only their vacant places. The old vine
cannot unwind its tendrils. The branch falls with the decay of its
support, and must cling to the new growths around it, if it would not
lie helpless in the dust. This paper is a new tendril, feeling its way,
as it best may, to whatever it can wind around. The thought of finding
here and there an old friend, and making, it may be, once in a while a
new one, is very grateful to me. The chief drawback to the pleasure is
the feeling that I am submitting to that inevitable exposure which is
the penalty of authorship in every form. A writer must make up his mind
to the possible rough treatment of the critics, who swarm like bacteria
whenever there is any literary material on which they can feed. I have
had as little to complain of as most writers, yet I think it is always
with reluctance that one encounters the promiscuous handling which
the products of the mind have to put up with, as much as the fruit and
provisions in the market-stalls. I had rather be criticised, however,
than criticise; that is, express my opinions in the public prints of
other writers' work, if they are living, and can suffer, as I should
often have to make them. There are enough, thank Heaven, without me.
We are literary cannibals, and our writers live on each other and each
other's productions to a fearful extent. What the mulberry leaf is
to the silk-worm, the author's book, treatise, essay, poem, is to the
critical larva; that feed upon it. It furnishes them with food and
clothing. The process may not be agreeable to the mulberry leaf or to
the printed page; but without it the leaf would not have become the silk
that covers the empress's shoulders, and but for the critic the author's
book might never have reached the scholar's table. Scribblers will feed
on each other, and if we insist on being scribblers we must consent to
be fed on. We must try to endure philosophically what we cannot help,
and ought not, I suppose, to wish to help.

It is the custom at our table to vary the usual talk, by the reading of
short papers, in prose or verse, by one or more of The Teacups, as we
are in the habit of calling those who make up our company. Thirty
years ago, one of our present circle--“Teacup Number Two,” The
Professor,--read a paper on Old Age, at a certain Breakfast-table, where
he was in the habit of appearing. That paper was published at the time,
and has since seen the light in other forms. He did not know so much
about old age then as he does now, and would doubtless write somewhat
differently if he took the subject up again. But I found that it was the
general wish that another of our company should let us hear what he had
to say about it. I received a polite note, requesting me to discourse
about old age, inasmuch as I was particularly well qualified by my
experience to write in an authoritative way concerning it. The fact is
that I,--for it is myself who am speaking,--have recently arrived at the
age of threescore years and twenty,--fourscore years we may otherwise
call it. In the arrangement of our table, I am Teacup Number One, and
I may as well say that I am often spoken of as The Dictator. There is
nothing invidious in this, as I am the oldest of the company, and no
claim is less likely to excite jealousy than that of priority of birth.

I received congratulations on reaching my eightieth birthday, not only
from our circle of Teacups, but from friends, near and distant, in large
numbers. I tried to acknowledge these kindly missives with the aid of a
most intelligent secretary; but I fear that there were gifts not
thanked for, and tokens of good-will not recognized. Let any neglected
correspondent be assured that it was not intentionally that he or she
was slighted. I was grateful for every such mark of esteem; even for
the telegram from an unknown friend in a distant land, for which I
cheerfully paid the considerable charge which the sender doubtless knew
it would give me pleasure to disburse for such an expression of friendly
feeling.

I will not detain the reader any longer from the essay I have promised.

This is the paper read to The Teacups.

It is in A Song of Moses that we find the words, made very familiar to
us by the Episcopal Burial Service, which place the natural limit on
life at threescore years and ten, with an extra ten years for some of
a stronger constitution than the average. Yet we are told that Moses
himself lived to be a hundred and twenty years old, and that his eye
was not dim nor his natural strength abated. This is hard to accept
literally, but we need not doubt that he was very old, and in remarkably
good condition for a man of his age. Among his followers was a stout
old captain, Caleb, the son of Jephunneh. This ancient warrior speaks
of himself in these brave terms: “Lo, I am this day fourscore and five
years old. As yet, I am as strong this day as I was in the day that
Moses sent me; as my strength was then, even so is my strength now,
for war, both to go out and to come in.” It is not likely that anybody
believed his brag about his being as good a man for active service at
eighty-five as he was at forty, when Moses sent him out to spy the land
of Canaan. But he was, no doubt, lusty and vigorous for his years, and
ready to smite the Canaanites hip and thigh, and drive them out, and
take possession of their land, as he did forthwith, when Moses gave him
leave.

Grand old men there were, three thousand years ago! But not all
octogenarians were like Caleb, the son of Jephunneh. Listen to poor old
Barzillai, and hear him piping: “I am this day fourscore years old; and
can I discern between good and evil? Can thy servant taste what I eat or
what I drink? Can I hear any more the voice of singing men and singing
women? Wherefore, then, should thy servant be yet a burden unto my
lord the king?” And poor King David was worse off than this, as you all
remember, at the early age of seventy.

Thirty centuries do not seem to have made any very great difference
in the extreme limits of life. Without pretending to rival the alleged
cases of life prolonged beyond the middle of its second century, such
as those of Henry Jenkins and Thomas Parr, we can make a good showing of
centenarians and nonagenarians. I myself remember Dr. Holyoke, of Salem,
son of a president of Harvard College, who answered a toast proposed in
his honor at a dinner given to him on his hundredth birthday.

“Father Cleveland,” our venerated city missionary, was born June 21,
1772, and died June 5, 1872, within a little more than a fortnight of
his hundredth birthday. Colonel Perkins, of Connecticut, died recently
after celebrating his centennial anniversary.

Among nonagenarians, three whose names are well known to Bostonians,
Lord Lyndhurst, Josiah Quincy, and Sidney Bartlett, were remarkable for
retaining their faculties in their extreme age. That patriarch of our
American literature, the illustrious historian of his country, is still
with us, his birth dating in 1800.

Ranke, the great German historian, died at the age of ninety-one, and
Chevreul, the eminent chemist, at that of a hundred and two.

Some English sporting characters have furnished striking examples of
robust longevity. In Gilpin's “Forest Scenery” there is the story of
one of these horseback heroes. Henry Hastings was the name of this old
gentleman, who lived in the time of Charles the First. It would be hard
to find a better portrait of a hunting squire than that which the Earl
of Shaftesbury has the credit of having drawn of this very peculiar
personage. His description ends by saying, “He lived to be an hundred,
and never lost his eyesight nor used spectacles. He got on horseback
without help, and rode to the death of the stag till he was past
fourscore.”

Everything depends on habit. Old people can do, of course, more or less
well, what they have been doing all their lives; but try to teach them
any new tricks, and the truth of the old adage will very soon show
itself. Mr. Henry Hastings had done nothing but hunt all his days, and
his record would seem to have been a good deal like that of Philippus
Zaehdarm in that untranslatable epitaph which may be found in “Sartor
Resartus.” Judged by its products, it was a very short life of a hundred
useless twelve months.

It is something to have climbed the white summit, the Mont Blanc of
fourscore. A small number only of mankind ever see their eightieth
anniversary. I might go to the statistical tables of the annuity and
life insurance offices for extended and exact information, but I prefer
to take the facts which have impressed themselves upon me in my own
career.

The class of 1829 at Harvard College, of which I am a member, graduated,
according to the triennial, fifty-nine in number. It is sixty years,
then, since that time; and as they were, on an average, about twenty
years old, those who survive must have reached fourscore years. Of the
fifty-nine graduates ten only are living, or were at the last accounts;
one in six, very nearly. In the first ten years after graduation, our
third decade, when we were between twenty and thirty years old, we lost
three members,--about one in twenty; between the ages of thirty and
forty, eight died,--one in seven of those the decade began with; from
forty to fifty, only two,--or one in twenty-four; from fifty to sixty,
eight,--or one in six; from sixty to seventy, fifteen,--or two out of
every five; from seventy to eighty, twelve,--or one in two. The greatly
increased mortality which began with our seventh decade went on steadily
increasing. At sixty we come “within range of the rifle-pits,” to borrow
an expression from my friend Weir Mitchell.

Our eminent classmate, the late Professor Benjamin Peirce, showed by
numerical comparison that the men of superior ability outlasted the
average of their fellow-graduates. He himself lived a little beyond his
threescore and ten years. James Freeman Clarke almost reached the age
of eighty. The eighth decade brought the fatal year for Benjamin Robbins
Curtis, the great lawyer, who was one of the judges of the Supreme Court
of the United States; for the very able chief justice of Massachusetts,
George Tyler Bigelow; and for that famous wit and electric centre of
social life, George T. Davis. At the last annual dinner every effort was
made to bring all the survivors of the class together. Six of the ten
living members were there, six old men in the place of the thirty or
forty classmates who surrounded the long, oval table in 1859, when I
asked, “Has there any old fellow got mixed with the boys?”--11 boys
whose tongues were as the vibrating leaves of the forest; whose talk was
like the voice of many waters; whose laugh was as the breaking of mighty
waves upon the seashore. Among the six at our late dinner was our first
scholar, the thorough-bred and accomplished engineer who held the city
of Lawrence in his brain before it spread itself out along the banks of
the Merrimac. There, too, was the poet whose National Hymn, “My Country,
't is of thee,” is known to more millions, and dearer to many of them,
than all the other songs written since the Psalms of David. Four of our
six were clergymen; the engineer and the present writer completed
the list. Were we melancholy? Did we talk of graveyards and epitaphs?
No,--we remembered our dead tenderly, serenely, feeling deeply what we
had lost in those who but a little while ago were with us. How could
we forget James Freeman Clarke, that man of noble thought and vigorous
action, who pervaded this community with his spirit, and was felt
through all its channels as are the light and the strength that radiate
through the wires which stretch above us? It was a pride and a happiness
to have such classmates as he was to remember. We were not the moping,
complaining graybeards that many might suppose we must have been. We had
been favored with the blessing of long life. We had seen the drama well
into its fifth act. The sun still warmed us, the air was still grateful
and life-giving. But there was another underlying source of our cheerful
equanimity, which we could not conceal from ourselves if we had wished
to do it. Nature's kindly anodyne is telling upon us more and more with
every year. Our old doctors used to give an opiate which they called
“the black drop.” It was stronger than laudanum, and, in fact, a
dangerously powerful narcotic. Something like this is that potent drug
in Nature's pharmacopoeia which she reserves for the time of need,--the
later stages of life. She commonly begins administering it at about
the time of the “grand climacteric,” the ninth septennial period, the
sixty-third year. More and more freely she gives it, as the years go
on, to her grey-haired children, until, if they last long enough, every
faculty is benumbed, and they drop off quietly into sleep under its
benign influence.

Do you say that old age is unfeeling? It has not vital energy enough to
supply the waste of the more exhausting emotions. Old Men's Tears, which
furnished the mournful title to Joshua Scottow's Lamentations, do not
suggest the deepest grief conceivable. A little breath of wind brings
down the raindrops which have gathered on the leaves of the tremulous
poplars. A very slight suggestion brings the tears from Marlborough's
eyes, but they are soon over, and he is smiling again as an allusion
carries him back to the days of Blenheim and Malplaquet. Envy not the
old man the tranquillity of his existence, nor yet blame him if it
sometimes looks like apathy. Time, the inexorable, does not threaten him
with the scythe so often as with the sand-bag. He does not cut, but
he stuns and stupefies. One's fellow-mortals can afford to be as
considerate and tender with him as Time and Nature.

There was not much boasting among us of our present or our past, as we
sat together in the little room at the great hotel. A certain amount
of self-deception is quite possible at threescore years and ten, but at
three score years and twenty Nature has shown most of those who live to
that age that she is earnest, and means to dismantle and have done with
them in a very little while. As for boasting of our past, the laudator
temporis acti makes but a poor figure in our time. Old people used to
talk of their youth as if there were giants in those days. We knew some
tall men when we were young, but we can see a man taller than any one
among them at the nearest dime museum. We had handsome women among us,
of high local reputation, but nowadays we have professional beauties
who challenge the world to criticise them as boldly as Phryne ever
challenged her Athenian admirers. We had fast horses,--did not “Old
Blue” trot a mile in three minutes? True, but there is a three-year-old
colt just put on the track who has done it in a little more than two
thirds of that time. It seems as if the material world had been made
over again since we were boys. It is but a short time since we were
counting up the miracles we had lived to witness. The list is familiar
enough: the railroad, the ocean steamer, photography, the spectroscope,
the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, anesthetics, electric
illumination,--with such lesser wonders as the friction match, the
sewing machine, and the bicycle. And now, we said, we must have come to
the end of these unparalleled developments of the forces of nature. We
must rest on our achievements. The nineteenth century is not likely to
add to them; we must wait for the twentieth century. Many of us, perhaps
most of us, felt in that way. We had seen our planet furnished by the
art of man with a complete nervous system: a spinal cord beneath the
ocean, secondary centres,--ganglions,--in all the chief places where
men are gathered together, and ramifications extending throughout
civilization. All at once, by the side of this talking and light-giving
apparatus, we see another wire stretched over our heads, carrying
force to a vast metallic muscular system,--a slender cord conveying the
strength of a hundred men, of a score of horses, of a team of elephants.
The lightning is tamed and harnessed, the thunderbolt has become a
common carrier. No more surprises in this century! A voice whispers,
What next?

It will not do for us to boast about our young days and what they had
to show. It is a great deal better to boast of what they could not show,
and, strange as it may seem, there is a certain satisfaction in it. In
these days of electric lighting, when you have only to touch a button
and your parlor or bedroom is instantly flooded with light, it is a
pleasure to revert to the era of the tinder-box, the flint and steel,
and the brimstone match. It gives me an almost proud satisfaction
to tell how we used, when those implements were not at hand or not
employed, to light our whale-oil lamp by blowing a live coal held
against the wick, often swelling our cheeks and reddening our
faces until we were on the verge of apoplexy. I love to tell of
our stage-coach experiences, of our sailing-packet voyages, of the
semi-barbarous destitution of all modern comforts and conveniences
through which we bravely lived and came out the estimable personages you
find us.

Think of it! All my boyish shooting was done with a flint-lock gun; the
percussion lock came to me as one of those new-fangled notions people
had just got hold of. We ancients can make a grand display of minus
quantities in our reminiscences, and the figures look almost as well as
if they had the plus sign before them.

I am afraid that old people found life rather a dull business in the
time of King David and his rich old subject and friend, Barzillai, who,
poor man, could not have read a wicked novel, nor enjoyed a symphony
concert, if they had had those luxuries in his day. There were no
pleasant firesides, for there were no chimneys. There were no daily
newspapers for the old man to read, and he could not read them if there
were, with his dimmed eyes, nor hear them read, very probably, with his
dulled ears. There was no tobacco, a soothing drug, which in its various
forms is a great solace to many old men and to some old women, Carlyle
and his mother used to smoke their pipes together, you remember.

Old age is infinitely more cheerful, for intelligent people at least,
than it was two or three thousand years ago. It is our duty, so far
as we can, to keep it so. There will always be enough about it that
is solemn, and more than enough, alas! that is saddening. But how much
there is in our times to lighten its burdens! If they that look out
at the windows be darkened, the optician is happy to supply them with
eye-glasses for use before the public, and spectacles for their hours
of privacy. If the grinders cease because they are few, they can be made
many again by a third dentition, which brings no toothache in its train.
By temperance and good Habits of life, proper clothing, well-warmed,
well-drained, and well-ventilated dwellings, and sufficient, not too
much exercise, the old man of our time may keep his muscular strength in
very good condition. I doubt if Mr. Gladstone, who is fast nearing his
eightieth birthday, would boast, in the style of Caleb, that he was as
good a man with his axe as he was when he was forty, but I would back
him,--if the match were possible, for a hundred shekels, against
that over-confident old Israelite, to cut down and chop up a cedar of
Lebanon. I know a most excellent clergyman, not far from my own time of
life, whom I would pit against any old Hebrew rabbi or Greek philosopher
of his years and weight, if they could return to the flesh, to run a
quarter of a mile on a good, level track.

We must not make too much of such exceptional cases of prolonged
activity. I often reproached my dear friend and classmate, Tames Freeman
Clarke, that his ceaseless labors made it impossible for his coevals to
enjoy the luxury of that repose which their years demanded. A wise old
man, the late Dr. James Walker, president of Harvard University,
said that the great privilege of old age was the getting rid of
responsibilities. These hard-working veterans will not let one get rid
of them until he drops in his harness, and so gets rid of them and
his life together. How often has many a tired old man envied the
superannuated family cat, stretched upon the rug before the fire,
letting the genial warmth tranquilly diffuse itself through all her
internal arrangements! No more watching for mice in dark, damp cellars,
no more awaiting the savage gray rat at the mouth of his den, no more
scurrying up trees and lamp-posts to avoid the neighbor's cur who wishes
to make her acquaintance! It is very grand to “die in harness,” but it
is very pleasant to have the tight straps unbuckled and the heavy collar
lifted from the neck and shoulders.

It is natural enough to cling to life. We are used to atmospheric
existence, and can hardly conceive of ourselves except as breathing
creatures. We have never tried any other mode of being, or, if we have,
we have forgotten all about it, whatever Wordsworth's grand ode may tell
us we remember. Heaven itself must be an experiment to every human soul
which shall find itself there. It may take time for an earthborn saint
to become acclimated to the celestial ether,--that is, if time can be
said to exist for a disembodied spirit. We are all sentenced to capital
punishment for the crime of living, and though the condemned cell of
our earthly existence is but a narrow and bare dwelling-place, we have
adjusted ourselves to it, and made it tolerably comfortable for the
little while we are to be confined in it. The prisoner of Chillon

   “regained [his] freedom with a sigh,”

and a tender-hearted mortal might be pardoned for looking back, like the
poor lady who was driven from her dwelling-place by fire and brimstone,
at the home he was leaving for the “undiscovered country.”

On the other hand, a good many persons, not suicidal in their
tendencies, get more of life than they want. One of our wealthy citizens
said, on hearing that a friend had dropped off from apoplexy, that it
made his mouth water to hear of such a case. It was an odd expression,
but I have no doubt that the fine old gentleman to whom it was
attributed made use of it. He had had enough of his gout and other
infirmities. Swift's account of the Struldbrugs is not very amusing
reading for old people, but some may find it a consolation to reflect
on the probable miseries they escape in not being doomed to an undying
earthly existence.

There are strange diversities in the way in which different old persons
look upon their prospects. A millionaire whom I well remember confessed
that he should like to live long enough to learn how much a certain
fellow-citizen, a multimillionaire, was worth. One of the three
nonagenarians before referred to expressed himself as having a great
curiosity about the new sphere of existence to which he was looking
forward.

The feeling must of necessity come to many aged persons that they have
outlived their usefulness; that they are no longer wanted, but rather in
the way, drags on the wheels rather than helping them forward. But let
them remember the often-quoted line of Milton,

   “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

This is peculiarly true of them. They are helping others without always
being aware of it. They are the shields, the breakwaters, of those who
come after them. Every decade is a defence of the one next behind it. At
thirty the youth has sobered into manhood, but the strong men of forty
rise in almost unbroken rank between him and the approaches of old age
as they show in the men of fifty. At forty he looks with a sense of
security at the strong men of fifty, and sees behind them the row of
sturdy sexagenarians. When fifty is reached, somehow sixty does not look
so old as it once used to, and seventy is still afar off. After sixty
the stern sentence of the burial service seems to have a meaning
that one did not notice in former years. There begins to be something
personal about it. But if one lives to seventy he soon gets used to
the text with the threescore years and ten in it, and begins to count
himself among those who by reason of strength are destined to reach
fourscore, of whom he can see a number still in reasonably good
condition. The octogenarian loves to read about people of ninety and
over. He peers among the asterisks of the triennial catalogue of the
University for the names of graduates who have been seventy years out of
college and remain still unstarred. He is curious about the biographies
of centenarians. Such escapades as those of that terrible old sinner and
ancestor of great men, the Reverend Stephen Bachelder, interest him as
they never did before. But he cannot deceive himself much longer. See
him walking on a level surface, and he steps off almost as well as ever;
but watch him coming down a flight of stairs, and the family record
could not tell his years more faithfully. He cut you dead, you say? Did
it occur to you that he could not see you clearly enough to know you
from any other son or daughter of Adam? He said he was very glad to hear
it, did he, when you told him that your beloved grandmother had just
deceased? Did you happen to remember that though he does not allow that
he is deaf, he will not deny that he does not hear quite so well as he
used to? No matter about his failings; the longer he holds on to life,
the longer he makes life seem to all the living who follow him, and thus
he is their constant benefactor.

Every stage of existence has its special trials and its special
consolations. Habits are the crutches of old age; by the aid of these we
manage to hobble along after the mental joints are stiff and the muscles
rheumatic, to speak metaphorically,--that is to say, when every act of
self-determination costs an effort and a pang. We become more and more
automatic as we grow older, and if we lived long enough we should come
to be pieces of creaking machinery like Maelzel's chess player,--or what
that seemed to be.

Emerson was sixty-three years old, the year I have referred to as that
of the grand climacteric, when he read to his son the poem he called
“Terminus,” beginning:

     “It is time to be old,
     To take in sail.
     The God of bounds,
     Who sets to seas a shore,
     Came to me in his fatal rounds
     And said, 'No more!'”

It was early in life to feel that the productive stage was over, but he
had received warning from within, and did not wish to wait for outside
advices. There is all the difference in the world in the mental as in
the bodily constitution of different individuals. Some must “take in
sail” sooner, some later. We can get a useful lesson from the American
and the English elms on our Common. The American elms are quite bare,
and have been so for weeks. They know very well that they are going
to have storms to wrestle with; they have not forgotten the gales of
September and the tempests of the late autumn and early winter. It is
a hard fight they are going to have, and they strip their coats off and
roll up their shirt-sleeves, and show themselves bare-armed and ready
for the contest. The English elms are of a more robust build, and stand
defiant, with all their summer clothing about their sturdy frames.
They may yet have to learn a lesson of their American cousins, for
notwithstanding their compact and solid structure they go to pieces in
the great winds just as ours do. We must drop much of our foliage before
winter is upon us. We must take in sail and throw over cargo, if that is
necessary, to keep us afloat. We have to decide between our duties and
our instinctive demand of rest. I can believe that some have welcomed
the decay of their active powers because it furnished them with
peremptory reasons for sparing themselves during the few years that were
left them.

Age brings other obvious changes besides the loss of active power. The
sensibilities are less keen, the intelligence is less lively, as
we might expect under the influence of that narcotic which Nature
administers. But there is another effect of her “black drop” which is
not so commonly recognized. Old age is like an opium-dream. Nothing
seems real except what is unreal. I am sure that the pictures painted by
the imagination,--the faded frescos on the walls of memory,--come out
in clearer and brighter colors than belonged to them many years earlier.
Nature has her special favors for her children of every age, and this is
one which she reserves for our second childhood.

No man can reach an advanced age without thinking of that great change
to which, in the course of nature, he must be so near. It has been
remarked that the sterner beliefs of rigid theologians are apt to soften
in their later years. All reflecting persons, even those whose minds
have been half palsied by the deadly dogmas which have done all they
could to disorganize their thinking powers,--all reflecting persons, I
say, must recognize, in looking back over a long life, how largely their
creeds, their course of life, their wisdom and unwisdom, their whole
characters, were shaped by the conditions which surrounded them. Little
children they came from the hands of the Father of all; little children
in their helplessness, their ignorance, they are going back to Him.
They cannot help feeling that they are to be transferred from the
rude embrace of the boisterous elements to arms that will receive them
tenderly. Poor planetary foundlings, they have known hard treatment at
the hands of the brute forces of nature, from the control of which they
are soon to be set free. There are some old pessimists, it is true,
who believe that they and a few others are on a raft, and that the ship
which they have quitted, holding the rest of mankind, is going down with
all on board. It is no wonder that there should be such when we remember
what have been the teachings of the priesthood through long series of
ignorant centuries. Every age has to shape the Divine image it worships
over again,--the present age and our own country are busily engaged in
the task at this time. We unmake Presidents and make new ones. This is
an apprenticeship for a higher task. Our doctrinal teachers are unmaking
the Deity of the Westminster Catechism and trying to model a new one,
with more of modern humanity and less of ancient barbarism in his
composition. If Jonathan Edwards had lived long enough, I have no doubt
his creed would have softened into a kindly, humanized belief.

Some twenty or thirty years ago, I said to Longfellow that certain
statistical tables I had seen went to show that poets were not a
long-lived race. He doubted whether there was anything to prove they
were particularly short-lived. Soon after this, he handed me a list
he had drawn up. I cannot lay my hand upon it at this moment, but I
remember that Metastasio was the oldest of them all. He died at the
age of eighty-four. I have had some tables made out, which I have every
reason to believe are correct so far as they go. From these, it appears
that twenty English poets lived to the average age of fifty-six years
and a little over. The eight American poets on the list averaged
seventy-three and a half, nearly, and they are not all dead yet. The
list including Greek, Latin, Italian, and German poets, with American
and English, gave an average of a little over sixty-two years. Our young
poets need not be alarmed. They can remember that Bryant lived to be
eighty-three years old, that Longfellow reached seventy-five and Halleck
seventy-seven, while Whittier is living at the age of nearly eighty-two.
Tennyson is still writing at eighty, and Browning reached the age of
seventy-seven.

Shall a man who in his younger days has written poetry, or what passed
for it, continue to attempt it in his later years? Certainly, if it
amuses or interests him, no one would object to his writing in verse as
much as he likes. Whether he should continue to write for the public is
another question. Poetry is a good deal a matter of heart-beats, and the
circulation is more languid in the later period of life. The joints are
less supple; the arteries are more or less “ossified.” Something like
these changes has taken place in the mind. It has lost the flexibility,
the plastic docility, which it had in youth and early manhood, when
the gristle had but just become hardened into bone. It is the nature
of poetry to writhe itself along through the tangled growths of the
vocabulary, as a snake winds through the grass, in sinuous, complex,
and unexpected curves, which crack every joint that is not supple as
india-rubber.

I had a poem that I wanted to print just here. But after what I have
this moment said, I hesitated, thinking that I might provoke the obvious
remark that I exemplified the unfitness of which I had been speaking. I
remembered the advice I had given to a poetical aspirant not long since,
which I think deserves a paragraph to itself.

My friend, I said, I hope you will not write in verse. When you write
in prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you
must.

Should I send this poem to the publishers, or not?

   “Some said, 'John, print it;' others said, 'Not so.'”

I did not ask “some” or “others.” Perhaps I should have thought it best
to keep my poem to myself and the few friends for whom it was written.
All at once, my daimon--that other Me over whom I button my waistcoat
when I button it over my own person--put it into my head to look up the
story of Madame Saqui. She was a famous danseuse, who danced Napoleon in
and out, and several other dynasties besides. Her last appearance was at
the age of seventy-six, which is rather late in life for the tight rope,
one of her specialties. Jules Janin mummified her when she died in 1866,
at the age of eighty. He spiced her up in his eulogy as if she had been
the queen of a modern Pharaoh. His foamy and flowery rhetoric put me
into such a state of good-nature that I said, I will print my poem, and
let the critical Gil Blas handle it as he did the archbishop's sermon,
or would have done, if he had been a writer for the “Salamanca Weekly.”

It must be premised that a very beautiful loving cup was presented to me
on my recent birthday, by eleven ladies of my acquaintance. This was
the most costly and notable of all the many tributes I received, and for
which in different forms I expressed my gratitude.

          TO THE ELEVEN LADIES

   WHO PRESENTED ME WITH A SILVER LOVING CUP ON THE
     TWENTY-NINTH OF AUGUST, M DCCC LXXXIX.

   “Who gave this cup?” The secret thou wouldst steal
   Its brimming flood forbids it to reveal:
   No mortal's eye shall read it till he first
   Cool the red throat of thirst.

   If on the golden floor one draught remain,
   Trust me, thy careful search will be in vain;
   Not till the bowl is emptied shalt thou know
   The names enrolled below.

   Deeper than Truth lies buried in her well
   Those modest names the graven letters spell
   Hide from the sight; but, wait, and thou shalt see
   Who the good angels be

   Whose bounty glistens in the beauteous gift
   That friendly hands to loving lips shall lift:
   Turn the fair goblet when its floor is dry,
   Their names shall meet thine eye.

   Count thou their number on the beads of Heaven,
   Alas! the clustered Pleiads are but seven;
   Nay, the nine sister Muses are too few,
   --The Graces must add two.

   “For whom this gift?” For one who all too long
   Clings to his bough among the groves of song;
   Autumn's last leaf, that spreads its faded wing
   To greet a second spring.

   Dear friends, kind friends, whate'er the cup may hold,
   Bathing its burnished depths, will change to gold
   Its last bright drop let thirsty Maenads drain,
   Its fragrance will remain.

   Better love's perfume in the empty bowl
   Than wine's nepenthe for the aching soul
   Sweeter than song that ever poet sung,
   It makes an old heart young!




III

After the reading of the paper which was reported in the preceding
number of this record, the company fell into talk upon the subject with
which it dealt.

The Mistress. “I could have wished you had said more about the religious
attitude of old age as such. Surely the thoughts of aged persons must
be very much taken up with the question of what is to become of them. I
should like to have The Dictator explain himself a little more fully on
this point.”

My dear madam, I said, it is a delicate matter to talk about. You
remember Mr. Calhoun's response to the advances of an over-zealous
young clergyman who wished to examine him as to his outfit for the
long journey. I think the relations between man and his Maker grow more
intimate, more confidential, if I may say so, with advancing years. The
old man is less disposed to argue about special matters of belief, and
more ready to sympathize with spiritually minded persons without anxious
questioning as to the fold to which they belong. That kindly judgment
which he exercises with regard to others he will, naturally enough,
apply to himself. The caressing tone in which the Emperor Hadrian
addresses his soul is very much like that of an old person talking with
a grandchild or some other pet:

  “Animula, vagula, blandula,
   Hospes comesque corporis.”

  “Dear little, flitting, pleasing sprite,
   The body's comrade and its guest.”

How like the language of Catullus to Lesbia's sparrow!

More and more the old man finds his pleasures in memory, as the present
becomes unreal and dreamlike, and the vista of his earthly future
narrows and closes in upon him. At last, if he live long enough, life
comes to be little more than a gentle and peaceful delirium of pleasing
recollections. To say, as Dante says, that there is no greater grief
than to remember past happiness in the hour of misery is not giving
the whole truth. In the midst of the misery, as many would call it, of
extreme old age, there is often a divine consolation in recalling the
happy moments and days and years of times long past. So beautiful are
the visions of bygone delight that one could hardly wish them to become
real, lest they should lose their ineffable charm. I can almost conceive
of a dozing and dreamy centenarian saying to one he loves, “Go, darling,
go! Spread your wings and leave me. So shall you enter that world of
memory where all is lovely. I shall not hear the sound of your footsteps
any more, but you will float before me, an aerial presence. I shall not
hear any word from your lips, but I shall have a deeper sense of your
nearness to me than speech can give. I shall feel, in my still solitude,
as the Ancient Mariner felt when the seraph band gathered before him:

  “'No voice did they impart
   No voice; but oh! the silence sank
   Like music on my heart.'”

I said that the lenient way in which the old look at the failings of
others naturally leads them to judge themselves more charitably. They
find an apology for their short-comings and wrong-doings in another
consideration. They know very well that they are not the same persons as
the middle-aged individuals, the young men, the boys, the children, that
bore their names, and whose lives were continuous with theirs. Here
is an old man who can remember the first time he was allowed to go
shooting. What a remorseless young destroyer he was, to be sure!
Wherever he saw a feather, wherever a poor little squirrel showed his
bushy tail, bang! went the old “king's arm,” and the feathers or the fur
were set flying like so much chaff. Now that same old man,--the mortal
that was called by his name and has passed for the same person for some
scores of years,--is considered absurdly sentimental by kind-hearted
women, because he opens the fly-trap and sets all its captives
free,--out-of-doors, of course, but the dear souls all insisting,
meanwhile, that the flies will, every one of them, be back again in
the house before the day is over. Do you suppose that venerable sinner
expects to be rigorously called to account for the want of feeling he
showed in those early years, when the instinct of destruction, derived
from his forest-roaming ancestors, led him to acts which he now looks
upon with pain and aversion?

“Senex” has seen three generations grow up, the son repeating the
virtues and the failings of the father, the grandson showing the same
characteristics as the father and grandfather. He knows that if such or
such a young fellow had lived to the next stage of life he would very
probably have caught up with his mother's virtues, which, like a graft
of a late fruit on an early apple or pear tree, do not ripen in her
children until late in the season. He has seen the successive ripening
of one quality after another on the boughs of his own life, and he finds
it hard to condemn himself for faults which only needed time to fall
off and be succeeded by better fruitage. I cannot help thinking that the
recording angel not only drops a tear upon many a human failing, which
blots it out forever, but that he hands many an old record-book to the
imp that does his bidding, and orders him to throw that into the fire
instead of the sinner for whom the little wretch had kindled it.

“And pitched him in after it, I hope,” said Number Seven, who is in
some points as much of an optimist as any one among us, in spite of the
squint in his brain,--or in virtue of it, if you choose to have it so.

“I like Wordsworth's 'Matthew,'” said Number Five, “as well as any
picture of old age I remember.”

“Can you repeat it to us?” asked one of The Teacups.

“I can recall two verses of it,” said Number Five, and she recited the
two following ones. Number Five has a very sweet voice. The moment she
speaks all the faces turn toward her. I don't know what its secret is,
but it is a voice that makes friends of everybody.

  “'The sighs which Matthew heaved were sighs
   Of one tired out with fun and madness;
   The tears which came to Matthew's eyes
   Were tears of light, the dew of gladness.

  “'Yet, sometimes, when the secret cup
   Of still and serious thought went round,
   It seemed as if he drank it up,
   He felt with spirit so profound:'

“This was the way in which Wordsworth paid his tribute to a

  “'Soul of God's best earthly mould.'”

The sweet voice left a trance-like silence after it, which may have
lasted twenty heart-beats. Then I said, We all thank you for your
charming quotation. How much more wholesome a picture of humanity than
such stuff as the author of the “Night Thoughts” has left us:

  “Heaven's Sovereign saves all beings but Himself
   That hideous sight, a naked human heart.”

Or the author of “Don Juan,” telling us to look into

  “Man's heart, and view the hell that's there!”

I hope I am quoting correctly, but I am more of a scholar in Wordsworth
than in Byron. Was Parson Young's own heart such a hideous spectacle to
himself?

If it was, he had better have stripped off his surplice. No,--it was
nothing but the cant of his calling. In Byron it was a mood, and he
might have said just the opposite thing the next day, as he did in his
two descriptions of the Venus de' Medici. That picture of old Matthew
abides in the memory, and makes one think better of his kind. What
nobler tasks has the poet than to exalt the idea of manhood, and to make
the world we live in more beautiful?

We have two or three young people with us who stand a fair chance of
furnishing us the element without which life and tea-tables alike are
wanting in interest. We are all, of course, watching them, and curious
to know whether we are to have a romance or not. Here is one of them;
others will show themselves presently.

I cannot say just how old the Tutor is, but I do not detect a gray hair
in his head. My sight is not so good as it was, however, and he may have
turned the sharp corner of thirty, and even have left it a year or two
behind him. More probably he is still in the twenties,--say twenty-eight
or twenty-nine. He seems young, at any rate, excitable, enthusiastic,
imaginative, but at the same time reserved. I am afraid that he is
a poet. When I say “I am afraid,” you wonder what I mean by the
expression. I may take another opportunity to explain and justify it; I
will only say now that I consider the Muse the most dangerous of sirens
to a young man who has his way to make in the world. Now this young
man, the Tutor, has, I believe, a future before him. He was born for a
philosopher,--so I read his horoscope,--but he has a great liking
for poetry and can write well in verse. We have had a number of poems
offered for our entertainment, which I have commonly been requested to
read. There has been some little mystery about their authorship, but
it is evident that they are not all from the same hand. Poetry is as
contagious as measles, and if a single case of it break out in any
social circle, or in a school, there are certain to be a number of
similar cases, some slight, some serious, and now and then one so
malignant that the subject of it should be put on a spare diet of
stationery, say from two to three penfuls of ink and a half sheet
of notepaper per diem. If any of our poetical contributions are
presentable, the reader shall have a chance to see them.

It must be understood that our company is not invariably made up of the
same persons. The Mistress, as we call her, is expected to be always in
her place. I make it a rule to be present. The Professor is almost
as sure to be at the table as I am. We should hardly know what to do
without Number Five. It takes a good deal of tact to handle such a
little assembly as ours, which is a republic on a small scale, for all
that they give me the title of Dictator, and Number Five is a great help
in every social emergency. She sees when a discussion tends to become
personal, and heads off the threatening antagonists. She knows when a
subject has been knocking about long enough and dexterously shifts the
talk to another track. It is true that I am the one most frequently
appealed to as the highest tribunal in doubtful cases, but I often care
more for Number Five's opinion than I do for my own. Who is this Number
Five, so fascinating, so wise, so full of knowledge, and so ready to
learn? She is suspected of being the anonymous author of a book which
produced a sensation when published, not very long ago, and which those
who read are very apt to read a second time, and to leave on their
tables for frequent reference. But we have never asked her. I do not
think she wants to be famous. How she comes to be unmarried is a mystery
to me; it must be that she has found nobody worth caring enough for.
I wish she would furnish us with the romance which, as I said, our
tea-table needs to make it interesting. Perhaps the new-comer will make
love to her,--I should think it possible she might fancy him.

And who is the new-comer? He is a Counsellor and a Politician. Has a
good war record. Is about forty-five years old, I conjecture. Is
engaged in a great law case just now. Said to be very eloquent. Has an
intellectual head, and the bearing of one who has commanded a regiment
or perhaps a brigade. Altogether an attractive person, scholarly,
refined has some accomplishments not so common as they might be in the
class we call gentlemen, with an accent on the word.

There is also a young Doctor, waiting for his bald spot to come, so that
he may get into practice.

We have two young ladies at the table,--the English girl referred to in
a former number, and an American girl of about her own age. Both of them
are students in one of those institutions--I am not sure whether they
call it an “annex” or not; but at any rate one of those schools
where they teach the incomprehensible sort of mathematics and other
bewildering branches of knowledge above the common level of high-school
education. They seem to be good friends, and form a very pleasing pair
when they walk in arm in arm; nearly enough alike to seem to belong
together, different enough to form an agreeable contrast.

Of course we were bound to have a Musician at our table, and we have
one who sings admirably, and accompanies himself, or one or more of our
ladies, very frequently.

Such is our company when the table is full. But sometimes only half a
dozen, or it may be only three or four, are present. At other times
we have a visitor or two, either in the place of one of our habitual
number, or in addition to it. We have the elements, we think, of
a pleasant social gathering,--different sexes, ages, pursuits, and
tastes,--all that is required for a “symphony concert” of conversation.
One of the curious questions which might well be asked by those who had
been with us on different occasions would be, “How many poets are there
among you?” Nobody can answer this question. It is a point of etiquette
with us not to press our inquiries about these anonymous poems too
sharply, especially if any of them betray sentiments which would not
bear rough handling.

I don't doubt that the different personalities at our table will get
mixed up in the reader's mind if he is not particularly clear-headed.
That happens very often, much oftener than all would be willing to
confess, in reading novels and plays. I am afraid we should get a good
deal confused even in reading our Shakespeare if we did not look back
now and then at the dramatis personae. I am sure that I am very apt to
confound the characters in a moderately interesting novel; indeed, I
suspect that the writer is often no better off than the reader in the
dreary middle of the story, when his characters have all made their
appearance, and before they have reached near enough to the denoument to
have fixed their individuality by the position they have arrived at in
the chain of the narrative.

My reader might be a little puzzled when he read that Number Five did or
said such or such a thing, and ask, “Whom do you mean by that title? I
am not quite sure that I remember.” Just associate her with that line of
Emerson,

   “Why nature loves the number five,”

and that will remind you that she is the favorite of our table.

You cannot forget who Number Seven is if I inform you that he specially
prides himself on being a seventh son of a seventh son. The fact of
such a descent is supposed to carry wonderful endowments with it.
Number Seven passes for a natural healer. He is looked upon as a kind of
wizard, and is lucky in living in the nineteenth century instead of the
sixteenth or earlier. How much confidence he feels in himself as the
possessor of half-supernatural gifts I cannot say. I think his peculiar
birthright gives him a certain confidence in his whims and fancies which
but for that he would hardly feel. After this explanation, when I speak
of Number Five or Number Seven, you will know to whom I refer.

The company are very frank in their criticisms of each other. “I did not
like that expression of yours, planetary foundlings,” said the Mistress.
“It seems to me that it is too like atheism for a good Christian like
you to use.”

Ah, my dear madam, I answered, I was thinking of the elements and the
natural forces to which man was born an almost helpless subject in
the rudimentary stages of his existence, and from which he has only
partially got free after ages upon ages of warfare with their tyranny.
Think what hunger forced the caveman to do! Think of the surly
indifference of the storms that swept the forest and the waters, the
earthquake chasms that engulfed him, the inundations that drowned him
out of his miserable hiding-places, the pestilences that lay in wait for
him, the unequal strife with ferocious animals! I need not sum up all
the wretchedness that goes to constitute the “martyrdom of man.” When
our forefathers came to this wilderness as it then was, and found
everywhere the bones of the poor natives who had perished in the great
plague (which our Doctor there thinks was probably the small-pox), they
considered this destructive malady as a special mark of providential
favor for them. How about the miserable Indians? Were they anything but
planetary foundlings? No! Civilization is a great foundling hospital,
and fortunate are all those who get safely into the creche before the
frost or the malaria has killed them, the wild beasts or the venomous
reptiles worked out their deadly appetites and instincts upon them. The
very idea of humanity seems to be that it shall take care of itself and
develop its powers in the “struggle for life.” Whether we approve it or
not, if we can judge by the material record, man was born a foundling,
and fought his way as he best might to that kind of existence which we
call civilized,--one which a considerable part of the inhabitants of our
planet have reached.

If you do not like the expression planetary foundlings, I have no
objection to your considering the race as put out to nurse. And what a
nurse Nature is! She gives her charge a hole in the rocks to live in,
ice for his pillow and snow for his blanket, in one part of the world;
the jungle for his bedroom in another, with the tiger for his watch-dog,
and the cobra as his playfellow.

Well, I said, there may be other parts of the universe where there are
no tigers and no cobras. It is not quite certain that such realms of
creation are better off, on the whole, than this earthly residence of
ours, which has fought its way up to the development of such centres of
civilization as Athens and Rome, to such personalities as Socrates, as
Washington.

“One of our company has been on an excursion among the celestial bodies
of our system, I understand,” said the Professor.

Number Five colored. “Nothing but a dream,” she said. “The truth is, I
had taken ether in the evening for a touch of neuralgia, and it set my
imagination at work in a way quite unusual with me. I had been reading
a number of books about an ideal condition of society,--Sir Thomas Mores
'Utopia,' Lord Bacon's 'New Atlantis,' and another of more recent date.
I went to bed with my brain a good deal excited, and fell into a deep
slumber, in which I passed through some experiences so singular that, on
awaking, I put them down on paper. I don't know that there is anything
very original about the experiences I have recorded, but I thought them
worth preserving. Perhaps you would not agree with me in that belief.”

“If Number Five will give us a chance to form our own judgment about
her dream or vision, I think we shall enjoy it,” said the Mistress. “She
knows what will please The Teacups in the way of reading as well as I
do how many lumps of sugar the Professor wants in his tea and how many I
want in mine.”

The company was so urgent that Number Five sent up-stairs for her paper.

Number Five reads the story of her dream.

It cost me a great effort to set down the words of the manuscript from
which I am reading. My dreams for the most part fade away so soon after
their occurrence that I cannot recall them at all. But in this case
my ideas held together with remarkable tenacity. By keeping my mind
steadily upon the work, I gradually unfolded the narrative which
follows, as the famous Italian antiquary opened one of those fragile
carbonized manuscripts found in the ruins of Herculaneum or Pompeii.

The first thing I remember about it is that I was floating upward,
without any sense of effort on my part. The feeling was that of flying,
which I have often had in dreams, as have many other persons. It was the
most natural thing in the world,--a semi-materialized volition, if I may
use such an expression.

At the first moment of my new consciousness,--for I seemed to have just
emerged from a deep slumber, I was aware that there was a companion at
my side. Nothing could be more gracious than the way in which this being
accosted me. I will speak of it as she, because there was a delicacy, a
sweetness, a divine purity, about its aspect that recalled my ideal of
the loveliest womanhood.

“I am your companion and your guide,” this being made me understand,
as she looked at me. Some faculty of which I had never before been
conscious had awakened in me, and I needed no interpreter to explain the
unspoken language of my celestial attendant.

“You are not yet outside of space and time,” she said, “and I am
going with you through some parts of the phenomenal or apparent
universe,--what you call the material world. We have plenty of what you
call time before us, and we will take our voyage leisurely, looking at
such objects of interest as may attract our attention as we pass. The
first thing you will naturally wish to look at will be the earth you
have just left. This is about the right distance,” she said, and we
paused in our flight.

The great globe we had left was rolling beneath us. No eye of one in the
flesh could see it as I saw or seemed to see it. No ear of any mortal
being could bear the sounds that came from it as I heard or seemed
to hear them. The broad oceans unrolled themselves before me. I could
recognize the calm Pacific and the stormy Atlantic,--the ships that
dotted them, the white lines where the waves broke on the shore,--frills
on the robes of the continents,--so they looked to my woman's
perception; the--vast South American forests; the glittering icebergs
about the poles; the snowy mountain ranges, here and there a summit
sending up fire and smoke; mighty rivers, dividing provinces within
sight of each other, and making neighbors of realms thousands of miles
apart; cities; light-houses to insure the safety of sea-going vessels,
and war-ships to knock them to pieces and sink them. All this, and
infinitely more, showed itself to me during a single revolution of the
sphere: twenty-four hours it would have been, if reckoned by earthly
measurements of time. I have not spoken of the sounds I heard while the
earth was revolving under us. The howl of storms, the roar and clash of
waves, the crack and crash of the falling thunderbolt,--these of course
made themselves heard as they do to mortal ears. But there were other
sounds which enchained my attention more than these voices of nature.
As the skilled leader of an orchestra hears every single sound from each
member of the mob of stringed and wind instruments, and above all the
screech of the straining soprano, so my sharpened perceptions made what
would have been for common mortals a confused murmur audible to me as
compounded of innumerable easily distinguished sounds. Above them
all arose one continued, unbroken, agonizing cry. It was the voice of
suffering womanhood, a sound that goes up day and night, one long chorus
of tortured victims.

“Let us get out of reach of this,” I said; and we left our planet, with
its blank, desolate moon staring at it, as if it had turned pale at the
sights and sounds it had to witness.

Presently the gilded dome of the State House, which marked our
starting-point, came into view for the second time, and I knew that
this side-show was over. I bade farewell to the Common with its Cogswell
fountain, and the Garden with its last awe-inspiring monument.

“Oh, if I could sometimes revisit these beloved scenes!” I exclaimed.

“There is nothing to hinder that I know of,” said my companion. “Memory
and imagination as you know them in the flesh are two winged creatures
with strings tied to their legs, and anchored to a bodily weight of a
hundred and fifty pounds, more or less. When the string is cut you can
be where you wish to be,--not merely a part of you, leaving the rest
behind, but the whole of you. Why shouldn't you want to revisit your old
home sometimes?”

I was astonished at the human way in which my guide conversed with
me. It was always on the basis of my earthly habits, experiences, and
limitations. “Your solar system,” she said, “is a very small part of
the universe, but you naturally feel a curiosity about the bodies which
constitute it and about their inhabitants. There is your moon: a bare
and desolate-looking place it is, and well it may be, for it has no
respirable atmosphere, and no occasion for one. The Lunites do not
breathe; they live without waste and without supply. You look as if you
do not understand this. Yet your people have, as you well know, what
they call incandescent lights everywhere. You would have said there can
be no lamp without oil or gas, or other combustible substance, to feed
it; and yet you see a filament which sheds a light like that of noon all
around it, and does not waste at all. So the Lunites live by influx of
divine energy, just as the incandescent lamp glows,--glows, and is not
consumed; receiving its life, if we may call it so, from the central
power, which wears the unpleasant name of 'dynamo.'”

The Lunites appeared to me as pale phosphorescent figures of ill-defined
outline, lost in their own halos, as it were. I could not help thinking
of Shelley's

        “maiden
     With white fire laden.”

But as the Lunites were after all but provincials, as are the tenants
of all the satellites, I did not care to contemplate them for any great
length of time.

I do not remember much about the two planets that came next to our own,
except the beautiful rosy atmosphere of one and the huge bulk of the
other. Presently, we found ourselves within hailing distance of another
celestial body, which I recognized at once, by the rings which girdled
it, as the planet Saturn. A dingy, dull-looking sphere it was in its
appearance. “We will tie up here for a while,” said my attendant. The
easy, familiar way in which she spoke surprised and pleased me.

Why, said I,--The Dictator,--what is there to prevent beings of another
order from being as cheerful, as social, as good companions, as the
very liveliest of God's creatures whom we have known in the flesh? Is
it impossible for an archangel to smile? Is such a phenomenon as a laugh
never heard except in our little sinful corner of the universe? Do you
suppose, that when the disciples heard from the lips of their Master the
play of words on the name of Peter, there was no smile of appreciation
on the bearded faces of those holy men? From any other lips we should
have called this pleasantry a--

Number Five shook her head very slightly, and gave me a look that seemed
to say, “Don't frighten the other Teacups. We don't call things by the
names that belong to them when we deal with celestial subjects.”

We tied up, as my attendant playfully called our resting, so near
the planet that I could know--I will not say see and hear, but
apprehend--all that was going on in that remote sphere; remote, as
we who live in what we have been used to consider the centre of the
rational universe regard it. What struck me at once was the deadness of
everything I looked upon. Dead, uniform color of surface and surrounding
atmosphere. Dead complexion of all the inhabitants. Dead-looking trees,
dead-looking grass, no flowers to be seen anywhere.

“What is the meaning of all this?” I said to my guide.

She smiled good-naturedly, and replied, “It is a forlorn home for
anything above a lichen or a toadstool; but that is no wonder, when you
know what the air is which they breathe. It is pure nitrogen.”

The Professor spoke up. “That can't be, madam,” he said. “The
spectroscope shows the atmosphere of Saturn to be--no matter, I have
forgotten what; but it was not pure nitrogen, at any rate.”

Number Five is never disconcerted. “Will you tell me,” she said, “where
you have found any account of the bands and lines in the spectrum of
dream-nitrogen? I should be so pleased to become acquainted with them.”

The Professor winced a little, and asked Delilah, the handmaiden, to
pass a plate of muffins to him. The dream had carried him away, and he
thought for the moment that he was listening to a scientific paper.

Of course, my companion went on to say, the bodily constitution of
the Saturnians is wholly different from that of air-breathing, that
is oxygen-breathing, human beings. They are the dullest, slowest, most
torpid of mortal creatures.

All this is not to be wondered at when you remember the inert
characteristics of nitrogen. There are in some localities natural
springs which give out slender streams of oxygen. You will learn by and
by what use the Saturnians make of this dangerous gas, which, as you
recollect, constitutes about one fifth of your own atmosphere. Saturn
has large lead mines, but no other metal is found on this planet.
The inhabitants have nothing else to make tools of, except stones and
shells. The mechanical arts have therefore made no great progress among
them. Chopping down a tree with a leaden axe is necessarily a slow
process.

So far as the Saturnians can be said to have any pride in anything, it
is in the absolute level which characterizes their political and social
order. They profess to be the only true republicans in the solar system.
The fundamental articles of their Constitution are these:

All Saturnians are born equal, live equal, and die equal.

All Saturnians are born free,--free, that is, to obey the rules laid
down for the regulation of their conduct, pursuits, and opinions, free
to be married to the person selected for them by the physiological
section of the government, and free to die at such proper period of life
as may best suit the convenience and general welfare of the community.

The one great industrial product of Saturn is the bread-root. The
Saturnians find this wholesome and palatable enough; and it is well they
do, as they have no other vegetable. It is what I should call a most
uninteresting kind of eatable, but it serves as food and drink, having
juice enough, so that they get along without water. They have a
tough, dry grass, which, matted together, furnishes them with clothes
sufficiently warm for their cold-blooded constitutions, and more than
sufficiently ugly.

A piece of ground large enough to furnish bread-root for ten persons
is allotted to each head of a household, allowance being made for the
possible increase of families. This, however, is not a very important
consideration, as the Saturnians are not a prolific race. The great
object of life being the product of the largest possible quantity
of bread-roots, and women not being so capable in the fields as the
stronger sex, females are considered an undesirable addition to society.
The one thing the Saturnians dread and abhor is inequality. The whole
object of their laws and customs is to maintain the strictest equality
in everything,--social relations, property, so far as they can be said
to have anything which can be so called, mode of living, dress, and all
other matters. It is their boast that nobody ever starved under their
government. Nobody goes in rags, for the coarse-fibred grass from which
they fabricate their clothes is very durable. (I confess I wondered how
a woman could live in Saturn. They have no looking-glasses. There is no
such article as a ribbon known among them. All their clothes are of one
pattern. I noticed that there were no pockets in any of their garments,
and learned that a pocket would be considered prima facie evidence of
theft, as no honest person would have use for such a secret receptacle.)
Before the revolution which established the great law of absolute and
lifelong equality, the inhabitants used to feed at their own private
tables. Since the regeneration of society all meals are taken in common.
The last relic of barbarism was the use of plates,--one or even more to
each individual. This “odious relic of an effete civilization,” as they
called it, has long been superseded by oblong hollow receptacles, one of
which is allotted to each twelve persons. A great riot took place
when an attempt was made by some fastidious and exclusive egotists to
introduce partitions which should partially divide one portion of these
receptacles into individual compartments. The Saturnians boast that
they have no paupers, no thieves, none of those fictitious values called
money,--all which things, they hear, are known in that small Saturn
nearer the sun than the great planet which is their dwelling-place.

“I suppose that now they have levelled everything they are quiet and
contented. Have they any of those uneasy people called reformers?”

“Indeed they have,” said my attendant. “There are the Orthobrachians,
who declaim against the shameful abuse of the left arm and hand, and
insist on restoring their perfect equality with the right. Then there
are Isopodic societies, which insist on bringing back the original
equality of the upper and lower limbs. If you can believe it, they
actually practise going on all fours,--generally in a private way, a
few of them together, but hoping to bring the world round to them in the
near future.”

Here I had to stop and laugh.

“I should think life might be a little dull in Saturn,” I said.

“It is liable to that accusation,” she answered. “Do you notice how many
people you meet with their mouths stretched wide open?”

“Yes,” I said, “and I do not know what to make of it. I should think
every fourth or fifth person had his mouth open in that way.”

“They are suffering from the endemic disease of their planet, prolonged
and inveterate gaping or yawning, which has ended in dislocation of the
lower jaw. After a time this becomes fixed, and requires a difficult
surgical operation to restore it to its place.”

It struck me that, in spite of their boast that they have no paupers, no
thieves, no money, they were a melancholy-looking set of beings.

“What are their amusements?” I asked.

“Intoxication and suicide are their chief recreations. They have a way
of mixing the oxygen which issues in small jets from certain natural
springs with their atmospheric nitrogen in the proportion of about
twenty per cent, which makes very nearly the same thing as the air of
your planet. But to the Saturnians the mixture is highly intoxicating,
and is therefore a relief to the monotony of their every-day life. This
mixture is greatly sought after, but hard to obtain, as the sources
of oxygen are few and scanty. It shortens the lives of those who have
recourse to it; but if it takes too long, they have other ways of
escaping from a life which cuts and dries everything for its miserable
subjects, defeats all the natural instincts, confounds all individual
characteristics, and makes existence such a colossal bore, as your
worldly people say, that self-destruction becomes a luxury.”

Number Five stopped here.

Your imaginary wholesale Shakerdom is all very fine, said I. Your
Utopia, your New Atlantis, and the rest are pretty to look at. But your
philosophers are treating the world of living souls as if they were,
each of them, playing a game of solitaire,--all the pegs and all the
holes alike. Life is a very different sort of game. It is a game of
chess, and not of solitaire, nor even of checkers. The men are not all
pawns, but you have your knights, bishops, rooks,--yes, your king and
queen,--to be provided for. Not with these names, of course, but all
looking for their proper places, and having their own laws and modes of
action. You can play solitaire with the members of your own family for
pegs, if you like, and if none of them rebel. You can play checkers with
a little community of meek, like-minded people. But when it comes to the
handling of a great state, you will find that nature has emptied a box
of chessmen before you, and you must play with them so as to give each
its proper move, or sweep them off the board, and come back to the
homely game such as I used to see played with beans and kernels of corn
on squares marked upon the back of the kitchen bellows.

It was curious to see how differently Number Five's narrative was
received by the different listeners in our circle. Number Five herself
said she supposed she ought to be ashamed of its absurdities, but she
did not know that it was much sillier than dreams often are, and she
thought it might amuse the company. She was herself always interested by
these ideal pictures of society. But it seemed to her that life must be
dull in any of them, and with that idea in her head her dreaming fancy
had drawn these pictures.

The Professor was interested in her conception of the existence of the
Lunites without waste, and the death in life of the nitrogen-breathing
Saturnians. Dream-chemistry was a new subject to him. Perhaps Number
Five would give him some lessons in it.

At this she smiled, and said she was afraid she could not teach him
anything, but if he would answer a few questions in matter-of-fact
chemistry which had puzzled her she would be vastly obliged to him.

“You must come to my laboratory,” said the Professor.

“I will come to-morrow,” said Number Five.

Oh, yes! Much laboratory work they will do! Play of mutual affinities.
Amalgamates. No freezing mixtures, I'll warrant!

Why shouldn't we get a romance out of all this, hey?

But Number Five looks as innocent as a lamb, and as brave as a lion. She
does not care a copper for the looks that are going round The Teacups.

Our Doctor was curious about those cases of anchylosis, as he called it,
of the lower jaw. He thought it a quite possible occurrence. Both the
young girls thought the dream gave a very hard view of the optimists,
who look forward to a reorganization of society which shall rid mankind
of the terrible evils of over-crowding and competition.

Number Seven was quite excited about the matter. He had himself drawn
up a plan for a new social arrangement. He had shown it to the
legal gentleman who has lately joined us. This gentleman thought it
well-intended, but that it would take one constable to every three
inhabitants to enforce its provisions.

I said the dream could do no harm; it was too outrageously improbable to
come home to anybody's feelings. Dreams were like broken mosaics,--the
separated stones might here and there make parts of pictures. If
one found a caricature of himself made out of the pieces which had
accidentally come together, he would smile at it, knowing that it was an
accidental effect with no malice in it. If any of you really believe
in a working Utopia, why not join the Shakers, and convert the world to
this mode of life? Celibacy alone would cure a great many of the evils
you complain of.

I thought this suggestion seemed to act rather unfavorably upon the
ladies of our circle. The two Annexes looked inquiringly at each other.
Number Five looked smilingly at them. She evidently thought it was time
to change the subject of conversation, for she turned to me and said,
“You promised to read us the poem you read before your old classmates
the other evening.”

I will fulfill my promise, I said. We felt that this might probably be
our last meeting as a Class. The personal reference is to our greatly
beloved and honored classmate, James Freeman Clarke.

   AFTER THE CURFEW.

   The Play is over. While the light
   Yet lingers in the darkening hall,

   I come to say a last Good-night
   Before the final Exeunt all.

   We gathered once, a joyous throng:
   The jovial toasts went gayly round;
   With jest, and laugh, and shout, and song
   we made the floors and walls resound.

   We come with feeble steps and slow,
   A little band of four or five,
   Left from the wrecks of long ago,
   Still pleased to find ourselves alive.

   Alive! How living, too, are they
   whose memories it is ours to share!
   Spread the long table's full array,
   There sits a ghost in every chair!

   One breathing form no more, alas!
   Amid our slender group we see;
   With him we still remained “The Class,”
    without his presence what are we?

   The hand we ever loved to clasp,
   That tireless hand which knew no rest,
   Loosed from affection's clinging grasp,
   Lies nerveless on the peaceful breast.

   The beaming eye, the cheering voice,
   That lent to life a generous glow,
   whose every meaning said “Rejoice,”
    we see, we hear, no more below.

   The air seems darkened by his loss,
   Earth's shadowed features look less fair,
   And heavier weighs the daily cross
   His willing shoulders helped as bear.

   Why mourn that we, the favored few

   Whom grasping Time so long has spared
   Life's sweet illusions to pursue,
   The common lot of age have shared?

   In every pulse of Friendship's heart
   There breeds unfelt a throb of pain,
   One hour must rend its links apart,
   Though years on years have forged the chain.

   So ends “The Boys,”--a lifelong play.
   We too must hear the Prompter's call
   To fairer scenes and brighter day
   Farewell! I let the curtain fall.




IV

If the reader thinks that all these talking Teacups came together by
mere accident, as people meet at a boarding-house, I may as well tell
him at once that he is mistaken. If he thinks I am going to explain
how it is that he finds them thus brought together, whether they form
a secret association, whether they are the editors of this or that
periodical, whether they are connected with some institution, and so
on,--I must disappoint him. It is enough that he finds them in each
other's company, a very mixed assembly, of different sexes, ages, and
pursuits; and if there is a certain mystery surrounds their meetings,
he must not be surprised. Does he suppose we want to be known and talked
about in public as “Teacups”? No; so far as we give to the community
some records of the talks at our table our thoughts become public
property, but the sacred personality of every Teacup must be properly
respected. If any wonder at the presence of one of our number, whose
eccentricities might seem to render him an undesirable associate of the
company, he should remember that some people may have relatives whom
they feel bound to keep their eye on; besides the cracked Teacup brings
out the ring of the sound ones as nothing else does. Remember also that
soundest teacup does not always hold the best tea, or the cracked teacup
the worst.

This is a hint to the reader, who is not expected to be too curious
about the individual Teacups constituting our unorganized association.

The Dictator Discourses.

I have been reading Balzac's Peau de Chagrin. You have all read the
story, I hope, for it is the first of his wonderful romances which fixed
the eyes of the reading world upon him, and is a most fascinating if
somewhat fantastic tale. A young man becomes the possessor of a certain
magic skin, the peculiarity of which is that, while it gratifies every
wish formed by its possessor, it shrinks in all its dimensions each time
that a wish is gratified. The young man makes every effort to ascertain
the cause of its shrinking; invokes the aid of the physicist, the
chemist, the student of natural history, but all in vain. He draws a
red line around it. That same day he indulges a longing for a certain
object. The next morning there is a little interval between the red line
and the skin, close to which it was traced. So always, so inevitably.
As he lives on, satisfying one desire, one passion, after another, the
process of shrinking continues. A mortal disease sets in, which keeps
pace with the shrinking skin, and his life and his talisman come to an
end together.

One would say that such a piece of integument was hardly a desirable
possession. And yet, how many of us have at this very moment a peau de
chagrin of our own, diminishing with every costly wish indulged, and
incapable, like the magical one of the story, of being arrested in its
progress.

Need I say that I refer to those coupon bonds, issued in the days of
eight and ten per cent interest, and gradually narrowing as they drop
their semiannual slips of paper, which represent wishes to be realized,
as the roses let fall their leaves in July, as the icicles melt away in
the thaw of January?

How beautiful was the coupon bond, arrayed in its golden raiment of
promises to pay at certain stated intervals, for a goodly number
of coming years! What annual the horticulturist can show will bear
comparison with this product of auricultural industry, which has
flowered in midsummer and midwinter for twenty successive seasons?
And now the last of its blossoms is to be plucked, and the bare stem,
stripped of its ever maturing and always welcome appendages, is reduced
to the narrowest conditions of reproductive existence. Such is the fate
of the financial peau de chagrin. Pity the poor fractional capitalist,
who has just managed to live on the eight per cent of his coupon bonds.
The shears of Atropos were not more fatal to human life than the long
scissors which cut the last coupon to the lean proprietor, whose slice
of dry toast it served to flatter with oleomargarine. Do you wonder
that my thoughts took the poetical form, in the contemplation of these
changes and their melancholy consequences? If the entire poem, of
several hundred lines, was “declined with thanks” by an unfeeling
editor, that is no reason why you should not hear a verse or two of it.

     THE PEAU DE CHAGRIN OF STATE STREET.

        How beauteous is the bond
        In the manifold array
        Of its promises to pay,
        While the eight per cent it gives
        And the rate at which one lives
          Correspond!

        But at last the bough is bare
        Where the coupons one by one
        Through their ripening days have run,
        And the bond, a beggar now,
        Seeks investment anyhow,
          Anywhere!

The Mistress commonly contents herself with the general supervision
of the company, only now and then taking an active part in the
conversation. She started a question the other evening which set some of
us thinking.

“Why is it,” she said, “that there is so common and so intense a desire
for poetical reputation? It seems to me that, if I were a man, I had
rather have done something worth telling of than make verses about what
other people had done.”

“You agree with Alexander the Great,” said the Professor. “You would
prefer the fame of Achilles to that of Homer, who told the story of his
wrath and its direful consequences. I am afraid that I should hardly
agree with you. Achilles was little better than a Choctaw brave. I won't
quote Horace's line which characterizes him so admirably, for I will
take it for granted that you all know it. He was a gentleman,--so is a
first-class Indian,--a very noble gentleman in point of courage, lofty
bearing, courtesy, but an unsoaped, ill-clad, turbulent, high-tempered
young fellow, looked up to by his crowd very much as the champion of
the heavy weights is looked up to by his gang of blackguards. Alexander
himself was not much better,--a foolish, fiery young madcap. How often
is he mentioned except as a warning? His best record is that he served
to point a moral as 'Macedonian's madman.' He made a figure, it is true,
in Dryden's great Ode, but what kind of a figure? He got drunk,--in
very bad company, too,--and then turned fire-bug. He had one redeeming
point,--he did value his Homer, and slept with the Iliad under his
pillow. A poet like Homer seems to me worth a dozen such fellows as
Achilles and Alexander.”

“Homer is all very well far those that can read him,” said Number Seven,
“but the fellows that tag verses together nowadays are mostly fools.
That's my opinion. I wrote some verses once myself, but I had been sick
and was very weak; hadn't strength enough to write in prose, I suppose.”

This aggressive remark caused a little stir at our tea-table. For you
must know, if I have not told you already, there are suspicions that we
have more than one “poet” at our table. I have already confessed that
I do myself indulge in verse now and then, and have given my readers
a specimen of my work in that line. But there is so much difference of
character in the verses which are produced at our table, without any
signature, that I feel quite sure there are at least two or three other
contributors besides myself. There is a tall, old-fashioned silver urn,
a sugar-bowl of the period of the Empire, in which the poems sent to be
read are placed by unseen hands. When the proper moment arrives, I lift
the cover of the urn and take out any manuscript it may contain. If
conversation is going on and the company are in a talking mood, I
replace the manuscript or manuscripts, clap on the cover, and wait until
there is a moment's quiet before taking it off again. I might guess the
writers sometimes by the handwriting, but there is more trouble taken to
disguise the chirography than I choose to take to identify it as that of
any particular member of our company.

The turn the conversation took, especially the slashing onslaught of
Number Seven on the writers of verse, set me thinking and talking
about the matter. Number Five turned on the stream of my discourse by a
question.

“You receive a good many volumes of verse, do you not?” she said, with a
look which implied that she knew I did.

I certainly do, I answered. My table aches with them. My shelves groan
with them. Think of what a fuss Pope made about his trials, when he
complained that

     “All Bedlam or Parnassus is let out”!

What were the numbers of the

     “Mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease”

to that great multitude of contributors to our magazines, and authors of
little volumes--sometimes, alas! big ones--of verse, which pour out of
the press, not weekly, but daily, and at such a rate of increase that
it seems as if before long every hour would bring a book, or at least an
article which is to grow into a book by and by?

I thanked Heaven, the other day, that I was not a critic. These
attenuated volumes of poetry in fancy bindings open their covers at one
like so many little unfledged birds, and one does so long to drop a worm
in,--a worm in the shape of a kind word for the poor fledgling! But
what a desperate business it is to deal with this army of candidates for
immortality! I have often had something to say about them, and I may be
saying over the same things; but if I do not remember what I have said,
it is not very likely that my reader will; if he does, he will find, I
am very sure, that I say it a little differently.

What astonishes me is that this enormous mass of commonplace verse,
which burdens the postman who brings it, which it is a serious task only
to get out of its wrappers and open in two or three places, is on the
whole of so good an average quality. The dead level of mediocrity is in
these days a table-land, a good deal above the old sea-level of laboring
incapacity. Sixty years ago verses made a local reputation, which
verses, if offered today to any of our first-class magazines, would go
straight into the waste-basket. To write “poetry” was an art and mystery
in which only a few noted men and a woman or two were experts.

When “Potter the ventriloquist,” the predecessor of the well-remembered
Signor Blitz, went round giving his entertainments, there was something
unexplained, uncanny, almost awful, and beyond dispute marvellous, in
his performances. Those watches that disappeared and came back to
their owners, those endless supplies of treasures from empty hats, and
especially those crawling eggs that travelled all over the magician's
person, sent many a child home thinking that Mr. Potter must
have ghostly assistants, and raised grave doubts in the minds of
“professors,” that is members of the church, whether they had not
compromised their characters by being seen at such an unhallowed
exhibition. Nowadays, a clever boy who has made a study of parlor
magic can do many of those tricks almost as well as the great sorcerer
himself. How simple it all seems when we have seen the mechanism of the
deception!

It is just so with writing in verse. It was not understood that
everybody can learn to make poetry, just as they can learn the more
difficult tricks of juggling. M. Jourdain's discovery that he had been
speaking and writing prose all his life is nothing to that of the man
who finds out in middle life, or even later, that he might have been
writing poetry all his days, if he had only known how perfectly easy and
simple it is. Not everybody, it is true, has a sufficiently good ear,
a sufficient knowledge of rhymes and capacity for handling them, to be
what is called a poet. I doubt whether more than nine out of ten, in
the average, have that combination of gifts required for the writing of
readable verse.

This last expression of opinion created a sensation among The Teacups.
They looked puzzled for a minute. One whispered to the next Teacup,
“More than nine out of ten! I should think that was a pretty liberal
allowance.”

Yes, I continued; perhaps ninety-nine in a hundred would come nearer to
the mark. I have sometimes thought I might consider it worth while to
set up a school for instruction in the art. “Poetry taught in twelve
lessons.” Congenital idiocy is no disqualification. Anybody can write
“poetry.” It is a most unenviable distinction to leave published a thin
volume of verse, which nobody wanted, nobody buys, nobody reads, nobody
cares for except the author, who cries over its pathos, poor fellow, and
revels in its beauties, which he has all to himself. Come! who will be
my pupils in a Course,--Poetry taught in twelve lessons? That made a
laugh, in which most of The Teacups, myself included, joined heartily.
Through it all I heard the sweet tones of Number Five's caressing voice;
not because it was more penetrating or louder than the others, for it
was low and soft, but it was so different from the others, there was so
much more life,--the life of sweet womanhood,--dissolved in it.

(Of course he will fall in love with her. “He? Who?” Why, the newcomer,
the Counsellor. Did I not see his eyes turn toward her as the silvery
notes rippled from her throat? Did they not follow her in her movements,
as she turned her tread this or that way?

--What nonsense for me to be arranging matters between two people
strangers to each other before to-day!)

“A fellow writes in verse when he has nothing to say, and feels too dull
and silly to say it in prose,” said Number Seven.

This made us laugh again, good-naturedly. I was pleased with a kind
of truth which it seemed to me to wrap up in its rather startling
affirmation. I gave a piece of advice the other day which I said I
thought deserved a paragraph to itself. It was from a letter I wrote not
long ago to an unknown young correspondent, who had a longing for seeing
himself in verse but was not hopelessly infatuated with the idea that he
was born a “poet.” “When you write in prose,” I said, “you say what you
mean. When you write in verse you say what you must.” I was thinking
more especially of rhymed verse. Rhythm alone is a tether, and not a
very long one. But rhymes are iron fetters; it is dragging a chain
and ball to march under their incumbrance; it is a clog-dance you are
figuring in, when you execute your metrical pas seul. Consider under
what a disadvantage your thinking powers are laboring when you are
handicapped by the inexorable demands of our scanty English rhyming
vocabulary! You want to say something about the heavenly bodies, and you
have a beautiful line ending with the word stars. Were you writing in
prose, your imagination, your fancy, your rhetoric, your musical ear for
the harmonies of language, would all have full play. But there is your
rhyme fastening you by the leg, and you must either reject the line
which pleases you, or you must whip your hobbling fancy and all your
limping thoughts into the traces which are hitched to one of three or
four or half a dozen serviceable words. You cannot make any use of
cars, I will suppose; you have no occasion to talk about scars; “the
red planet Mars” has been used already; Dibdin has said enough about the
gallant tars; what is there left for you but bars? So you give up your
trains of thought, capitulate to necessity, and manage to lug in some
kind of allusion, in place or out of place, which will allow you to make
use of bars. Can there be imagined a more certain process for breaking
up all continuity of thought, for taking out all the vigor, all the
virility, which belongs to natural prose as the vehicle of strong,
graceful, spontaneous thought, than this miserable subjugation of
intellect to the-clink of well or ill matched syllables? I think you
will smile if I tell you of an idea I have had about teaching the art
of writing “poems” to the half-witted children at the Idiot Asylum. The
trick of rhyming cannot be more usefully employed than in furnishing
a pleasant amusement to the poor feeble-minded children. I should feel
that I was well employed in getting up a Primer for the pupils of the
Asylum, and other young persons who are incapable of serious thought and
connected expression. I would start in the simplest way; thus:--

     When darkness veils the evening....
     I love to close my weary....

The pupil begins by supplying the missing words, which most children who
are able to keep out of fire and water can accomplish after a certain
number of trials. When the poet that is to be has got so as to perform
this task easily, a skeleton verse, in which two or three words of each
line are omitted, is given the child to fill up. By and by the more
difficult forms of metre are outlined, until at length a feebleminded
child can make out a sonnet, completely equipped with its four pairs of
rhymes in the first section and its three pairs in the second part.

Number Seven interrupted my discourse somewhat abruptly, as is his wont;
for we grant him a license, in virtue of his eccentricity, which we
should hardly expect to be claimed by a perfectly sound Teacup.

“That's the way,--that 's the way!” exclaimed he. “It's just the same
thing as my plan for teaching drawing.”

Some curiosity was shown among The Teacups to know what the queer
creature had got into his mind, and Number Five asked him, in her
irresistible tones, if he wouldn't oblige us by telling us all about it.

He looked at her a moment without speaking. I suppose he has often been
made fun of,--slighted in conversation, taken as a butt for people who
thought themselves witty, made to feel as we may suppose a cracked piece
of china-ware feels when it is clinked in the company of sound bits
of porcelain. I never saw him when he was carelessly dealt with
in conversation,--for it would sometimes happen, even at our
table,--without recalling some lines of Emerson which always struck me
as of wonderful force and almost terrible truthfulness:--

     “Alas! that one is born in blight,
     Victim of perpetual slight
     When thou lookest in his face
     Thy heart saith, 'Brother, go thy ways
     None shall ask thee what thou doest,
     Or care a rush for what thou knowest,
     Or listen when thou repliest,
     Or remember where thou liest,
     Or how thy supper is sodden;'
     And another is born
     To make the sun forgotten.”

Poor fellow! Number Seven has to bear a good deal in the way of neglect
and ridicule, I do not doubt. Happily, he is protected by an amount
of belief in himself which shields him from many assailants who would
torture a more sensitive nature. But the sweet voice of Number Five and
her sincere way of addressing him seemed to touch his feelings. That
was the meaning of his momentary silence, in which I saw that his eyes
glistened and a faint flush rose on his cheeks. In a moment, however, as
soon as he was on his hobby, he was all right, and explained his new and
ingenious system as follows:

“A man at a certain distance appears as a dark spot,--nothing more.
Good. Anybody, man, woman, or child, can make a dot, say a period, such
as we use in writing. Lesson No. 1. Make a dot; that is, draw your man,
a mile off, if that is far enough. Now make him come a little nearer, a
few rods, say. The dot is an oblong figure now. Good. Let your scholar
draw the oblong figure. It is as easy as it is to make a note of
admiration. Your man comes nearer, and now some hint of a bulbous
enlargement at one end, and perhaps of lateral appendages and a
bifurcation, begins to show itself. The pupil sets down with his pencil
just what he sees,--no more. So by degrees the man who serves as model
approaches. A bright pupil will learn to get the outline of a human
figure in ten lessons, the model coming five hundred feet nearer each
time. A dull one may require fifty, the model beginning a mile off, or
more, and coming a hundred feet nearer at each move.”

The company were amused by all this, but could not help seeing that
there was a certain practical possibility about the scheme. Our two
Annexes, as we call then, appeared to be interested in the project, or
fancy, or whim, or whatever the older heads might consider it. “I guess
I'll try it,” said the American Annex. “Quite so,” answered the English
Annex. Why the first girl “guessed” about her own intentions it is hard
to say. What “quite so” referred to it would not be easy to determine.
But these two expressions would decide the nationality of our two young
ladies if we met them on the top of the great Pyramid.

I was very glad that Number Seven had interrupted me. In fact, it is
a good thing once in a while to break in upon the monotony of a steady
talker at a dinner-table, tea-table, or any other place of social
converse. The best talker is liable to become the most formidable of
bores. It is a peculiarity of the bore that he is the last person to
find himself out. Many a terebrant I have known who, in that capacity,
to borrow a line from Coleridge,

     “Was great, nor knew how great he was.”

A line, by the way, which, as I have remarked, has in it a germ like
that famous “He builded better than he knew” of Emerson.

There was a slight lull in the conversation. The Mistress, who keeps an
eye on the course of things, and feared that one of those panic silences
was impending, in which everybody wants to say something and does not
know just what to say, begged me to go on with my remarks about the
“manufacture” of “poetry.”

You use the right term, madam, I said. The manufacture of that article
has become an extensive and therefore an important branch of industry.
One must be an editor, which I am not, or a literary confidant of a wide
circle of correspondents, which I am, to have any idea of the enormous
output of verse which is characteristic of our time. There are many
curious facts connected with this phenomenon. Educated people--yes,
and many who are not educated--have discovered that rhymes are not the
private property of a few noted writers who, having squatted on that
part of the literary domain some twenty or forty or sixty years
ago, have, as it were, fenced it in with their touchy, barbed-wire
reputations, and have come to regard it and cause it to be regarded as
their private property. The discovery having been made that rhyme is not
a paddock for this or that race-horse, but a common, where every
colt, pony, and donkey can range at will; a vast irruption into that
once-privileged inclosure has taken place. The study of the great
invasion is interesting.

Poetry is commonly thought to be the language of emotion. On the
contrary, most of what is so called proves the absence of all passionate
excitement. It is a cold-blooded, haggard, anxious, worrying hunt
after rhymes which can be made serviceable, after images which will be
effective, after phrases which are sonorous; all this under limitations
which restrict the natural movements of fancy and imagination. There
is a secondary excitement in overcoming the difficulties of rhythm
and rhyme, no doubt, but this is not the emotional heat excited by the
subject of the “poet's” treatment. True poetry, the best of it, is but
the ashes of a burnt-out passion. The flame was in the eye and in the
cheek, the coals may be still burning in the heart, but when we come
to the words it leaves behind it, a little warmth, a cinder or two just
glimmering under the dead gray ashes,--that is all we can look for. When
it comes to the manufactured article, one is surprised to find how well
the metrical artisans have learned to imitate the real thing. They catch
all the phrases of the true poet. They imitate his metrical forms as a
mimic copies the gait of the person he is representing.

Now I am not going to abuse “these same metre ballad-mongers,” for the
obvious reason that, as all The Teacups know, I myself belong to the
fraternity. I don't think that this reason should hinder my having my
say about the ballad-mongering business. For the last thirty years I
have been in the habit of receiving a volume of poems or a poem, printed
or manuscript--I will not say daily, though I sometimes receive more
than one in a day, but at very short intervals. I have been consulted by
hundreds of writers of verse as to the merit of their performances, and
have often advised the writers to the best of my ability. Of late I
have found it impossible to attempt to read critically all the literary
productions, in verse and in prose, which have heaped themselves on
every exposed surface of my library, like snowdrifts along the railroad
tracks,--blocking my literary pathway, so that I can hardly find my
daily papers.

What is the meaning of this rush into rhyming of such a multitude
of people, of all ages, from the infant phenomenon to the oldest
inhabitant?

Many of my young correspondents have told me in so many words, “I want
to be famous.” Now it is true that of all the short cuts to fame, in
time of peace, there is none shorter than the road paved with rhymes.
Byron woke up one morning and found himself famous. Still more notably
did Rouget de l'Isle fill the air of France, nay, the whole atmosphere
of freedom all the world over, with his name wafted on the wings of the
Marseillaise, the work of a single night. But if by fame the aspirant
means having his name brought before and kept before the public, there
is a much cheaper way of acquiring that kind of notoriety. Have your
portrait taken as a “Wonderful Cure of a Desperate Disease given up by
all the Doctors.” You will get a fair likeness of yourself and a partial
biographical notice, and have the satisfaction, if not of promoting
the welfare of the community, at least that of advancing the financial
interests of the benefactor whose enterprise has given you your coveted
notoriety. If a man wants to be famous, he had much better try the
advertising doctor than the terrible editor, whose waste-basket is a
maw which is as insatiable as the temporary stomach of Jack the
Giant-killer.

“You must not talk so,” said Number Five. “I know you don't mean any
wrong to the true poets, but you might be thought to hold them cheap,
whereas you value the gift in others,--in yourself too, I rather think.
There are a great many women,--and some men,--who write in verse from
a natural instinct which leads them to that form of expression. If you
could peep into the portfolio of all the cultivated women among your
acquaintances, you would be surprised, I believe, to see how many of
them trust their thoughts and feelings to verse which they never think
of publishing, and much of which never meets any eyes but their
own. Don't be cruel to the sensitive natures who find a music in the
harmonies of rhythm and rhyme which soothes their own souls, if it
reaches no farther.”

I was glad that Number Five spoke up as she did. Her generous instinct
came to the rescue of the poor poets just at the right moment. Not that
I meant to deal roughly with them, but the “poets” I have been forced
into relation with have impressed me with certain convictions which
are not flattering to the fraternity, and if my judgments are not
accompanied by my own qualifications, distinctions, and exceptions, they
may seem harsh to many readers.

Let me draw a picture which many a young man and woman, and some no
longer young, will recognize as the story of their own experiences.

--He is sitting alone with his own thoughts and memories. What is that
book he is holding? Something precious, evidently, for it is bound
in “tree calf,” and there is gilding enough about it for a birthday
present. The reader seems to be deeply absorbed in its contents, and
at times greatly excited by what he reads; for his face is flushed, his
eyes glitter, and--there rolls a large tear down his cheek. Listen to
him; he is reading aloud in impassioned tones:

   And have I coined my soul in words for naught?
   And must I, with the dim, forgotten throng
   Of silent ghosts that left no earthly trace
   To show they once had breathed this vital air,
   Die out, of mortal memories?

His voice is choked by his emotion. “How is it possible,” he says to
himself, “that any one can read my 'Gaspings for Immortality' without
being impressed by their freshness, their passion, their beauty, their
originality?” Tears come to his relief freely,--so freely that he has
to push the precious volume out of the range of their blistering shower.
Six years ago “Gaspings for Immortality” was published, advertised,
praised by the professionals whose business it is to boost their
publishers' authors. A week and more it was seen on the counters of
the booksellers and at the stalls in the railroad stations. Then it
disappeared from public view. A few copies still kept their place on
the shelves of friends,--presentation copies, of course, as there is no
evidence that any were disposed of by sale; and now, one might as well
ask for the lost books of Livy as inquire at a bookstore for “Gaspings
for Immortality.”

The authors of these poems are all round us, men and women, and no one
with a fair amount of human sympathy in his disposition would treat them
otherwise than tenderly. Perhaps they do not need tender treatment.
How do you know that posterity may not resuscitate these seemingly dead
poems, and give their author the immortality for which he longed and
labored? It is not every poet who is at once appreciated. Some will
tell you that the best poets never are. Who can say that you, dear
unappreciated brother or sister, are not one of those whom it is left
for after times to discover among the wrecks of the past, and hold up to
the admiration of the world?

I have not thought it necessary to put in all the interpellations, as
the French call them, which broke the course of this somewhat extended
series of remarks; but the comments of some of The Teacups helped me to
shape certain additional observations, and may seem to the reader as of
more significance than what I had been saying.

Number Seven saw nothing but the folly and weakness of the “rhyming
cranks,” as he called them. He thought the fellow that I had described
as blubbering over his still-born poems would have been better occupied
in earning his living in some honest way or other. He knew one chap that
published a volume of verses, and let his wife bring up the wood for
the fire by which he was writing. A fellow says, “I am a poet!” and he
thinks himself different from common folks. He ought to be excused
from military service. He might be killed, and the world would lose the
inestimable products of his genius. “I believe some of 'em think,” said
Number Seven, “that they ought not to be called upon to pay their taxes
and their bills for household expenses, like the rest of us.”

“If they would only study and take to heart Horace's 'Ars Poetica,'”
 said the Professor, “it would be a great benefit to them and to the
world at large. I would not advise you to follow him too literally, of
course, for, as you will see, the changes that have taken place since
his time would make some of his precepts useless and some dangerous,
but the spirit of them is always instructive. This is the way, somewhat
modernized and accompanied by my running commentary, in which he
counsels a young poet:

“'Don't try to write poetry, my boy, when you are not in the mood
for doing it,--when it goes against the grain. You are a fellow of
sense,--you understand all that.

“'If you have written anything which you think well of, show it to
Mr.______, the well-known critic; to “the governor,” as you call
him,--your honored father; and to me, your friend.'

“To the critic is well enough, if you like to be overhauled and put out
of conceit with yourself,--it may do you good; but I wouldn't go to 'the
governor' with my verses, if I were you. For either he will think what
you have written is something wonderful, almost as good as he could
have written himself,--in fact, he always did believe in hereditary
genius,--or he will pooh-pooh the whole rhyming nonsense, and tell you
that you had a great deal better stick to your business, and leave all
the word-jingling to Mother Goose and her followers.

“'Show me your verses,' says Horace. Very good it was in him, and mighty
encouraging the first counsel he gives! 'Keep your poem to yourself for
some eight or ten years; you will have time to look it over, to correct
it and make it fit to present to the public.'

“'Much obliged for your advice,' says the poor poet, thirsting for a
draught of fame, and offered a handful of dust. And off he hurries to
the printer, to be sure that his poem comes out in the next number of
the magazine he writes for.”

“Is not poetry the natural language of lovers?”

It was the Tutor who asked this question, and I thought he looked in
the direction of Number Five, as if she might answer his question. But
Number Five stirred her tea devotedly; there was a lump of sugar, I
suppose, that acted like a piece of marble. So there was a silence while
the lump was slowly dissolving, and it was anybody's chance who saw fit
to take up the conversation.

The voice that broke the silence was not the sweet, winsome one we were
listening for, but it instantly arrested the attention of the company.
It was the grave, manly voice of one used to speaking, and accustomed to
be listened to with deference. This was the first time that the company
as a whole had heard it, for the speaker was the new-comer who has been
repeatedly alluded to,--the one of whom I spoke as “the Counsellor.”

“I think I can tell you something about that,” said the Counsellor. “I
suppose you will wonder how a man of my profession can know or interest
himself about a question so remote from his arid pursuits. And yet
there is hardly one man in a thousand who knows from actual experience
a fraction of what I have learned of the lovers' vocabulary in my
professional experience. I have, I am sorry to say, had to take an
important part in a great number of divorce cases. These have brought
before me scores and hundreds of letters, in which every shade of the
great passion has been represented. What has most struck me in these
amatory correspondences has been their remarkable sameness. It seems as
if writing love-letters reduced all sorts of people to the same level.
I don't remember whether Lord Bacon has left us anything in that
line,--unless, indeed, he wrote Romeo and Juliet' and the 'Sonnets;' but
if he has, I don't believe they differ so very much from those of his
valet or his groom to their respective lady-loves. It is always, My
darling! my darling! The words of endearment are the only ones the lover
wants to employ, and he finds the vocabulary too limited for his vast
desires. So his letters are apt to be rather tedious except to the
personage to whom they are addressed. As to poetry, it is very common to
find it in love-letters, especially in those that have no love in them.
The letters of bigamists and polygamists are rich in poetical extracts.
Occasionally, an original spurt in rhyme adds variety to an otherwise
monotonous performance. I don't think there is much passion in men's
poetry addressed to women. I agree with The Dictator that poetry is
little more than the ashes of passion; still it may show that the flame
has had its sweep where you find it, unless, indeed, it is shoveled in
from another man's fireplace.”

“What do you say to the love poetry of women?” asked the Professor. “Did
ever passion heat words to incandescence as it did those of Sappho?”

The Counsellor turned,--not to Number Five, as he ought to have done,
according to my programme, but to the Mistress.

“Madam,” he said, “your sex is adorable in many ways, but in the abandon
of a genuine love-letter it is incomparable. I have seen a string of
women's love-letters, in which the creature enlaced herself about the
object of her worship as that South American parasite which clasps the
tree to which it has attached itself, begins with a slender succulent
network, feeds on the trunk, spreads its fingers out to hold firmly
to one branch after another, thickens, hardens, stretches in every
direction, following the boughs,--and at length gets strong enough to
hold in its murderous arms, high up in air, the stump and shaft of the
once sturdy growth that was its support and subsistence.”

The Counsellor did not say all this quite so formally as I have set it
down here, but in a much easier way. In fact, it is impossible to smooth
out a conversation from memory without stiffening it; you can't have a
dress shirt look quite right without starching the bosom.

Some of us would have liked to hear more about those letters in the
divorce cases, but the Counsellor had to leave the table. He promised to
show us some pictures he has of the South American parasite. I have seen
them, and I can assure you they are very curious.

The following verses were found in the urn, or sugar-bowl.

          CACOETHES SCRIBENDI.

     If all the trees in all the woods were men,
     And each and every blade of grass a pen;
     If every leaf on every shrub and tree
     Turned to a sheet of foolscap; every sea
     Were changed to ink, and all earth's living tribes
     Had nothing else to do but act as scribes,
     And for ten thousand ages, day and night,
     The human race should write, and write, and write,
     Till all the pens and paper were used up,
     And the huge inkstand was an empty cup,
     Still would the scribblers clustered round its brim
     Call for more pens, more paper, and more ink.




V

“Dolce, ma non troppo dolce,” said the Professor to the Mistress, who
was sweetening his tea. She always sweetens his and mine for us. He
has been attending a series of concerts, and borrowed the form of
the directions to the orchestra. “Sweet, but not too sweet,” he said,
translating the Italian for the benefit of any of the company who might
not be linguists or musical experts.

“Do you go to those musical hullabaloos?” called out Number Seven. There
was something very much like rudeness in this question and the tone in
which it was asked. But we are used to the outbursts, and extravagances,
and oddities of Number Seven, and do not take offence at his rough
speeches as we should if any other of the company uttered them.

“If you mean the concerts that have been going on this season, yes, I
do,” said the Professor, in a bland, good-humored way.

“And do you take real pleasure in the din of all those screeching and
banging and growling instruments?”

“Yes,” he answered, modestly, “I enjoy the brouhaha, if you choose to
consider it such, of all this quarrelsome menagerie of noise-making
machines, brought into order and harmony by the presiding genius,
the leader, who has made a happy family of these snarling stringed
instruments and whining wind instruments, so that although

     “Linguae centum sent, oraque centum,

“notwithstanding there are a hundred vibrating tongues and a hundred
bellowing mouths, their one grand blended and harmonized uproar sets all
my fibres tingling with a not unpleasing tremor.”

“Do you understand it? Do you take any idea from it? Do you know what it
all means?” said Number Seven.

The Professor was long-suffering under this series of somewhat
peremptory questions. He replied very placidly, “I am afraid I have but
a superficial outside acquaintance with the secrets, the unfathomable
mysteries, of music. I can no more conceive of the working conditions of
the great composer,

     “'Untwisting all the chains that tie
     The hidden soul of harmony,'

“than a child of three years can follow the reasonings of Newton's
'Principia.' I do not even pretend that I can appreciate the work of
a great master as a born and trained musician does. Still, I do love
a great crash of harmonies, and the oftener I listen to these musical
tempests the higher my soul seems to ride upon them, as the wild fowl
I see through my window soar more freely and fearlessly the fiercer the
storm with which they battle.”

“That's all very well,” said Number Seven, “but I wish we could get the
old-time music back again. You ought to have heard,--no, I won't mention
her, dead, poor girl,--dead and singing with the saints in heaven,--but
the S____ girls. If you could have heard them as I did when I was a
boy, you would have cried, as we all used to. Do you cry at those great
musical smashes? How can you cry when you don't know what it is all
about? We used to think the words meant something,--we fancied that
Burns and Moore said some things very prettily. I suppose you've
outgrown all that.”

No one can handle Number Seven in one of his tantrums half so well as
Number Five can do it. She can pick out what threads of sense may
be wound off from the tangle of his ideas when they are crowded and
confused, as they are apt to be at times. She can soften the occasional
expression of half-concealed ridicule with which the poor old fellow's
sallies are liable to be welcomed--or unwelcomed. She knows that the
edge of a broken teacup may be sharper, very possibly, than that of a
philosopher's jackknife. A mind a little off its balance, one which has
a slightly squinting brain as its organ; will often prove fertile in
suggestions. Vulgar, cynical, contemptuous listeners fly at all its
weaknesses, and please themselves with making light of its often futile
ingenuities, when a wiser audience would gladly accept a hint which
perhaps could be developed in some profitable direction, or so interpret
an erratic thought that it should prove good sense in disguise. That is
the way Number Five was in the habit of dealing with the explosions of
Number Seven. Do you think she did not see the ridiculous element in a
silly speech, or the absurdity of an outrageously extravagant assertion?
Then you never heard her laugh when she could give way to her sense of
the ludicrous without wounding the feelings of any other person. But her
kind heart never would forget itself, and so Number Seven had a champion
who was always ready to see that his flashes of intelligence, fitful
as they were, and liable to be streaked with half-crazy fancies, always
found one willing recipient of what light there was in them.

Number Five, I have found, is a true lover of music, and has a right
to claim a real knowledge of its higher and deeper mysteries. But she
accepted very cordially what our light-headed companion said about the
songs he used to listen to.

“There is no doubt,” she remarked, “that the tears which used to be shed
over 'Oft in the sully night,' or 'Auld Robin Gray,' or 'A place in thy
memory, dearest,' were honest tears, coming from the true sources of
emotion. There was no affectation about them; those songs came home to
the sensibilities of young people,--of all who had any sensibilities
to be acted upon. And on the other hand, there is a great amount of
affectation in the apparent enthusiasm of many persons in admiring and
applauding music of which they have not the least real appreciation.
They do not know whether it is good or bad, the work of a first-rate
or a fifth-rate composer; whether there are coherent elements in it, or
whether it is nothing more than 'a concourse of sweet sounds' with no
organic connections. One must be educated, no doubt, to understand the
more complex and difficult kinds of musical composition. Go to the great
concerts where you know that the music is good, and that you ought to
like it whether you do or not. Take a music-bath once or twice a week
for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what
the water-bath is to the body. I wouldn't trouble myself about the
affectations of people who go to this or that series of concerts chiefly
because it is fashionable. Some of these people whom we think so silly
and hold so cheap will perhaps find, sooner or later, that they have
a dormant faculty which is at last waking up,--and that they who came
because others came, and began by staring at the audience, are listening
with a newly found delight. Every one of us has a harp under bodice or
waistcoat, and if it can only once get properly strung and tuned it will
respond to all outside harmonies.”

The Professor has some ideas about music, which I believe he has given
to the world in one form or another; but the world is growing old
and forgetful, and needs to be reminded now and then of what one has
formerly told it.

“I have had glimpses,” the Professor said, “of the conditions into
which music is capable of bringing a sensitive nature. Glimpses, I say,
because I cannot pretend that I am capable of sounding all the depths
or reaching all the heights to which music may transport our mortal
consciousness. Let me remind you of a curious fact with reference to the
seat of the musical sense. Far down below the great masses of thinking
marrow and its secondary agents, just as the brain is about to merge in
the spinal cord, the roots of the nerve of hearing spread their white
filaments out into the sentient matter, where they report what the
external organs of hearing tell them. This sentient matter is in remote
connection only with the mental organs, far more remote than the centres
of the sense of vision and that of smell. In a word, the musical faculty
might be said to have a little brain of its own. It has a special
world and a private language all to itself. How can one explain its
significance to those whose musical faculties are in a rudimentary state
of development, or who have never had them trained? Can you describe
in intelligible language the smell of a rose as compared with that of
a violet? No,--music can be translated only by music. Just so far as
it suggests worded thought, it falls short of its highest office. Pure
emotional movements of the spiritual nature,--that is what I ask of
music. Music will be the universal language,--the Volapuk of spiritual
being.”

“Angels sit down with their harps and play at each other, I suppose,”
 said Number Seven. “Must have an atmosphere up there if they have harps,
or they wouldn't get any music. Wonder if angels breathe like mortals?
If they do, they must have lungs and air passages, of course. Think
of an angel with the influenza, and nothing but a cloud for a
handkerchief!”

--This is a good instance of the way in which Number Seven's squinting
brain works. You will now and then meet just such brains in heads you
know very well. Their owners are much given to asking unanswerable
questions. A physicist may settle it for us whether there is an
atmosphere about a planet or not, but it takes a brain with an extra
fissure in it to ask these unexpected questions,--questions which the
natural philosopher cannot answer, and which the theologian never thinks
of asking.

The company at our table do not keep always in the same places. The
first thing I noticed, the other evening, was that the Tutor was sitting
between the two Annexes, and the Counsellor was next to Number Five.
Something ought to come of this arrangement. One of those two young
ladies must certainly captivate and perhaps capture the Tutor. They are
just the age to be falling in love and to be fallen in love with. The
Tutor is good looking, intellectual, suspected of writing poetry, but
a little shy, it appears to me. I am glad to see him between the two
girls. If there were only one, she might be shy too, and then there
would be less chance for a romance such as I am on the lookout for; but
these young persons lend courage to each other, and between them, if
he does not wake up like Cymon at the sight of Iphigenia, I shall be
disappointed. As for the Counsellor and Number Five, they will soon find
each other out. Yes, it is all pretty clear in my mind,--except that
there is always an x in a problem where sentiments are involved. No, not
so clear about the Tutor. Predestined, I venture my guess, to one or the
other, but to which? I will suspend my opinion for the present.

I have found out that the Counsellor is a childless widower. I am told
that the Tutor is unmarried, and so far as known not engaged. There is
no use in denying it,--a company without the possibility of a love-match
between two of its circle is like a champagne bottle with the cork out
for some hours as compared to one with its pop yet in reserve.
However, if there should be any love-making, it need not break up our
conversations. Most of it will be carried on away from our tea-table.

Some of us have been attending certain lectures on Egypt and its
antiquities. I have never been on the Nile. If in any future state there
shall be vacations in which we may have liberty to revisit our old
home, equipped with a complete brand-new set of mortal senses as our
travelling outfit, I think one of the first places I should go to, after
my birthplace, the old gambrel-roofed house,--the place where it stood,
rather,--would be that mighty, awe-inspiring river. I do not suppose we
shall ever know half of what we owe to the wise and wonderful people who
confront us with the overpowering monuments of a past which flows out of
the unfathomable darkness as the great river streams from sources even
as yet but imperfectly explored.

I have thought a good deal about Egypt, lately, with reference to our
historical monuments. How did the great unknown mastery who fixed the
two leading forms of their monumental records arrive at those admirable
and eternal types, the pyramid and the obelisk? How did they get their
model of the pyramid?

Here is an hour-glass, not inappropriately filled with sand from the
great Egyptian desert. I turn it, and watch the sand as it accumulates
in the lower half of the glass. How symmetrically, how beautifully,
how inevitably, the little particles pile up the cone, which is ever
building and unbuilding itself, always aiming at the stability which is
found only at a certain fixed angle! The Egyptian children playing in
the sand must have noticed this as they let the grains fall from their
hands, and the sloping sides of the miniature pyramid must have been
among the familiar sights to the little boys and girls for whom the sand
furnished their earliest playthings. Nature taught her children through
the working of the laws of gravitation how to build so that her forces
should act in harmony with art, to preserve the integrity of a structure
meant to reach a far-off posterity. The pyramid is only the cone in
which Nature arranges her heaped and sliding fragments; the cone
with flattened Surfaces, as it is prefigured in certain well-known
crystalline forms. The obelisk is from another of Nature's patterns; it
is only a gigantic acicular crystal.

The Egyptians knew what a monument should be, simple, noble, durable.
It seems to me that we Americans might take a lesson from those early
architects. Our cemeteries are crowded with monuments which are very
far from simple, anything but noble, and stand a small chance of being
permanent. The pyramid is rarely seen, perhaps because it takes up so
much room; and when built on a small scale seems insignificant as we
think of it, dwarfed by the vast structures of antiquity. The obelisk is
very common, and when in just proportions and of respectable dimensions
is unobjectionable.

But the gigantic obelisks like that on Bunker Hill, and especially
the Washington monument at the national capital, are open to critical
animadversion. Let us contrast the last mentioned of these great piles
with the obelisk as the Egyptian conceived and executed it. The new
Pharaoh ordered a memorial of some important personage or event. In
the first place, a mighty stone was dislodged from its connections, and
lifted, unbroken, from the quarry. This was a feat from which our modern
stone-workers shrink dismayed. The Egyptians appear to have handled
these huge monoliths as our artisans handle hearthstones and doorsteps,
for the land actually bristled with such giant columns. They were shaped
and finished as nicely as if they were breastpins for the Titans to
wear, and on their polished surfaces were engraved in imperishable
characters the records they were erected to preserve.

Europe and America borrow these noble productions of African art and
power, and find them hard enough to handle after they have succeeded
in transporting them to Rome, or London, or New York. Their simplicity,
grandeur, imperishability, speaking symbolism, shame all the pretentious
and fragile works of human art around them. The obelisk has no joints
for the destructive agencies of nature to attack; the pyramid has no
masses hanging in unstable equilibrium, and threatening to fall by their
own weight in the course of a thousand or two years.

America says the Father of his Country must have a monument worthy of
his exalted place in history. What shall it be? A temple such as Athens
might have been proud to rear upon her Acropolis? An obelisk such as
Thebes might have pointed out with pride to the strangers who found
admission through her hundred gates? After long meditation and the
rejection of the hybrid monstrosities with which the nation was menaced,
an obelisk is at last decided upon. How can it be made grand and
dignified enough to be equal to the office assigned it? We dare not
attempt to carve a single stone from the living rock,--all our modern
appliances fail to make the task as easy to us as it seems to have
been to the early Egyptians. No artistic skill is required in giving
a four-square tapering figure to a stone column. If we cannot shape a
solid obelisk of the proper dimensions, we can build one of separate
blocks. How can we give it the distinction we demand for it? The nation
which can brag that it has “the biggest show on earth” cannot boast a
great deal in the way of architecture, but it can do one thing,--it can
build an obelisk that shall be taller than any structure now standing
which the hand of man has raised. Build an obelisk! How different the
idea of such a structure from that of the unbroken, unjointed prismatic
shaft, one perfect whole, as complete in itself, as fitly shaped and
consolidated to defy the elements, as the towering palm or the tapering
pine! Well, we had the satisfaction for a time of claiming the tallest
structure in the world; and now that the new Tower of Babel which has
sprung up in Paris has killed that pretention, I think we shall feel and
speak more modestly about our stone hyperbole, our materialization of
the American love of the superlative. We have the higher civilization
among us, and we must try to keep down the forth-putting instincts of
the lower. We do not want to see our national monument placarded as “the
greatest show on earth,”--perhaps it is well that it is taken down from
that bad eminence.

I do not think that this speech of mine was very well received. It
appeared to jar somewhat on the nerves of the American Annex. There was
a smile on the lips of the other Annex,--the English girl,--which she
tried to keep quiet, but it was too plain that she enjoyed my diatribe.

It must be remembered that I and the other Teacups, in common with the
rest of our fellow-citizens, have had our sensibilities greatly
worked upon, our patriotism chilled, our local pride outraged, by the
monstrosities which have been allowed to deform our beautiful public
grounds. We have to be very careful in conducting a visitor, say from
his marble-fronted hotel to the City Hall.--Keep pretty straight along
after entering the Garden,--you will not care to inspect the little
figure of the military gentleman to your right.--Yes, the Cochituate
water is drinkable, but I think I would not turn aside to visit that
small fabric which makes believe it is a temple, and is a weak-eyed
fountain feebly weeping over its own insignificance. About that other
stone misfortune, cruelly reminding us of the “Boston Massacre,” we will
not discourse; it is not imposing, and is rarely spoken of.

What a mortification to the inhabitants of a city with some hereditary
and contemporary claims to cultivation; which has noble edifices, grand
libraries, educational institutions of the highest grade, an art-gallery
filled with the finest models and rich in paintings and statuary,--a
stately city that stretches both arms across the Charles to clasp the
hands of Harvard, her twin-sister, each lending lustre to the other like
double stars,--what a pity that she should be so disfigured by crude
attempts to adorn her and commemorate her past that her most loving
children blush for her artificial deformities amidst the wealth of her
natural beauties! One hardly knows which to groan over most sadly,--the
tearing down of old monuments, the shelling of the Parthenon, the
overthrow of the pillared temples of Rome, and in a humbler way the
destruction of the old Hancock house, or the erection of monuments which
are to be a perpetual eyesore to ourselves and our descendants.

We got talking on the subject of realism, of which so much has been said
of late.

It seems to me, I said, that the great additions which have been made
by realism to the territory of literature consist largely in swampy,
malarious, ill-smelling patches of soil which had previously been left
to reptiles and vermin. It is perfectly easy to be original by violating
the laws of decency and the canons of good taste. The general consent of
civilized people was supposed to have banished certain subjects from
the conversation of well-bred people and the pages of respectable
literature. There is no subject, or hardly any, which may not be treated
of at the proper time, in the proper place, by the fitting person,
for the right kind of listener or reader. But when the poet or the
story-teller invades the province of the man of science, he is on
dangerous ground. I need say nothing of the blunders he is pretty sure
to make. The imaginative writer is after effects. The scientific man is
after truth. Science is decent, modest; does not try to startle, but
to instruct. The same scenes and objects which outrage every sense of
delicacy in the story teller's highly colored paragraphs can be read
without giving offence in the chaste language of the physiologist or the
physician.

There is a very celebrated novel, “Madame Bovary,” the work of M.
Flaubert, which is noted for having been the subject of prosecution as
an immoral work. That it has a serious lesson there is no doubt, if
one will drink down to the bottom of the cup. But the honey of sensuous
description is spread so deeply over the surface of the goblet that
a large proportion of its readers never think of its holding anything
else. All the phases of unhallowed passion are described in full detail.
That is what the book is bought and read for, by the great majority of
its purchasers, as all but simpletons very well know. That is what makes
it sell and brought it into the courts of justice. This book is famous
for its realism; in fact, it is recognized as one of the earliest and
most brilliant examples of that modern style of novel which, beginning
where Balzac left off, attempted to do for literature what the
photograph has done for art. For those who take the trouble to drink
out of the cup below the rim of honey, there is a scene where realism is
carried to its extreme,--surpassed in horror by no writer, unless it be
the one whose name must be looked for at the bottom of the alphabet,
as if its natural place were as low down in the dregs of realism as
it could find itself. This is the death-bed scene, where Madame Bovary
expires in convulsions. The author must have visited the hospitals for
the purpose of watching the terrible agonies he was to depict, tramping
from one bed to another until he reached the one where the cries and
contortions were the most frightful. Such a scene he has reproduced. No
hospital physician would have pictured the straggle in such colors.
In the same way, that other realist, M. Zola, has painted a patient
suffering from delirium tremens, the disease known to common speech as
“the horrors.” In describing this case he does all that language can do
to make it more horrible than the reality. He gives us, not realism, but
super-realism, if such a term does not contradict itself.

In this matter of the literal reproduction of sights and scenes which
our natural instinct and our better informed taste and judgment teach us
to avoid, art has been far in advance of literature. It is three hundred
years since Joseph Ribera, more commonly known as Spagnoletto, was born
in the province Valencia, in Spain. We had the misfortune of seeing a
painting of his in a collection belonging to one of the French princes,
and exhibited at the Art Museum. It was that of a man performing upon
himself the operation known to the Japanese as hararkiri. Many persons
who looked upon this revolting picture will never get rid of its
remembrance, and will regret the day when their eyes fell upon it. I
should share the offence of the painter if I ventured to describe it.
Ribera was fond of depicting just such odious and frightful subjects.
“Saint Lawrence writhing on his gridiron, Saint Sebastian full of
arrows, were equally a source of delight to him. Even in subjects
which had no such elements of horror he finds the materials for the
delectation of his ferocious pencil; he makes up for the defect by
rendering with a brutal realism deformity and ugliness.”

The first great mistake made by the ultra-realists; like Flaubert and
Zola, is, as I have said, their ignoring the line of distinction between
imaginative art and science. We can find realism enough in books of
anatomy, surgery, and medicine. In studying the human figure, we want to
see it clothed with its natural integuments. It is well for the artist
to study the ecorche in the dissecting-room, but we do not want the
Apollo or the Venus to leave their skins behind them when they go into
the gallery for exhibition. Lancisi's figures show us how the great
statues look when divested of their natural covering. It is instructive,
but useful chiefly as a means to aid in the true artistic reproduction
of nature. When the hospitals are invaded by the novelist, he should
learn something from the physician as well as from the patients. Science
delineates in monochrome. She never uses high tints and strontian lights
to astonish lookers-on. Such scenes as Flaubert and Zola describe would
be reproduced in their essential characters, but not dressed up in
picturesque phrases. That is the first stumbling-block in the way of
the reader of such realistic stories as those to which I have referred.
There are subjects which must be investigated by scientific men which
most educated persons would be glad to know nothing about. When a
realistic writer like Zola surprises his reader into a kind of knowledge
he never thought of wishing for, he sometimes harms him more than he
has any idea of doing. He wants to produce a sensation, and he leaves
a permanent disgust not to be got rid of. Who does not remember odious
images that can never be washed out from the consciousness which they
have stained? A man's vocabulary is terribly retentive of evil words,
and the images they present cling to his memory and will not loose their
hold. One who has had the mischance to soil his mind by reading
certain poems of Swift will never cleanse it to its original whiteness.
Expressions and thoughts of a certain character stain the fibre of the
thinking organ, and in some degree affect the hue of every idea that
passes through the discolored tissues.

This is the gravest accusation to bring against realism, old or recent,
whether in the brutal paintings of Spagnoletto or in the unclean
revelations of Zola. Leave the description of the drains and cesspools
to the hygienic specialist, the painful facts of disease to the
physician, the details of the laundry to the washerwoman. If we are to
have realism in its tedious descriptions of unimportant particulars,
let it be of particulars which do not excite disgust. Such is the
description of the vegetables in Zola's “Ventre de Paris,” where, if
one wishes to see the apotheosis of turnips, beets, and cabbages, he can
find them glorified as supremely as if they had been symbols of so many
deities; their forms, their colors, their expression, worked upon until
they seem as if they were made to be looked at and worshipped rather
than to be boiled and eaten.

I am pleased to find a French critic of M. Flaubert expressing ideas
with which many of my own entirely coincide. “The great mistake of the
realists,” he says, “is that they profess to tell the truth because
they tell everything. This puerile hunting after details, this cold and
cynical inventory of all the wretched conditions in the midst of which
poor humanity vegetates, not only do not help us to understand it
better, but, on the contrary, the effect on the spectators is a kind
of dazzled confusion mingled with fatigue and disgust. The material
truthfulness to which the school of M. Flaubert more especially pretends
misses its aim in going beyond it. Truth is lost in its own excess.”

I return to my thoughts on the relations of imaginative art in all its
forms with science. The subject which in the hands of the scientific
student is handled decorously,--reverently, we might almost
say,--becomes repulsive, shameful, and debasing in the unscrupulous
manipulations of the low-bred man of letters.

I confess that I am a little jealous of certain tendencies in our own
American literature, which led one of the severest and most outspoken
of our satirical fellow-countrymen, no longer living to be called to
account for it, to say; in a moment of bitterness, that the mission of
America was to vulgarize mankind. I myself have sometimes wondered at
the pleasure some Old World critics have professed to find in the most
lawless freaks of New World literature. I have questioned whether their
delight was not like that of the Spartans in the drunken antics of their
Helots. But I suppose I belong to another age, and must not attempt to
judge the present by my old-fashioned standards.

The company listened very civilly to these remarks, whether they agreed
with them or not. I am not sure that I want all the young people to
think just as I do in matters of critical judgment. New wine does not
go well into old bottles, but if an old cask has held good wine, it may
improve a crude juice to stand awhile upon the lees of that which once
filled it.

I thought the company had had about enough of this disquisition. They
listened very decorously, and the Professor, who agrees very well
with me, as I happen to know, in my views on this business of realism,
thanked me for giving them the benefit of my opinion.

The silence that followed was broken by Number Seven's suddenly
exclaiming,--

“I should like to boss creation for a week!”

This expression was an outbreak suggested by some train of thought which
Number Seven had been following while I was discoursing. I do not think
one of the company looked as if he or she were shocked by it as an
irreligious or even profane speech. It is a better way always, in
dealing with one of those squinting brains, to let it follow out its own
thought. It will keep to it for a while; then it will quit the rail, so
to speak, and run to any side-track which may present itself.

“What is the first thing you would do?” asked Number Five in a pleasant,
easy way.

“The first thing? Pick out a few thousand of the best specimens of the
best races, and drown the rest like so many blind puppies.”

“Why,” said she, “that was tried once, and does not seem to have worked
very well.”

“Very likely. You mean Noah's flood, I suppose. More people nowadays,
and a better lot to pick from than Noah had.”

“Do tell us whom you would take with you,” said Number Five.

“You, if you would go,” he answered, and I thought I saw a slight flush
on his cheek. “But I didn't say that I should go aboard the new ark
myself. I am not sure that I should. No, I am pretty sure that I
shouldn't. I don't believe, on the whole, it would pay me to save
myself. I ain't of much account. But I could pick out some that were.”

And just now he was saying that he should like to boss the universe! All
this has nothing very wonderful about it. Every one of us is subject to
alternations of overvaluation and undervaluation of ourselves. Do you
not remember soliloquies something like this? “Was there ever such a
senseless, stupid creature as I am? How have I managed to keep so long
out of the idiot asylum? Undertook to write a poem, and stuck fast at
the first verse. Had a call from a friend who had just been round the
world. Did n't ask him one word about what he had seen or heard, but
gave him full details of my private history, I having never been off
my own hearth-rug for more than an hour or two at a time, while he was
circumnavigating and circumrailroading the globe. Yes, if anybody can
claim the title, I am certainly the prize idiot.” I am afraid that we
all say such things as this to ourselves at times. Do we not use more
emphatic words than these in our self-depreciation? I cannot say how it
is with others, but my vocabulary of self-reproach and humiliation is
so rich in energetic expressions that I should be sorry to have an
interviewer present at an outburst of one of its raging geysers, its
savage soliloquies. A man is a kind of inverted thermometer, the bulb
uppermost, and the column of self-valuation is all the time going up and
down. Number Seven is very much like other people in this respect,--very
much like you and me.

This train of reflections must not carry me away from Number Seven.

“If I can't get a chance to boss this planet for a week or so,” he began
again, “I think I could write its history,--yes, the history of the
world, in less compass than any one who has tried it so far.”

“You know Sir Walter Raleigh's 'History of the World,' of course?” said
the Professor.

“More or less,--more or less,” said Number Seven prudently. “But I don't
care who has written it before me. I will agree to write the story of
two worlds, this and the next, in such a compact way that you can commit
them both to memory in less time than you can learn the answer to the
first question in the Catechism.”

What he had got into his head we could not guess, but there was no
little curiosity to discover the particular bee which was buzzing in his
bonnet. He evidently enjoyed our curiosity, and meant to keep us waiting
awhile before revealing the great secret.

“How many words do you think I shall want?”

It is a formula, I suppose, I said, and I will grant you a hundred
words.

“Twenty,” said the Professor. “That was more than the wise men of Greece
wanted for their grand utterances.”

The two Annexes whispered together, and the American Annex gave their
joint result. One thousand was the number they had fixed on. They were
used to hearing lectures, and could hardly conceive that any subject
could be treated without taking up a good part of an hour.

“Less than ten,” said Number Five. “If there are to be more than ten, I
don't believe that Number Seven would think the surprise would be up to
our expectations.”

“Guess as much as you like,” said Number Seven.

“The answer will keep. I don't mean to say what it is until we are ready
to leave the table.” He took a blank card from his pocket-book, wrote
something on it, or appeared, at any rate, to write, and handed it, face
down, to the Mistress. What was on the card will be found near the
end of this paper. I wonder if anybody will be curious enough to
look further along to find out what it was before she reads the next
paragraph?

In the mean time there is a train of thought suggested by Number Seven
and his whims. If you want to know how to account for yourself, study
the characters of your relations. All of our brains squint more or less.
There is not one in a hundred, certainly, that does not sometimes see
things distorted by double refraction, out of plumb or out of focus, or
with colors which do not belong to it, or in some way betraying that the
two halves of the brain are not acting in harmony with each other. You
wonder at the eccentricities of this or that connection of your own.
Watch yourself, and you will find impulses which, but for the restraints
you put upon them, would make you do the same foolish things which you
laugh at in that cousin of yours. I once lived in the same house with
the near relative of a very distinguished person, whose name is still
honored and revered among us. His brain was an active one, like that of
his famous relative, but it was full of random ideas, unconnected trains
of thought, whims, crotchets, erratic suggestions. Knowing him, I could
interpret the mental characteristics of the whole family connection
in the light of its exaggerated peculiarities as exhibited in my odd
fellow-boarder. Squinting brains are a great deal more common than we
should at first sight believe. Here is a great book, a solid octavo of
five hundred pages, full of the vagaries of this class of organizations.
I hope to refer to this work hereafter, but just now I will only
say that, after reading till one is tired the strange fancies of the
squarers of the circle, the inventors of perpetual motion, and the rest
of the moonstruck dreamers, most persons will confess to themselves that
they have had notions as wild, conceptions as extravagant, theories as
baseless, as the least rational of those which are here recorded.

Some day I want to talk about my library. It is such a curious
collection of old and new books, such a mosaic of learning and fancies
and follies, that a glance over it would interest the company. Perhaps
I may hereafter give you a talk abut books, but while I am saying a few
passing words upon the subject the greatest bibliographical event that
ever happened in the book-market of the New World is taking place under
our eyes. Here is Mr. Bernard Quaritch just come from his well-known
habitat, No. 15 Piccadilly, with such a collection of rare, beautiful,
and somewhat expensive volumes as the Western Continent never saw before
on the shelves of a bibliopole.

We bookworms are all of us now and then betrayed into an extravagance.
The keen tradesmen who tempt us are like the fishermen who dangle a
minnow, a frog, or a worm before the perch or pickerel who may be on
the lookout for his breakfast. But Mr. Quaritch comes among us like that
formidable angler of whom it is said,

   His hook he baited with a dragon's tail,
   And sat upon a rock and bobbed for whale.

The two catalogues which herald his coming are themselves interesting
literary documents. One can go out with a few shillings in his pocket,
and venture among the books of the first of these catalogues without
being ashamed to show himself with no larger furnishing of the means for
indulging his tastes,--he will find books enough at comparatively modest
prices. But if one feels very rich, so rich that it requires a good deal
to frighten him, let him take the other catalogue and see how many books
he proposes to add to his library at the prices affixed. Here is a Latin
Psalter with the Canticles, from the press of Fust and Schoeffer, the
second book issued from their press, the second book printed with a
date, that date being 1459. There are only eight copies of this work
known to exist; you can have one of them, if so disposed, and if you
have change enough in your pocket. Twenty-six thousand two hundred and
fifty dollars will make you the happy owner of this precious volume.
If this is more than you want to pay, you can have the Gold Gospels of
Henry VIII., on purple vellum, for about half the money. There are pages
on pages of titles of works any one of which would be a snug little
property if turned into money at its catalogue price.

Why will not our multimillionaires look over this catalogue of Mr.
Quaritch, and detain some of its treasures on this side of the Atlantic
for some of our public libraries? We decant the choicest wines of Europe
into our cellars; we ought to be always decanting the precious treasures
of her libraries and galleries into our own, as we have opportunity and
means. As to the means, there are so many rich people who hardly know
what to do with their money that it is well to suggest to them any
new useful end to which their superfluity may contribute. I am not in
alliance with Mr. Quaritch; in fact, I am afraid of him, for if I stayed
a single hour in his library, where I never was but once, and then for
fifteen minutes only, I should leave it so much poorer than I entered
it that I should be reminded of the picture in the titlepage of Fuller's
'Historie of the Holy Warre,' “We went out full. We returned empty.”

--After the teacups were all emptied, the card containing Number Seven's
abridged history of two worlds, this and the next, was handed round.

This was all it held:

After all had looked at it, it was passed back to me. “Let The Dictator
interpret it,” they all said.

This is what I announced as my interpretation:

Two worlds, the higher and the lower, separated by the thinnest of
partitions. The lower world is that of questions; the upper world
is that of answers. Endless doubt and unrest here below; wondering,
admiring, adoring certainty above.--Am I not right?

“You are right,” answered Number Seven solemnly. “That is my
revelation.”

The following poem was found in the sugar-bowl.

I read it to the company. There was much whispering and there were many
conjectures as to its authorship, but every Teacup looked innocent, and
we separated each with his or her private conviction. I had mine, but I
will not mention it.

        THE ROSE AND THE FERN.

   Lady, life's sweetest lesson wouldst thou learn,
   Come thou with me to Love's enchanted bower:
   High overhead the trellised roses burn;
   Beneath thy feet behold the feathery fern,
   A leaf without a flower.

   What though the rose leaves fall? They still are sweet,
   And have been lovely in their beauteous prime,
   While the bare frond seems ever to repeat,
   “For us no bud, no blossom, wakes to greet
   The joyous flowering time!”

   Heed thou the lesson. Life has leaves to tread
   And flowers to cherish; summer round thee glows;
   Wait not till autumn's fading robes are shed,
   But while its petals still are burning red
   Gather life's full-blown rose!




VI

Of course the reading of the poem at the end of the last paper has left
a deep impression. I strongly suspect that something very much like
love-making is going on at our table. A peep under the lid of the
sugar-bowl has shown me that there is another poem ready for the
company. That receptacle is looked upon with an almost tremulous
excitement by more than one of The Teacups. The two Annexes turn towards
the mystic urn as if the lots which were to determine their destiny were
shut up in it. Number Five, quieter, and not betraying more curiosity
than belongs to the sex at all ages, glances at the sugarbowl now
and then; looking so like a clairvoyant, that sometimes I cannot help
thinking she must be one. There is a sly look about that young Doctor's
eyes, which might imply that he knows something about what the silver
vessel holds, or is going to hold. The Tutor naturally falls under
suspicion, as he is known to have written and published poems. I
suppose the Professor and myself have hardly been suspected of writing
love-poems; but there is no telling,--there is no telling. Why may not
some one of the lady Teacups have played the part of a masculine lover?
George Sand, George Eliot, Charles Egbert Craddock, made pretty good
men in print. The authoress of “Jane Eyre” was taken for a man by many
persons. Can Number Five be masquerading in verse? Or is one of the
two Annexes the make believe lover? Or did these girls lay their heads
together, and send the poem we had at our last sitting to puzzle the
company? It is certain that the Mistress did not write the poem. It
is evident that Number Seven, who is so severe in his talk about
rhymesters, would not, if he could, make such a fool of himself as to
set up for a “poet.” Why should not the Counsellor fall in love and
write verses? A good many lawyers have been “poets.”

Perhaps the next poem, which may be looked for in its proper place, may
help us to form a judgment. We may have several verse-writers among us,
and if so there will be a good opportunity for the exercise of judgment
in distributing their productions among the legitimate claimants. In
the mean time, we must not let the love-making and the song-writing
interfere with the more serious matters which these papers are expected
to contain.

Number Seven's compendious and comprehensive symbolism proved
suggestive, as his whimsical notions often do. It always pleases me to
take some hint from anything he says when I can, and carry it out in a
direction not unlike that of his own remark. I reminded the company of
his enigmatical symbol.

You can divide mankind in the same way, I said. Two words, each of
two letters, will serve to distinguish two classes of human beings who
constitute the principal divisions of mankind. Can any of you tell what
those two words are?

“Give me five letters,” cried Number Seven, “and I can solve your
problem! F-o-o-l-s,--those five letters will give you the first and
largest half. For the other fraction”--

Oh, but, said I, I restrict you absolutely to two letters. If you are
going to take five, you may as well take twenty or a hundred.

After a few attempts, the company gave it up. The nearest approach to
the correct answer was Number Five's guess of Oh and Ah: Oh signifying
eternal striving after an ideal, which belongs to one kind of nature;
and Ah the satisfaction of the other kind of nature, which rests at ease
in what it has attained.

Good! I said to Number Five, but not the answer I am after. The great
division between human beings is into the Ifs and the Ases.

“Is the last word to be spelt with one or two s's?” asked the young
Doctor.

The company laughed feebly at this question. I answered it soberly. With
one s. There are more foolish people among the Ifs than there are among
the Ases.

The company looked puzzled, and asked for an explanation.

This is the meaning of those two words as I interpret them: If it
were,--if it might be,--if it could be,--if it had been. One portion
of mankind go through life always regretting, always whining, always
imagining. These are the people whose backbones remain cartilaginous all
their lives long, as do those of certain other vertebrate animals,--the
sturgeons, for instance. A good many poets must be classed with this
group of vertebrates.

As it is,--this is the way in which the other class of people look at
the conditions in which they find themselves. They may be optimists or
pessimists, they are very largely optimists,--but, taking things just as
they find them, they adjust the facts to their wishes if they can; and
if they cannot, then they adjust themselves to the facts. I venture to
say that if one should count the Ifs and the Ases in the conversation
of his acquaintances, he would find the more able and important persons
among them--statesmen, generals, men of business--among the Ases, and
the majority of the conspicuous failures among the Ifs. I don't know but
this would be as good a test as that of Gideon,--lapping the water or
taking it up in the hand. I have a poetical friend whose conversation
is starred as thick with ifs as a boiled ham is with cloves. But another
friend of mine, a business man, whom I trust in making my investments,
would not let me meddle with a certain stock which I fancied, because,
as he said, “there are too many ifs in it. As it looks now, I would n't
touch it.”

I noticed, the other evening, that some private conversation was going
on between the Counsellor and the two Annexes. There was a mischievous
look about the little group, and I thought they were hatching some plot
among them. I did not hear what the English Annex said, but the American
girl's voice was sharper, and I overheard what sounded to me like,
“It is time to stir up that young Doctor.” The Counsellor looked very
knowing, and said that he would find a chance before long. I was rather
amused to see how readily he entered into the project of the young
people. The fact is, the Counsellor is young for his time of life; for
he already betrays some signs of the change referred to in that once
familiar street song, which my friend, the great American surgeon,
inquired for at the music-shops under the title, as he got it from the
Italian minstrel,

     “Silva tredi mondi goo.”

I saw, soon after this, that the Counsellor was watching his chance to
“stir up the young Doctor.”

It does not follow, because our young Doctor's bald spot is slower in
coming than he could have wished, that he has not had time to form
many sound conclusions in the calling to which he has devoted himself
Vesalius, the father of modern descriptive anatomy, published his great
work on that subject before he was thirty. Bichat, the great anatomist
and physiologist, who died near the beginning of this century, published
his treatise, which made a revolution in anatomy and pathology, at about
the same age; dying soon after he had reached the age of thirty. So,
possibly the Counsellor may find that he has “stirred up” a young man
who, can take care of his own head, in case of aggressive movements in
its direction.

“Well, Doctor,” the Counsellor began, “how are stocks in the measles
market about these times? Any corner in bronchitis? Any syndicate in the
vaccination business?” All this playfully.

“I can't say how it is with other people's patients; most of my families
are doing very well without my help, at this time.”

“Do tell me, Doctor, how many families you own. I have heard it said
that some of our fellow-citizens have two distinct families, but you
speak as if you had a dozen.”

“I have, but not so large a number as I should like. I could take care
of fifteen or twenty more without: having to work too hard.”

“Why, Doctor, you are as bad as a Mormon. What do you mean by calling
certain families yours?”

“Don't you speak about my client? Don't your clients call you their
lawyer? Does n't your baker, does n't your butcher, speak of the
families he supplies as his families?”

“To be sure, yes, of course they do; but I had a notion that a man had as
many doctors as he had organs to be doctored.”

“Well, there is some truth in that; but did you think the old-fashioned
family doctor was extinct, a fossil like the megatherium?”

“Why, yes, after the recent experience of a friend of mine, I did begin
to think that there would soon be no such personage left as that same
old-fashioned family doctor. Shall I tell you what that experience was?”

The young Doctor said he should be mightily pleased to hear it. He was
going to be one of those old-fogy practitioners himself.

“I don't know,” the Counsellor said, “whether my friend got all the
professional terms of his story correctly, nor whether I have got them
from him without making any mistakes; but if I do make blunders in some
of the queer names, you can correct me. This is my friend's story:

“My family doctor,” he said, “was a very sensible man, educated at
a school where they professed to teach all the specialties, but not
confining himself to any one branch of medical practice. Surgical
practice he did not profess to meddle with, and there were some classes
of patients whom he was willing to leave to the female physician. But
throughout the range of diseases not requiring exceptionally skilled
manual interference, his education had authorized him to consider
himself, and he did consider himself, qualified to undertake the
treatment of all ordinary cases--It so happened that my young wife was
one of those uneasy persons who are never long contented with their
habitual comforts and blessings, but always trying to find something a
little better, something newer, at any rate. I was getting to be near
fifty years old, and it happened to me, as it not rarely does to people
at about that time of life, that my hair began to fall out. I spoke
of it to my doctor, who smiled, said it was a part of the process
of reversed evolution, but might be retarded a little, and gave me a
prescription. I did not find any great effect from it, and my wife
would have me go to a noted dermatologist. The distinguished specialist
examined my denuded scalp with great care. He looked at it through a
strong magnifier. He examined the bulb of a fallen hair in a powerful
microscope. He deliberated for a while, and then said, 'This is a case
of alopecia. It may perhaps be partially remedied. I will give you a
prescription.' Which he did, and told me to call again in a fortnight.
At the end of three months I had called six times, and each time got a
new recipe, and detected no difference in the course of my 'alopecia.'
After I had got through my treatment, I showed my recipes to my family
physician; and we found that three of them were the same he had used,
familiar, old-fashioned remedies, and the others were taken from a
list of new and little-tried prescriptions mentioned in one of the last
medical journals, which was lying on the old doctor's table. I might as
well have got no better under his charge, and should have got off much
cheaper.

“The next trouble I had was a little redness of the eyes, for which
my doctor gave me a wash; but my wife would have it that I must see an
oculist. So I made four visits to an oculist, and at the last visit the
redness was nearly gone,--as it ought to have been by that time. The
specialist called my complaint conjunctivitis, but that did not make it
feel any better nor get well any quicker. If I had had a cataract or any
grave disease of the eye, requiring a nice operation on that delicate
organ, of course I should have properly sought the aid of an expert,
whose eye, hand, and judgment were trained to that special business; but
in this case I don't doubt that my family doctor would have done just
as well as the expert. However, I had to obey orders, and my wife
would have it that I should entrust my precious person only to the most
skilful specialist in each department of medical practice.

“In the course of the year I experienced a variety of slight
indispositions. For these I was auriscoped by an aurist, laryngoscoped
by a laryngologist, ausculted by a stethoscopist, and so on, until a
complete inventory of my organs was made out, and I found that if I
believed all these searching inquirers professed to have detected in my
unfortunate person, I could repeat with too literal truth the words of
the General Confession, 'And there is no health in us.' I never heard
so many hard names in all my life. I proved to be the subject of a long
catalogue of diseases, and what maladies I was not manifestly guilty of
I was at least suspected of harboring. I was handed along all the way
from alopecia, which used to be called baldness, to zoster, which
used to be known as shingles. I was the patient of more than a dozen
specialists. Very pleasant persons, many of them, but what a fuss they
made about my trifling incommodities! 'Please look at that photograph.
See if there is a minute elevation under one eye.'

“'On which side?' I asked him, for I could not be sure there was
anything different on one side from what I saw on the other.

“'Under the left eye. I called it a pimple; the specialist called it
acne. Now look at this photograph. It was taken after my acne had been
three months under treatment. It shows a little more distinctly than in
the first photograph, doe

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