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The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865

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Title: The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865

Author: Various


        
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, VOLUME 15, NO. 88, FEBRUARY, 1865 ***

THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

_A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics._

VOL. XV.--FEBRUARY, 1865.--NO. LXXXVIII.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by TICKNOR AND
FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.




OUR FIRST GREAT PAINTER, AND HIS WORKS.


On the 8th of July, 1843, Washington Allston died. Twenty-one years have
since gone by; and already his name has a fine flavor of the past added
to its own proper aroma.

In twenty-one years Art has made large advances, but not in the
direction of imagination. In that rare and precious quality the works of
Allston remain preëminent as before.

It is now so long ago as 1827 that the first exhibition of pictures at
the Boston Athenæum took place; and then and there did Allston first
become known to his American public. Returned from Europe after a long
absence, he had for some years been living a retired, even a recluse
life, was personally known to a few friends, and by name only to the
public. The exhibition of some of his pictures on this occasion made
known his genius to his fellow-citizens; and who, having once felt the
strange charm of that genius, but recalls with joyful interest the happy
hour when he was first brought under its influence? I well remember,
even at this distance in time, the mystic, charmed presence that hung
about the "Jeremiah dictating his Prophecy to Baruch the Scribe,"
"Beatrice," "The Flight of Florimel," "The Triumphal Song of Miriam on
the Destruction of Pharaoh and his Host in the Red Sea," and "The
Valentine." I was then young, and had yet to learn that the quality that
so attracted me in these pictures is, indeed, the rarest virtue in any
work of Art,--that, although pictures without imagination are without
savor, yet that the larger number of those that are painted are
destitute of that grace,--and that, when, in later years, I should visit
the principal galleries of Europe, and see the masterpieces of each
master, I still should return to the memory of Allston's works as to
something most precious and unique in Art. I have also, since that time,
come to believe, that, while every sensitive beholder must feel the
charm of Allston's style, its intellectual ripeness can be fully
appreciated only by the aid of a foreign culture.

Passing through Europe with this impression of Allston's genius, in the
Venetians I first recognized his kindred; in Venice I found the school
in which he had studied, and in which Nature had fitted him to study:
for his eye for color was like his management of it,--Venetian. His
treatment of heads has a round, ripe, sweet fulness which reminds one
of the heads in the "Paradiso" of Tintoretto,--that work which deserves
a place in the foremost rank of the world's masterpieces. The great
praise implied in this comparison is justly due to Allston. The texture
and handling of his work are inimitable. Without any appearance of
labor, all crudeness is absorbed; the outlines of objects are not so
much softened as emptied of their color and substance, so that the light
appears to pass them. The finishing is so judicious that the spectator
believes he could see more on approaching nearer. The eye searches the
shade, and sees and defines the objects at first concealed by it. The
eye is not satiated, but by the most artful means excited to greater
appetite. The coloring is not so much harmonious as harmony itself, out
of which melodies of color play through the picture in a way that is
found in no other master but Paul Veronese. As Allston himself expressed
it, he liked to echo his colors; and as an echo is best heard where all
else is silence, so the pure repose of these compositions gives
extraordinary value to such delicate repetitions of color. The effect
is, one might say, more musical than pictorial. This peculiar and
musical effect is most noticeable in the landscapes. They are like odes,
anthems, and symphonies. They run up the scale, beginning with the
low-toned "Moonlight," through the great twilight piece called "After
Sunset," the "Forest Scene," where it seems always afternoon, the gray
"Mountain Landscape," a world composed of stern materials, the cool
"Sunrise on the Mediterranean," up to the broad, pure, Elysian daylight
of the "Italian Landscape," with atmosphere full of music, color, and
perfume, cooled and shaded by the breezy pines, open far away to the
sea, and the sky peopled with opalescent clouds, trooping wide on their
celestial errands.

Of this last landscape the poetic merit is as great as the artistic
excellence is unrivalled. Whoever has made pictures and handled colors
knows well that a subject pitched on a high key of light is vastly more
difficult to manage than one of which the highest light is not above the
middle tint. To keep on that high key which belongs to broad daylight,
and yet preserve harmony, repose, and atmosphere, is in the highest
degree difficult; but here it is successfully done, and again reminds us
of the Paul Veronese treatment. Though a quiet picture, it is full of
brilliancy. It represents a broad and partly shaded expanse, full, also,
of light and sweet sunshine, through which the eye travels till it rests
on the distant mountain, rising majestically in grand volcanic forms
from the horizon plains. The sky is filled with cloudy veils, floating,
prismatic; some quiet water, crossed by a bridge which rests on round
arches, is in the middle distance; and a few trees near the foreground
form the group from which rises the stone-pine, which is the principal
feature in the picture, and gives it its character. As I write this, I
fear that any reader who has not seen the picture to which I refer will
immediately think of Turner's Italian landscapes, so familiar to all the
world through engravings, where a stone-pine is lifted against the sky
as a mass of dark to contrast with the mass of light necessarily in the
same region of the picture. But such effects, however legitimate and
powerful in the hands of Turner, were not in Allston's manner; they
would ruin and break the still harmony which was the law of his mind and
of his compositions. Under this tree, on the path, fall flickering spots
of sunshine, in which sit or stand two or three figures. The scarlet and
white of their dresses, catching the sunshine, make the few high notes
that cause the whole piece to throb like music.

There is also a large Swiss landscape, possessing in an extraordinary
degree the pure, keen atmosphere, as well as the grand mountain forms,
of the Alpine spaces. To look on this piece exhilarates as does the
sight of the Alps themselves; and it strikes the eye as a shrill
trumpet sound the ear. This landscape, a grand antithesis to the last
described, marks a great range of power in the mind that produced them
both.

But Allston was not a landscape-painter. His landscapes are few in
number, though great in excellence. They are poetic in the truest sense;
they are laden with thought and life, and are of "imagination all
compact." They transport the beholder to a fairer world, where, through
and behind the lovely superficies of things, he sees the hidden ideal of
each member,--of rock, sea, sky, earth, and forest,--and feels by a
clear magnetism that he is in presence of the very truth of things.

We now come to a class of Allston's pictures which are known chiefly,
perhaps only, in Boston. They are justly prized by their owners as
possessions of inestimable value; they are the works that more than
others display his peculiar genius. I allude to certain ideal heads and
figures called by these names: "Beatrice," "Rosalie," "The Bride," "The
Spanish Girl," "The Evening Hymn," "The Tuscan Girl," "Miriam," "The
Valentine," "Lorenzo and Jessica," "The Flight of Florimel," "The Roman
Lady," and others; and I shall give a short description of the most
important of these, sometimes in my own words, and sometimes in those of
one who is the only writer I can find who has said anything distinctive
about the works of Allston. I refer to William Ware, who died in the act
of preparing a course of lectures on the Genius of Allston,--a task for
which he was well qualified by his artistic organization, his long study
of Art, and his clear appreciation of Allston's power.

In these smaller ideal pieces Allston seems to have found his own
genius, so peculiar are they, so different from the works of all other
masters, and so divine in their expressive repose. I say divine in their
repose with full intention; for this is a repose, not idle and
voluptuous, not poetic and dreamy, but a repose full of life, a repose
which commands and controls the beholder, and stirs within him that
idealism that lies deep hidden in every mind. These pieces consist of
heads and figures, mostly single, distinct as individuals, and each a
heaven of beauty in itself.

The method of this artist was to suppress all the coarser beauties which
make up the substance of common pictures. He was the least _ad
captandum_ of workers. He avoided bright eyes, curls, and contours,
glancing lights, strong contrasts, and colors too crude for harmony. He
reduced his beauty to her elements, so that an inner beauty might play
through her features. Like the Catholic discipline which pales the face
of the novice with vigils, seclusion, and fasting, and thus makes room
and clears the way for the movements of the spirit, so in these figures
every vulgar grace is suppressed. No classic contours, no languishing
attitudes, no asking for admiration,--but a severe and chaste restraint,
a modest sweetness, a slumbering intellectual atmosphere, a graceful
self-possession, eyes so sincere and pure that heaven's light shines
through them, and, beyond all, a hovering spiritual life that makes each
form a presence.

Perhaps the two most remarkable and original of the pieces I have named
above are the "Beatrice" and the "Rosalie." Of the "Beatrice" there has
been much discussion whether she could have been intended to represent
the Beatrice of Dante. To me it appears that there is nothing like that
world- and heaven-renowned lady in this our Beatrice. She sits alone:
one sees that in the expression of her eyes. Her dress is of almost
conventual simplicity; the colors rich, but sober; the style flowing and
mediæval. She has soft brown hair; soft, velvet-soft, brown eyes;
features not salient, but rounded into the contours of the head; her
whole expression receptive, yet radiant with sentiment. The complexion
of a tender rose, equally diffused, gives an indescribable air of
healthful delicacy to the face. The expression of the whole figure is
that of one in a very dream of sentiment. Her twilight eyes see without
effort into the very soul of things, as other eyes look at their
surfaces. The sentiment of this figure is so powerful that by its gentle
charm it fastens the beholder, who gazes and cannot withdraw his eyes,
wondering what is the spell that can so hold him to that face, which is
hardly beautiful, surely without surface beauty. I once heard a person
who was unaccustomed to the use of critical terms say of these creations
of Allston, "Here is beauty, but not the beauty that glares on you"; and
this phrase, so odd, but so original, well describes the beauty of this
Beatrice, who, though now transfigured by sentiment and capable of being
a home-goddess, does not seem intended to shine in starry circles.

But for the beauty of execution in this picture, it is unsurpassed. It
is in this respect like the most beautiful things ever painted by
Raphael,--like the Madonna del Cardellino, whose face has light within,
"_luce di dentro_," as is the expressive Italian phrase,--and is also
like another picture that I have seen, attributed to Raphael, in the
collection of the late Baron Kestner at Rome.

Visiting the extremely curious and valuable gallery of this gentleman,
the Hanoverian Minister at Rome, after making us begin at the beginning,
among the very early masters, he led us on with courteous determination
through his specimens of all the schools, and made us observe the
characteristics of each school and each master, till at last we rested
in the last room, where hung a single picture covered with a silken
curtain. This at last, with sacred and reverent ceremony, was drawn
aside, and revealed a portrait by Raphael,--the portrait of a lady,
young and beautiful, and glowing with a tender sentiment which recalled
to my remembrance these heads by Allston, not alone in the sentiment,
but in the masterly beauty of the painting. M. Kestner told us he
supposed the picture to be a portrait of that niece of Cardinal Bibbiena
to whom Raphael was betrothed. The picture had come into his possession
by one of those wonderful chances which have preserved so many valuable
works from destruction. At a sale of pictures at Bologna, he told us he
noticed a very ordinary head, badly enough painted, but with very
beautiful hands,--hands which betrayed the work of a master; and he
conjectured this to be some valuable picture, hastily covered with
coarse work to deceive the emissaries of a conqueror when they came to
select and carry off the most valuable pictures from the galleries of
the conquered city. He gave his agent orders to purchase it, and when in
his possession a little careful work removed the upper colors and
discovered one of the most beautiful heads ever painted even by Raphael.
Though it may and will seem extravagant, I am satisfied that there are
several heads by Allston that would lose nothing by comparison with this
admirable work. Indeed, though M. Kestner's picture is a portrait, it is
a work so entirely in the same class with the "Beatrice," the "Rosalie,"
the "Valentine," and some other works of Allston, in sentiment and
execution, that the comparison is fairly challenged.

"Rosalie" is different from "Beatrice." She seems listening to music;
and so the little poem written by the author, and recited by him when
showing the picture newly finished to his friends, describes her. The
face indicates, not a dream of sentiment, like that of "Beatrice," but
rather a rapture. She is "caught on a higher strain." She is a creature
as passionate as tender; more like Juliet than like Miranda; fit to be
the love of a poet, and to reward his song with the overflowing cup of
love. In this figure also beauty melts into feeling. The composition of
color is masterly; in the draperies it is inlaid in opposing fields, by
which means the key of the whole is raised, and the rising rapture of
expression powerfully seconded. Did I not fear to insist too much on
what may be only a private fancy, I should say that these colors
reverberate like some rich orchestral strain of music.

"The Roman Lady reading." This Roman lady might be the mother of the
Gracchi, so stately and of so grand a style is she. But she is a modern,
for she reads from a book. She might be Vittoria Colonna, the loved of
Michel Angelo, so grave, so dignified is her aspect. The whole figure is
reading. A vital intelligence seems to pass from the eyes to the book.
Nothing tender in this woman, who, if a Roman, takes life after the
"high Roman fashion." The beauty and perfect representation of the hands
should be noticed here, as well as in the "Rosalie" and "Beatrice."

"Triumphal Song of Miriam on the Destruction of Pharaoh and his Hosts in
the Red Sea." This is a three-quarter length figure. She stands singing,
with one hand holding the timbrel, the other thrown aloft, the whole
form up-borne by the swelling triumphal song. I hardly know what it is
in this picture which takes one back so far into the world's early days.
The figure is neither antique nor modern; the face is not entirely of
the Hebrew type, but the tossing exultation seems so truly to carry off
the wild thrill of joy when a people is released from bondage, that it
is almost unnecessary to put the words into her mouth,--"Sing ye to the
Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider hath He
thrown into the sea." This figure is dramatically imaginative. In
looking at it, one feels called on to sing triumphal songs with Miriam,
and not to stand idly looking. The magnetism of the artist at the moment
of conception powerfully seizes on the beholder.

"The Valentine" is described by William Ware[A] as follows.

"For the 'Valentine' I may say, though to some it may seem an
extravagance, I have never been able to invent the terms that would
sufficiently express my admiration of that picture,--I mean, of its
color; though as a whole it is admirable for its composition, for the
fewness of the objects admitted, for the simplicity and naturalness of
the arrangement. But the charm is in the color of the flesh, of the
head, of the two hands. The subject is a young woman reading a letter,
holding the open letter with both the hands. The art can go no further,
nor as I believe has it ever gone any further. Some pigments or
artifices were unfortunately used, which have caused the surface to
crack, and which require the picture now to be looked at at a further
remove than the work on its own account needs or requires; it even
demands a nearer approach, in order to be well seen, than these cracks
will permit. But these accidental blemishes do not materially interfere
with the appreciation and enjoyment of the picture. It has what I
conceive to be that most rare merit,--it has the same universal hue of
nature and truth in both the shadows and the lights which Nature has,
but _Art_ almost never, and which is the great cross to the artist. The
great defect and the great difficulty, in imitating the hues of flesh,
lies in the shadows and the half-shadows. You will often observe in
otherwise excellent works of the most admirable masters, that, the
moment their pencil passes to the shadows of the flesh, especially the
half-shadows, truth, though not always a certain beauty, forsakes them.
The shadows are true in their degree of dark, but false in tone and hue.
They are true shadows, but not true flesh. You see the form of a face,
neck, arm, hand in shadow, but not flesh in shade; and were that portion
of the form sundered from its connection with the body, it could never
be told, by its color alone, what it was designed to be. Allston's
wonderful merit is, (and it was Titian's,) that the hue of life and
flesh is the same in the shadow as in the light. It is not only shadow
or dark, but it is flesh in shadow. The shadows of most artists, even
very distinguished ones, are green, or brown, or black, or lead color,
and have some strong and decided tint other than that of flesh. The
difficulty with most seems to have been so insuperable, that they cut
the knot at a single blow, and surrendered the shadows of the flesh, as
an impossibility, to green or brown or black. And in the general
imitation of the flesh tints the greatest artists have apparently
abandoned the task in despair, and contented themselves with a correct
utterance of form and expression, with well-harmonized darks and lights,
with little attention to the hues of Nature. Such was Caravaggio always,
and Guercino often, and all their respective followers. Such was Michel
Angelo, and often Raffaelle,--though at other times the color of
Raffaelle is not inferior in truth and glory to Titian, greatest of the
Venetian colorists: as in his portraits of Leo X., Julius, and some
parts of his frescos. But for the most part, though he had the genius
for everything, for color as well as form, yet one may conjecture he
found color in its greatest excellence too laborious for the careful
elaboration which can alone produce great results, too costly of time
and toil, the sacrifice too great of the greater to the less. Allston
was apparently never weary of the labor which would add one more tint of
truth to the color of a head or a hand, or even of any object of still
life, that entered into any of his compositions. Any eye that looks can
see that it was a most laborious and difficult process by which he
secured his results,--by no superficial wash of glaring pigments, as in
the color of Rubens, whose carnations look as if he had finished the
forms at once, the lights and the darks in solid opaque colors, and then
with a free, broad brush or sponge washed in the carmine, lake, and
vermilion, to confer the requisite amount of red,--but, on the contrary,
wrought out in solid color from beginning to end, by a painful and
sagacious formation, on the palette, of the very tint by which the
effect, the lights, shadows, and half-shadows, and the thousand almost
imperceptible gradations of hue which bind together the principal masses
of light and shade, was to be produced."

Here Mr. Ware undoubtedly errs in attributing the success of Allston's
flesh tints to the use of solid color alone. Such effects are not
possible without the aid of transparent colors in glazing; but it is the
judicious combination of solid with transparent pigments, combined not
bodily on the palette, but in their use on the canvas, that gives to
oil-painting all its unrivalled power in the hands of a master. Allston
was accustomed to inlay his pictures in solid crude color with a medium
that hardened like stone, and to leave them months and even years to dry
before finishing them with the glazing colors, which worked in his hands
like magic over such a well-hardened surface. By this method of working
he was able to secure solidity of appearance, richness of color, unity
of effect, and atmospheric repose and tenderness enveloping all objects
in the picture. Many of his unfinished works are left in the first stage
of this process, showing precisely how far he relied on the use of solid
color; and by comparing the works left in this state with his finished
pictures, one may see how much he was indebted to the use of transparent
glazes for the beauty, tenderness, and variety of color in the last
stages of his work.

In 1839 there was an exhibition in Boston of such of the works of
Allston as could be borrowed for the occasion. This was managed by the
friends of the artist for his benefit. The exhibition was held in
Harding's Gallery, a square, well-lighted room, but too small for the
larger pictures. It was, however, the best room that could be procured
for the purpose. Here were shown forty-five pictures, including one or
two drawings. There was something peculiarly happy in this exhibition of
works by a single mind. On entering, the presence of the artist seemed
to fill the room. The door-keeper held the door, but Allston held the
room; for his spirit flowed from all the walls, and helped the spectator
to see his work aright. This accompaniment of the artist's presence,
which hangs about all truly artistic works, is disturbed in a
miscellaneous collection, where jarring influences contend, and the
worst pictures outshine and outglare the best, and for a time triumph
over them. But in this exhibition no such disturbance met one, but
rather one was received into an atmosphere of peace and harmony, and in
such a temper beheld the pictures.

The largest picture on the walls was "The Dead Man restored to Life by
touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha." This is a great subject,
greatly treated, full of power and expression.

The next in size was "Jeremiah dictating his Prophecy to Baruch, the
Scribe." This picture contains two figures, both seated. It is a picture
the scale of which demands that it be seen from a distance, though its
perfect execution makes a nearer view desirable also. If it were seen at
the end of some church aisle, through arches, and with a good light upon
it, the effect would be much enforced. It is a picture of extraordinary
expression. The Prophet, the grandest figure among the sons of men, with
those strange eyes that Allston loved to paint,--eyes which see
verities, not objects,--is looking not upward, but forward, not into
space, but into spirit; with one hand raised, as if listening, he
receives the heavenly communication, which the beautiful youth at his
feet is writing in a book. The force and beauty of this work are
unsurpassed. It is a perfect picture: grand in design, perfect in
composition, splendid in color, successful in execution, and the figures
full of expression,--for the inspiration of the Prophet seems to
overflow into the Scribe, whose attitude indicates enthusiastic
receptiveness; it is, indeed, in every pictorial quality that can be
named, admirable.

The other pictures in this collection, with the exception of the large
Swiss landscape, were of cabinet size. Some of them have been already
described in this paper. I will give Mr. Ware's description of "Lorenzo
and Jessica," and of "The Spanish Girl." Mr. Ware says:--

"But perhaps the most exquisite examples of repose are the 'Lorenzo and
Jessica,' and 'The Spanish Girl.' These are works also to which no
perfection could be added,--from which, without loss, neither touch nor
tint could be subtracted. We might search through all galleries, the
Louvre or any other, for their equals or rivals in either conception or
execution. I speak of these familiarly, because I suppose you all to be
familiar with them. The first named, the 'Lorenzo and Jessica,' is a
very small picture, one of the smallest of Allston's best ones; but no
increase of size could have enlarged its beauty or in any sense have
added to its value. The lovers sit side by side, their hands clasped, at
the dim hour of twilight, all the world hushed into silence, not a cloud
visible to speck the clear expanse of the darkening sky, as if
themselves were the only creatures breathing in life, and they absorbed
into each other, while their eyes, turned in the same direction, are
turned upon the fading light of the gentle, but brilliant planet, as it
sinks below the horizon: the gentle brilliancy, not the setting, the
emblem of their mutual loves. As you dwell upon the scene, your only
thought is, May this quiet beauty, this delicious calm, never be
disturbed, but may

    'The peace of the scene pass into the heart!'

In the background, breaking the line of the horizon, but in fine unison
with the figures and the character of the atmosphere, are the faint
outlines of a villa of Italian architecture, but to whose luxurious
halls you can hardly wish the lovers should ever return, so long as they
can remain sitting upon that bank. It is all painted in that deep,
subdued, but rich tone, in which, except by the strongest light, the
forms are scarcely to be made out, but to which, to the mind in some
moods, a charm is lent, surpassing all the glory of the sun.

"'The Spanish Girl' is another example to the same point. It is one of
the most beautiful and perfect of all of Mr. Allston's works. The
Spanish girl gives her name to the picture, but it is one of those
misnomers of which there are many among his works. One who looks at the
picture scarcely ever looks at, certainly cares nothing for, the
Spanish girl, and regards her as merely giving her name to the picture;
and when the mind recurs to it afterwards, however many years may have
elapsed, while he can recall nothing of the beauty, the grace, or the
charms of the Spanish maiden, the landscape, of which her presence is a
mere inferior incident, is never forgotten, but remains forever as a
part of the furniture of the mind. In this part of the picture, the
landscape, it must be considered as one of the most felicitous works of
genius, where, by a few significant tints and touches, there is unveiled
a world of beauty. You see the roots of a single hill only, and a remote
mountain-summit, but you think of Alps and Andes, and the eye presses
onwards till it at last rests on a low cloud at the horizon. It is a
mere snatch of Nature, but, though only that, every square inch of the
surface has its meaning. It carries you back to what your mind imagines
of the warm, reddish tints of the Brown Mountains of Cervantes, where
the shepherds and shepherdesses of that pastoral scene passed their
happy, sunny hours. The same deep feeling of repose is shown in all the
half-developed objects of the hill-side, in the dull, sleepy tint of the
summer air, and in the warm, motionless haze that wraps sky, land, tree,
water, and cloud. It is quite wonderful by how few tints and touches, by
what almost shadowy and indistinct forms, a whole world of poetry can be
breathed into the soul, and the mind sent rambling off into pastures,
fields, boundless deserts of imaginary pleasures, where only is warmth
and sunshine and rest, where only poets dwell, and beauty wanders abroad
with her sweeping train, and the realities of the working-day world are
for a few moments happily forgotten."

"The Flight of Florimel" is an upright landscape. Florimel, on a white
horse, is rushing with long leaps through the forest. The horse and
rider are so near the front of the picture as to occupy an important
space in the foreground. The lady, in her dress of beaten gold, with
fair hair, and pale, frightened face, clings with both hands to her
bridle, and half looks back towards her pursuer. The color of this
picture is of exquisite beauty. The tender white and pale yellows of the
horse and rider show like fairy colors in a fairy forest. The whole is
wonderfully light and airy, flickering between light and shade. The
forest has no heavy glooms. The light breaks through everywhere. The
forms of the trees are light and piny; the red soil is seen, the roots
of the trees, the broken turf, the sandy ground. All the colors are
delightfully broken up in the mysterious half-light which confuses the
outlines of every object, without making them shadowy. Such a picture
one might see with half-shut eyes in a sunny wood, if one had more
poetry than prose in one's head, and were well read in the "Faërie
Queen."

"A Mother Watching her Sleeping Child." This is a very small picture,
remarkable only for its tender sentiment and delightful coloring. The
child is nude; the flesh tints of a tender rose, painted with that
luminous effect which leaves no memory of paint or pencil-touch behind
it.

"American Scenery." This is a small landscape, with something of the
Indian Summer haze; and a solitary horseman trotting across the
foreground with an indifferent manner, as if he would soon be out of
sight, wonderfully enhances the quietness of the scene.

"Isaac of York." This head of a Jew is powerfully painted, warm and
rich; as also are two heads called "Sketches of Polish Jews," which were
painted at one sitting.

"A Portrait of Benjamin West, late President of the Royal Academy," has
all the most admirable qualities that a simple portrait can have.

"A Portrait of the Artist, painted in Rome," is very interesting, from
the youthful sweetness of the face.

"Head of St. Peter" is a study for the head of St. Peter in a large
picture of the Angel delivering Peter from Prison. In this large
picture, lately brought from England to Boston, the head of the angel
is of surpassing beauty, and makes a powerful contrast with that of the
Apostle, whose strong Hebrew features are flooded with the light which
surrounds his heavenly deliverer.

"The Sisters." This picture represents two young girls of three-quarter
size, the back of one turned toward the spectator. In the Catalogue is a
note by the artist, who says,--"The air and color of the head with
golden hair was imitated from a picture by Titian, called the Portrait
of his Daughter,--but not the character or the disposition of the hair,
which in the portrait is a crop; the action of the portrait is also
different, holding up a casket with both hands. The rest of the picture,
with the exception of the curtain in the background, is original." Now
this is a very modest as well as honest statement of the artist; for
both the figures seem perfectly original, and do not recall Titian's
Daughter to the memory, except as an example of a successful study of
Titian's color, which I believe all are permitted, nay, recommended, to
imitate, if they can. It is, however, quite true, that this picture is
less Allstonian than the rest, which makes his explanation welcome. It
was undoubtedly painted as a study, and was not an original suggestion
of his own mind, as almost everything he has left evidently was,--if
internal evidence is evidence enough. Allston himself said, that he
never painted anything that did not cost him his whole mind; and those
who read his genius in his works can easily believe this statement.

"The Tuscan Girl." This is a very lovely little picture. It is not a
study of costume, but a picture of dreamy girlhood musing in a wood. The
sentiment of this charming little picture is best described in a little
poem with which its first appearance was accompanied, and which opens
thus:--

    "How pleasant and how sad the turning tide
      Of human life, when side by side
      The child and youth begin to glide
        Along the vale of years:
    The pure twin-being for a little space,
    With lightsome heart, and yet a graver face,
      Too young for woe, but not for tears!"

I will not occupy any more space with describing the pictures in this
unique collection. All were not brought together that might have been.
One very remarkable small picture, called "Spalatro, or the Bloody
Hand," was not with these. Its distance from Boston probably prevented
its being risked on the dangers of a long journey.

There are several pictures by Allston in England. Of these I cannot
speak, as I have not seen them. Of one, however, "Elijah in the Desert,"
Mr. Ware gives so striking a description, that I will quote nearly the
whole of it.

"I turn with more pleasure to another work of Mr. Allston, even though
but few can ever have seen it, but which made upon my own mind, when I
saw it immediately after it was completed, an impression of grandeur and
beauty never to be effaced, and never recalled without new sentiments of
enthusiastic admiration. I refer to his grand landscape of 'Elijah in
the Desert,'--a large picture of perhaps six feet by four. It might have
been more appropriately named an Asian or Arabian Desert. That is to
say, it is a very unfortunate error to give to either a picture or a
book a name which raises false expectations; especially is this the case
when the name of the picture is a great or imposing one which greatly
excites the imagination. What could be more so than this, 'Elijah in the
Desert, fed by Ravens'? Extreme and fatal was the disappointment to
many, on entering the room, when, looking on the picture, no Elijah was
to be seen; at least you had to search for him among the subordinate
objects, hidden away among the grotesque roots of an enormous
banyan-tree; and the Prophet, when found at last, was hardly worth the
pains of the search. But as soon as the intelligent visitor had
recovered from his first disappointment, the objects which then
immediately filled the eye taught him, that, though he had not found
what he had been promised, a Prophet, he had found more than a Prophet,
a landscape which in its sublimity excited the imagination as
powerfully as any gigantic form of the Elijah could have done, even
though Michel Angelo had drawn it. It is meant to represent, and does
perfectly represent, an illimitable desert, a boundless surface of
barrenness and desolation, where Nature can bring forth nothing but
seeds of death, and the only tree there is dead and withered, not a leaf
to be seen nor possible. The only other objects, beside the level of the
desert, either smooth with sand or rough with ragged rock, are a range
of dark mountains on the right, heavy lowering clouds which overspread
and overshadow the whole scene, the roots and wide-spread branches of an
enormous banyan-tree, through the tortuous and leafless branches of
which the distant landscape, the hills, rocks, clouds, and remote plains
are seen. The roots of this huge tree of the desert, in all directions
from the main trunk, rise upward, descend, and root themselves again in
the earth, then again rise, again descend into the ground and root
themselves, and so on, growing smaller and smaller as the process is
repeated, till they disappear in the general level of the plain, or lose
themselves among the rocks, like the knots and convolutions of a huge
family of boa-constrictors. The branches, which almost completely fill
the upper part of the picture, are done with such truth to general
Nature, are so admirable in color, so wonderful in the treatment of
their perspective, that the eye is soon happily withdrawn from any
attention to the roots, among which the Prophet sits, receiving the food
with which the ravens, as they float towards him, miraculously supply
him.... You forgot the Prophet, the ravens, the roots, and almost the
branches, though these were too vast and multitudinous to be overlooked,
and were, moreover, truly characteristic, and dwelt only upon the heavy
rolling clouds, the lifeless desert, the sublime masses of the distant
mountains, and the indeterminate misty outline of the horizon, where
earth and heaven became one. The picture was, therefore, a landscape of
a most sublime, impressive character, and not a mere representation of a
passage of Scripture history. It would have been a great gain to the
work, if the Scripture passage could have been painted out, and the
desert only left. But, as it is, it serves as one further illustration
of the characteristic of Mr. Allston's art, of which I have already
given several examples. For, melancholy, dark, and terrific almost, as
are all the features of the scene, a strange calm broods over it all, as
of an ocean, now overhung by black threatening clouds, dead and
motionless, but the sure precursors of change and storm; and over the
desert hang the clouds which were soon to break and deluge the parched
earth and cover it again with verdure. But at present the only motion
and life is in the little brook Cherith, as it winds along among the
roots of the great tree. The sublime, after all, is better expressed in
the calmness, repose, and silence of the 'Elijah,' than in the tempests
of Poussin or Vernet, Wilson or Salvator Rosa."

"Belshazzar's Feast." Any criticism of Allston's works would be very
imperfect which did not speak of his "Belshazzar's Feast,"--because,
though the picture was never finished, it occupied so large a part of
the life and thoughts of Allston, that it demands some mention. It had
been an object of great interest among Allston's friends before it had
been seen by one of them. It was intended by him to fulfil a commission
from certain gentlemen of Boston for a large picture, the subject of
which was to be chosen by himself. A sum of money was also placed at his
disposal with the commission, in order to secure to him leisure and
freedom from care, that he might work at his ease, and do justice to his
thought. This commission was the result of the confidence in him and his
genius which was felt by those friends who knew him best.

The picture was begun, went forward, and was nearly completed, when an
important change in the structure of the work was determined on, and
undertaken with great courage. As often unfortunately happens in such
cases, the interruption to the flow of thought was fatal to the success
of the picture. It was laid aside for many years, but was the work
actually in hand at the time of Allston's death. When, after that event,
his studio was entered by his nearest friends, and the picture so long
guarded with jealous reserve was first seen, it was found to be in a
disorganized, almost chaotic state. But though fragmentary, the
fragments were full of interest. Many passages were perfectly painted,
and the whole intention was full of grandeur and beauty. But a picture
left in that state should never have been publicly shown. Deeply
interesting to artists, and to those familiar with the genius of
Allston, it could be only a puzzling wonder to those who go to an
exhibition to see finished pictures, and who do not understand those
which are not finished. With this work such persons could have no
concern. Yet, by what appears a great error of judgement, this worse
than unfinished picture was made the subject of a public exhibition,
though in a state of incompleteness which the artist during life would
not permit his nearest friend to behold. And as if this violation of his
wishes were not enough, a stolen and travestied copy soon appeared, and
was heralded by placards, on which the words "Great Picture by
Washington Allston" were seen in letters large enough to be read across
the street, and on which the words "Copy of" were in such very small
type that they were unnoticed, except by those who looked for them. This
copy went to other cities, and gave of course a most erroneous
impression of the great painter's genius.

Among the half-finished pictures found in the studio of Allston after
his death were several designs on canvas in chalk or umber. These seemed
so valuable, and their condition so perishable, that it was thought best
to have them engraved. This was undertaken by a friend and admirer of
the artist, Mr. S. H. Perkins, who arranged the designs and
superintended the engraving, and published the work with the aid of a
partial subscription and at his own risk. The brothers Cheney engraved
the outlines, and with peculiar skill and feeling imitated the broadly
expressive chalk lines by combining several delicately traced lines into
one. These outlines and sketches were published in 1850.

There are, first six plates of outlines from heads and figures in a
picture of "Michael setting the Watch." This picture must have been
painted in England, and in unknown here except by these outlines. From
these alone great strength of design might be inferred. There are,
besides, "A Sibyl," sitting in a cave-like, rocky place, the eyes
dilated with thought, the mouth tenderly fixed; the cave is open to the
sea. This design would have proved one of the most characteristic works
of Allston, had it been painted. "Dido and Æneas." Then four plates from
figures of angels in "Jacob's Dream." This is a picture painted in
England for Lord Egremont, and is mentioned in Leslie's Recollections,
by the editor of that work, in a minor key of praise. Then comes the
outline of a single figure, "Uriel sitting in the Sun." This picture was
also painted in England. As Allston was fond of referring to it, and
describing the methods he used to represent the light of the sun behind
the angel, as if he felt satisfied with the result, it may be inferred
that the effort to do so difficult a thing was successful. The sun was
painted over a white ground with transparent glazings of the primary
colors laid and dried separately, thus combining the colors
prismatically to produce white light. The figure of the sitting angle is
grandly original,--of the most noble proportions, and full of watchful
life, as of one conscious of a great trust.

Then come three compositions, with many figures,--"Heliodorus," "Fairies
on the Seashore," and "Titania's Court." These show as much power in
composition as the single figures do in design.

The "Fairies on the Seashore" is an exquisitely graceful design, both in
the figures and the landscape. It is a perfect poem, even as it stands
in the outline. A strip of sea, a breaking wave, a rocky island, and on
the beach begins a stream of fairies, diminishing as it curves up into
the sky. The last one on the shore seems lingering, and the next one to
her draws her upwards. The design when painted would have had the lower
part of the picture in the shadow of night, and the coming morn in the
sky, the light of which should be caught on the distant figures up among
the clouds.

"Titania's Court" is in a moon-lighted space in the forest. Six fairies
are dancing in a ring. More are coming out of the depths of the wood and
off its rocky heights, hand in hand,--a flow of graceful figures. On the
right side of the picture sits Titania, served by her Indian page, who
kneels before her, holding an acorn-cup. This page is delicately
differenced from the fairies by his straight hair, his features,
Asiatic, though handsome, his girdle and bracelets of pearls, and a
short striped skirt about his loins. The fairies all have flowing
drapery or none, and features regular as Greeks. Two little figures in
the air above Titania's head are fanning her with butterflies' wings;
others are bringing water in shells and flower-cups; others playing on
musical instruments. This is better than most pictures of this
often-painted subject, because in it fancy does not override
imagination, but helps and serves it.

Another design was in chalk, on a dark canvas, of a ship at sea in a
squall. This is wonderfully imitated in the engraving,--even all the
blotches and erasures are there. The curves of the waves in a rolling
sea were never better caught in all their subtle force. The clouds have
great suggestions.

There is a figure of "The Prodigal Son," from a pencil drawing; and a
"Prometheus," also from a pencil sketch.

Allston seemed equally at home in drawing powerful figures in action, or
delicate dreamy figures in repose. He had the true imaginative power
which realizes and understands all natural forms.

We have thus given a few words of description to some of these
remarkable pictures. We do not hope to convey any idea of them to those
who have not seen them, for a picture is by its very nature incapable of
being described in words. That which makes it a picture takes it out of
the sphere of words. Neither do we attempt to analyze the genius of this
great painter. We can enumerate some of his artistic qualities: his
power in color, so creative; the still, reposeful spirit of his
creations, reminding one of Beato Angelico; his grandly expressive
forms; his powerful color compositions; and above all, that greatest
crowning merit, that his works are, almost without exception, vitalized
by an imaginative force which makes them living presences. Such effects
are not produced by talent, however great, by culture, however perfect,
but by a mind which is a law to itself,--in other words, a genius. Such,
and nothing less, was Washington Allston.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] _Lectures on the Works and Genius of Washington Allston._ Boston:
Phillips, Sampson, & Co. 1852.




DOCTOR JOHNS


I.

In the summer of 1812, when the good people of Connecticut were feeling
uncommonly bitter about the declaration of war against England, and were
abusing Mr. Madison in the roundest terms, there lived in the town of
Canterbury a fiery old gentleman, of nearly sixty years, and a sterling
Democrat, who took up the cudgels bravely for the Administration, and
stoutly belabored Governor Roger Griswold for his tardy obedience to the
President in calling out the militia, and for what he called his absurd
pretensions in regard to State sovereignty. He was a man, too, who meant
all that he said, and gave the best proof of it by offering his military
services,--first to the Governor, and then to the United States General
commanding the Department.

Nor was he wholly unfitted: he was erect, stanch, well knit together,
and had served with immense credit in the local militia, in which he
wore the title of Major. It does not appear that his offer was
immediately accepted; but the following season he was invested with the
command of a company, and was ordered back and forth to various
threatened points along the seaboard. His home affairs, meantime, were
left in charge of his son, a quiet young man of four-and-twenty, who for
three years had been stumbling with a very reluctant spirit through the
law-books in the Major's office, and who shared neither his father's
ardor of temperament nor his political opinions. Eliza, a daughter of
twenty summers, acted as mistress of the house, and stood in place of
mother to a black-eyed little girl of thirteen,--the Major's daughter by
a second wife, who had died only a few years before.

Notwithstanding the lack of political sympathy, there was yet a strong
attachment between father and son. The latter admired immensely the
energy and full-souled ardor of the old gentleman; and the father, in
turn, was proud of the calm, meditative habit of mind which the son had
inherited from his mother. "There is metal in the boy to make a judge
of," the major used to say. And when Benjamin, shortly after his
graduation at one of the lesser New England colleges, had given hint of
his possible study of theology, the Major answered with a "Pooh! pooh!"
which disturbed the son,--possibly weighed with him,--more than the
longest opposing argument could have done. The manner of the father had
conveyed, unwittingly enough, a notion of absurdity as attaching to the
lad's engaging in such sacred studies, which overwhelmed him with a
sense of his own unworthiness.

The Major, like all sound Democrats, had always been an ardent admirer
of Mr. Jefferson and of the French political school. Benjamin had a
wholesome horror of both,--not so much from any intimate knowledge of
their theories, as by reason of a strong religious instinct, which had
been developed under his mother's counsels into a rigid and exacting
Puritanism.

The first wife of the Major had left behind her the reputation of "a
saint." It was not undeserved: her quiet, constant charities,--her
kindliness of look and manner, which were in themselves the best of
charities,--a gentle, Christian way she had of dealing with all the
vagrant humors of her husband,--and the constancy of her devotion to all
duties, whether religious or domestic, gave her better claim to the
saintly title than most who wear it. The Major knew this, and was proud
to say it. "If," he was accustomed to say, "I am the most godless man in
the parish, my wife is the most godly woman." Yet his godlessness was,
after all, rather outside than real: it was a kind of effrontery,
provoked into noisy display by the extravagant bigotries of those about
him. He did not believe in monopolies of opinion, but in good average
dispersion of all sorts of thinking. On one occasion he had horrified
his poor wife by bringing home a full set of Voltaire's Works; but
having reasoned her--or fancying he had--into a belief in the entire
harmlessness of the offending books, he gratified her immensely by
placing them out of all sight and reach of the boy Benjamin.

He never interfered with the severe home course of religious instruction
entered upon by the mother. On the contrary, he said, "The boy will need
it all as an offset to the bedevilments that will overtake him in our
profession." The Major had a very considerable country practice, and had
been twice a member of the Legislature.

His second wife, a frivolous, indolent person, who had brought him a
handsome dot, and left him the pretty black-eyed Mabel, never held equal
position with the first. It was observed, however, with some surprise,
that under the sway of the latter he was more punctilious and regular in
religious observances than before,--a fact which the shrewd ones
explained by his old doctrine of adjusting averages.

Benjamin, Eliza, and Mabel,--each in their way,--waited news from the
military campaign of the Major with great anxiety; all the more because
he was understood to be a severe disciplinarian, and it had been rumored
in the parish that two or three of his company, of rank Federal
opinions, had vowed they would sooner shoot the captain than any foreign
enemy of the State. The Major, however, heard no guns in either front or
rear up to the time of the British attack upon the borough of
Stonington, in midsummer of 1814. In the defence here he was very
active, in connection with a certain artillery force that had come down
the river from Norwich; and although the attack of the British Admiral
was a mere feint, yet for a while there was a very lively sprinkling of
shot. The people of the little borough were duly frightened, the
"Ramilies" seventy-four gun-ship of his Majesty enjoyed an excellent
opportunity for long-range practice, and the militia gave an honest
airing to their patriotism. The Major was wholly himself. "If the
rascals would only attempt a landing!" said he; and as he spoke, a
fragment of shell struck his sword-arm at the elbow. The wound was a
grievous one, and the surgeon in attendance declared amputation to be
necessary. The Major combated the decision for a while, but loss of
blood weakened his firmness, and the operation was gone through with
very bunglingly. Next morning a country wagon was procured to transport
him home. The drive was an exceeding rough one, and the stump fell to
bleeding. Most men would have lain by for a day or two, but the Major
insisted upon pushing on for Canterbury, where he arrived late at night,
very much exhausted.

The country physician declared, on examination next morning, that some
readjustment of the amputated limb was necessary, which was submitted to
by the Major in a very irritable humor. Friends and enemies of the
wounded man were all kind and full of sympathy. Miss Eliza was in a
flutter of dreary apprehension that rendered her incapable of doing
anything effectively. Benjamin was as tender and as devoted as a woman.
The wound healed in due time, but the Major did not rally. The drain
upon his vitality had been too great; he fell into a general decline,
which within a fortnight gave promise of fatal results. The Major met
the truth like a veteran; he arranged his affairs, by the aid of his
son, with a great show of method,--closed all in due time; and when he
felt his breath growing short, called Benjamin, and like a good officer
gave his last orders.

"Mabel," said he, "is provided for; it is but just that her mother's
property should be settled on her; I have done so. For yourself and
Eliza, you will have need of a close economy. I don't think you'll do
much at law; you once thought of preaching; if you think so now, preach,
Benjamin; there's something in it; at least it's better than
Fed--Federalism."

A fit of coughing seized him here, from which he never fairly rallied.
Benjamin took his hand when he grew quiet, and prayed silently, while
the Major slipped off the roll militant forever.


II.

The funeral was appointed for the second day thereafter. The house was
set in order for the occasion. Chairs were brought in from the
neighbors. A little table, with a Bible upon it, was placed in the
entrance-way at the foot of the stairs, that all might hear what the
clergyman should say. The body lay in the parlor, with the Major's sword
and cocked hat upon the coffin; and the old gentleman's face had never
worn an air of so much dignity as it wore now. Death had refined away
all trace of his irritable humors, of his passionate, hasty speech. It
looked like the face of a good man,--so said nine out of ten who gazed
on it that day; yet when the immediate family came up to take their last
glimpse,--the two girls being in tears,--in that dreary half-hour after
all was arranged, and the flocking-in of the neighbors was waited for,
Benjamin, as calm as the dead face below him, was asking himself if the
poor gentleman, his father, had not gone away to a place of torment. He
feared it; nay, was he not bound to believe it by the whole force of his
education? and his heart, in that hour, made only a feeble revolt
against the belief. In the very presence of the grim messenger of the
Eternal, who had come to seal the books and close the account, what
right had human affection to make outcry? Death had wrought the work
given him to do, like a good servant; had not he, too,--Benjamin,--a
duty to fulfil? the purposes of Eternal Justice to recognize, to
sanction, to approve? In the exaltation of his religious sentiment it
seemed to him, for one crazy moment at least, that he would be justified
in taking his place at the little table where prayer was to be said, and
in setting forth, as one who knew so intimately the shortcomings of the
deceased, all those weaknesses of the flesh and spirit by which the
Devil had triumphed, and in warning all those who came to his burial of
the judgments of God which would surely fall on them as on him, except
they repented and believed. Was he not, indeed, commissioned, as it
were, by the lips of the dead man to "cry aloud and spare not"?

Happily, however, the officiating clergyman was of a more even temper,
and he said what little he had to say in way of "improvement of the
occasion" to the text of "judge not, that ye be not judged."

"We are too apt," said he, (and he was now addressing a company that
crowded the parlors and flowed over into the yard in front, where the
men stood with heads uncovered,) "we are too apt to measure a man's
position in the eye of God, and to assign him his rank in the future, by
his conformity to the external observances of religion,--not
remembering, in our complacency, that we see differently from those who
look on from beyond the world, and that there are mysterious and secret
relations of God with the conscience of every man, which we cannot
measure or adjust. Let us hope that our deceased friend profited by such
to insure his entrance into the Eternal City, whose streets are of gold,
and the Lamb the light thereof."

The listeners said "Amen" to this in their hearts; but the son, still
exalted by the fervor of that new purpose which he had formed by the
father's death-bed, and riveted more surely as he looked last on his
face, asked himself, if the old preacher had not allowed a kindly
worldly prudence to blunt the sharpness of the Word. "Why not tell these
friendly mourners," thought he, "that they may well shed their bitterest
tears, for that this old man they mourn over has lived the life of the
ungodly, has neglected all the appointed means of escape, has died the
death of the unrighteous, and must surely suffer the pains of the second
death? Should not the swift warning be brought home to me and to them?"

Sudden contact with Death had refined all his old religious impressions
to an intensity that shaped itself into a flaming sword of retribution.
All this, however, as yet, lay within his own mind, not beating down his
natural affection, or his grief, but struggling for reconcilement with
them; no outward expression, even to those who clung to him so nearly,
revealed it. The memorial-stone which he placed over his father's grave,
and which possibly is standing now within the old churchyard of
Canterbury, bore only this:--

        HERE LIES THE BODY OF
              REUBEN JOHNS.
    A GOOD HUSBAND; A KIND FATHER;
    A PATRIOT, WHO DIED FOR HIS COUNTRY,
          1ST SEPT., 1814.

And a little below,--

    "Christ died for all."


III.

It will be no contravention of the truth of this epitaph, to say that
the Major had been always a most miserable manager of his private
business affairs; it is even doubtful if the kindest fathers and best
husbands are not apt to be. Certain it is, that, when Benjamin came to
examine, in connection with a village attorney, (for the son had
inherited the father's inaccessibility to "profit and loss" statements,)
such loose accounts as the Major had left, it was found that the poor
gentleman had lived up so closely to his income--whether as lawyer or
military chieftain--as to leave his little home property subject to the
payment of a good many outstanding debts. There appeared, indeed, a
great parade of ledgers and day-books and statements of accounts; but it
is by no means unusual for those who are careless or ignorant of
business system to make a pretty show of the requisite implements, and
to confuse themselves, in a pleasant way, with the intricacy of their
own figures.

The Major sinned pretty largely in this way; so that it was plain, that,
after the sale of all his available effects, including the library with
its inhibited Voltaire, there would remain only enough to secure a
respectable maintenance for Miss Eliza. To this end, Benjamin determined
at once that the residue of the estate should be settled upon
her,--reserving only so much as would comfortably maintain him during a
three years' course of battling with Theology.

The younger sister, Mabel,--as has already been intimated,--was provided
for by an interest in certain distinct and dividend-bearing securities,
which--to the honor of the Major--had never been submitted to the
alembic of his figures and "accounts current." She was placed at a
school where she accomplished herself for three or four years; and put
the seal to her accomplishments by marrying very suddenly, and without
family consultation,--under which she usually proved restive,--a young
fellow, who by aid of her snug fortune succeeded in establishing himself
in a thriving business; and as early as the year 1820, Mabel, under her
new name of Mrs. Brindlock, was the mistress of one of those fine
merchant-palaces at the lower end of Greenwich Street in New York City,
which commanded a view of the elegant Battery, and were the admiration
of all country visitors.

Benjamin had needed only his father's hint, (for which he was ever
grateful,) and the solemn scenes of his death and burial, to lead him to
an entire renunciation of his law-craft and to an engagement in fervid
study for the ministry. This he prosecuted at first with a devout old
gentleman who had been a pupil of President Edwards; and this private
reading was finished off by a course at Andover. His studies completed,
he was licensed to preach; and not long after, without any consideration
of what the future of this world might have in store for him, he
committed the error which so many grave and serious men are prone to
commit,--that is to say, he married hastily, after only two or three
months of solemn courtship, a charming girl of nineteen, whose only idea
of meeting the difficulties of this life was to love her dear Benjamin
with her whole heart, and to keep the parlor dusted.

But unfortunately there was no parlor to dust The consequence was that
the newly married couple were compelled to establish a temporary home
upon the second floor of the comfortable house of Mr. Handby, a
well-to-do farmer, and the father of the bride. Here the new clergyman
devoted himself resolutely to Tillotson, to Edwards, to John Newton, and
in the intervals prepared some score or more of sermons,--to all which
Mrs. Johns devoutly listening in their fresh state, without ever a wink,
entered upon the conscientious duties of a wife. From time to time some
old clergyman of the neighborhood would ask the Major's son to assist
him in the Sabbath services; and at rarer intervals the Reverend Mr.
Johns was invited to some far-away township where the illness or absence
of the settled minister might keep the new licentiate for four or five
weeks; on which occasions the late Miss Handby was most zealous in
preparing a world of comforts for the journey, and invariably followed
him up with one or two double letters, "hoping her dear Benjamin was
careful to wear the muffler which his Rachel had knit for him, and not
to expose his precious throat,"--or "longing for that quiet home of
_their own_, which would not make necessary these _cruel separations_,
and where she should have the uninterrupted society of her dear
Benjamin."

To all such the conscientious husband dutifully replied, "thankful for
his Rachel's expression of interest in such a sinner as himself, and
trusting that she would not forget that health or the comforts of this
world were but of comparatively small importance, since this was 'not
our abiding city.' He trusted, too, that she would not allow the
transitory affections of this life, _however dear they might be_, to
engross her to the neglect of those which were _far more_ important. He
permitted himself to hope that Rachel" (he was chary of endearing
epithets) "would not murmur against the dispensations of Providence, and
would be content with whatever He might provide; and hoping that Mr.
Handby and family were in their usual health, remained her Christian
friend and devoted husband, Benjamin Johns."

It so happened, that, after this discursive life had lasted for some ten
months, a serious difficulty arose between the clergyman and the parish
of the neighboring town of Ashfield. The person who served as the
spiritual director of the people was suspected of leaning strongly
toward some current heresy of the day; and the suspicion being once set
on foot, there was not a sermon the poor man could preach but some
quidnunc of the parish snuffed somewhere in it the taint of the false
doctrine. The due convocations and committees of inquiry followed
sharply after, and the incumbent received his dismissal in due form at
the hands of some "brother in the bonds of the Gospel."

A few weeks later, Giles Elderkin of Ashfield, "Society's Committee,"
invited, by letter, the Reverend Benjamin Johns to come and "fill their
pulpit the following Lord's day"; and added,--"If you conclude to preach
for us, I shall be pleased to have you put up at my house over the
Sabbath."

"There you are," said Mr. Handby, when the matter was announced in
family conclave,--"just the man for them. They like sober, solid
preaching in Ashfield."

"I call it real providential," said Mrs. Handby; "fust-rate folks, and
't a'n't a long drive over for Rachel."

Little Mrs. Johns looked upon the grave, earnest face of her husband
with delight and pride, but said nothing.

"I know Squire Elderkin," says Mr. Handby, meditatively,--"a clever man,
and a forehanded man, very. It's a rich parish, son-in-law; they ought
to do well by you."

"I don't like," says Mr. Johns, "to look at what may become my spiritual
duty in that light."

"I wouldn't," returned Mr. Handby; "but when you are as old as I am,
son-in-law, you'll know that we have to keep a kind of side-look upon
the good things of this world,--else we shouldn't be placed in it."

"_He_ heareth the young ravens when they cry," said the minister,
gravely.

"Just it," says Mr. Handby; "but I don't want your young ravens to be
crying."

At which Rachel, with the slightest possible suffusion of color, and a
pretty affectation of horror, said,--

"Now, papa!"

There was an interuption here, and the conclave broke up; but Rachel,
stepping briskly to the place she loved so well, beside the minister,
said, softly,--

"I hope you'll go, Benjamin; and do, please, preach that beautiful
sermon on Revelations."


IV.

Thirty or forty years ago there lay scattered about over Southern New
England a great many quiet inland towns, numbering from a thousand to
two or three thousand inhabitants, which boasted a little old-fashioned
"society" of their own,--which had their important men who were heirs to
some snug country property, and their gambrel-roofed houses odorous with
traditions of old-time visits by some worthies of the Colonial period,
or of the Revolution. The good, prim dames, in starched caps and
spectacles, who presided over such houses, were proud of their tidy
parlors,--of their old India china,--of their beds of thyme and sage in
the garden,--of their big Family Bible with brazen clasps,--and, most
times, of their minister.

One Orthodox Congregational Society extended its benignant patronage
over all the people of such town; or, if a stray Episcopalian or
Seven-Day Baptist were here and there living under the wing of the
parish, they were regarded with a serene and stately gravity, as
necessary exceptions to the law of Divine Providence,--like scattered
instances of red hair or of bow-legs in otherwise well-favored families.

There were no wires stretching over the country to shock the nerves of
the good gossips with the thought that their neighbors knew more than
they. There were no heathenisms of the cities, no tenpins, no travelling
circus, no progressive young men of heretical tendencies. Such towns
were as quiet as a sheepfold. Sauntering down their broad central
street, along which all the houses were clustered with a somewhat dreary
uniformity of aspect, one might of a summer's day hear the rumble of the
town mill in some adjoining valley, busy with the town grist; in autumn,
the flip-flap of the flails came pulsing on the ear from half a score of
wide-open barns that yawned with plenty; and in winter, the clang of
axes on the near hills smote sharply upon the frosty stillness, and
would be straightway followed by the booming crash of some great tree.

But civilization and the railways have debauched all such quiet,
stately, steady towns. There are none of them left. If the iron cordon
of travel, by a little divergence, has spared their quietude, leaving
them stranded upon a beach where the tide of active business never
flows, all their dignities are gone. The men of foresight and enterprise
have drifted away to new centres of influence. The bustling dames in
starched caps have gone down childless to their graves, or, disgusted
with gossip at second hand, have sought more immediate contact with the
world. A German tailor, may be, has hung out his sign over the door of
some mouldering mansion, where, in other days, a doughty judge of the
county court, with a great raft of children, kept his honors and his
family warm. A slatternly "carryall," with a driver who reeks of bad
spirit, keeps up uneasy communication with the outside world, traversing
twice or three times a day the league of drive which lies between the
post-office and the railway-station. A few iron-pated farmers, and a few
gentlemen of Irish extraction who keep tavern and stores, divide among
themselves the official honors of the town.

If, on the other hand, the people maintain their old thrift and
importance by actual contact with some great thoroughfare of travel,
their old quietude is exploded; a mushroom station has sprung up;
mushroom villas flank all the hills; the girls wear mushroom hats. A
turreted monster of a chapel from some flamboyant tower bellows out its
Sunday warning to a new set of church-goers. There is a little coterie
of "superior intelligences," who talk of the humanities, and diffuse
their airy rationalism over here and there a circle of the progressive
town. Even the meeting house, which was the great congregational centre
of the town religion, has lost its venerable air, taken off by some new
fancy of variegated painting. The high, square pews are turned into
low-backed seats, that flame on a summer Sunday with such gorgeous
millinery as would have shocked the grave people of thirty years ago.
The deep bass note which once pealed from the belfry with a solemn and
solitary dignity of sound has now lost it all amid the jangle of a
half-dozen bells of lighter and airier twang. Even the parson himself
will not be that grave man of stately bearing, who met the rarest fun
only benignantly, and to whom all the villagers bowed,--but some new
creature full of the logic of the schools and the latest
conventionalisms of manner. The homespun disciples of other days would
be brought grievously to the blush, if some deep note of the old bell
should suddenly summon them to the presence of so fine a teacher,
encompassed with such pretty appliances of upholstery; and, counting
their chances better in the strait path they knew on uncarpeted floors
and between high pews, they would slink back into their graves
content,--all the more content, perhaps, if they should listen to the
service of the new teacher, and, in their common-sense way, reckon what
chance the dapper talker might have,--as compared with the solemn
soberness of the old pastor,--in opening the ponderous doors for them
upon the courts above.

Into this metamorphosed condition the town of Ashfield has possibly
fallen in these latter days; but in the good year 1819, when the
Reverend Benjamin Johns was invited for the first time to fill its
pulpit of an early autumn Sunday, it was still in possession of all its
palmy quietude and of its ancient cheery importance. And to that old
date we will now transfer ourselves.


V.

Every other day the stage-coach comes into Ashfield from the north, on
the Hartford turnpike, and rumbles through the main street of the town,
seesawing upon its leathern thoroughbraces. Just where the pike forks
into the main northern road, and where the scattered farm-houses begin
to group more thickly along the way, the country Jehu prepares for a
triumphant entry by giving a long, clean cut to the lead-horses, and two
or three shortened, sharp blows with his doubled lash to those upon the
wheel; then, moistening his lip, he disengages the tin horn from its
socket, and, with one more spirited "chirrup" to his team and a petulant
flirt of the lines, he gives out, with tremendous explosive efforts, a
series of blasts that are heard all down the street. Here and there a
blind is coyly opened, and some old dame in ruffled cap peers out, or
some stout wench at a back door stands gazing with her arms a-kimbo. The
horn rattles back into its socket again; the lines are tightened, and
the long lash smacks once more around the reeking flanks of the leaders.
Yonder, in his sooty shop, stands the smith, keeping up with his elbow a
lazy sway upon his bellows, while he looks admiringly over coach and
team, and gives an inquisitive glance at the nigh leader's foot, that
he shod only yesterday. A flock of geese, startled from a mud-puddle
through which the coach dashes on, rush away with outstretched necks,
and wings at their widest, and a great uproar of gabble. Two
school-girls--home for the nooning--are idling over a gateway, half
swinging, half musing, gazing intently. There is a gambrel-roofed
mansion, with a balustrade along its upper pitch, and quaint ogees of
ancient joinery over the hall-door; and through the cleanly scrubbed
parlor-windows is to be seen a prim dame, who turns one spectacled
glance upon the passing coach, and then resumes her sewing. There are
red houses, with their corners and barge-boards dressed off with white,
and on the door-step of one a green tub that flames with a great pink
hydrangea. Scattered along the way are huge ashes, sycamores, elms, in
somewhat devious line; and from a pendent bough of one of these last a
trio of school-boys are seeking to beat down the swaying nest of an
oriole with a convergent fire of pebbles.

The coach flounders on,--past an old house with stone chimney, (on which
an old date stands coarsely cut,) and with front door divided down its
middle, with a huge brazen knocker upon its right half,--with two St.
Luke's crosses in its lower panels, and two diamond-shaped "lights"
above. Hereabout the street widens into what seems a common; and not far
below, sitting squarely and authoritatively in the middle of the common,
is the red-roofed meeting-house, with tall spire, and in its shadow the
humble belfry of the town academy. Opposite these there comes into the
main street a highway from the east; and upon one of the corners thus
formed stands the Eagle Tavern, its sign creaking appetizingly on a
branch of an overhanging sycamore, under which the stage-coach dashes up
to the tavern-door, to unlade its passengers for dinner, and to find a
fresh relay of horses.

Upon the opposite corner is the country store of Abner Tew, Esq.,
postmaster during the successive administrations of Mr. Madison and Mr.
Monroe. He comes out presently from his shop-door, which is divided
horizontally, the upper half being open in all ordinary weathers; and
the lower half, as he closes it after him, gives a warning jingle to a
little bell within. A spare, short, hatchet-faced man is Abner Tew, who
walks over with a prompt business-step to receive a leathern pouch from
the stage-driver. He returns with it,--a few eager townspeople following
upon his steps,--reenters his shop, and delivers the pouch within a
glazed door in the corner, where the postmistress _ex officio_ Mrs.
Abner Tew, a tall, gaunt woman in black bombazine and spectacles,
proceeds to assort the Ashfield mail. By reason of this division of
duties, the shop is known familiarly as the shop of "the Tew partners."

Among the waiting expectant, who loiter about among the sugar-barrels of
the grocery department, there presently appears--with a new tinkle of
the little bell--a stout, ruddy man, just past middle age, in
broad-brimmed white beaver and sober homespun suit, who is met with a
deferential "Good day, Squire," from one and another, as he falls
successively into short parley with them. A self-possessed, cheery man,
who has strong opinions, and does not fear to express them; Selectman
for the last eight years; who has presided in town-meeting time out of
mind; member of the Legislature, and once a Senator for the district.
This was Giles Elderkin, Esq., the gentleman who, on behalf of the
Ecclesiastical Society, had conducted the correspondence with the
Reverend Mr. Johns; and he was now waiting his reply. Thus is presently
brought to him by the postmistress, who, catching a glimpse of the
Squire through the glazed door, has taken the precaution to adjust her
cap-strings and dexterously to flirt one or two of the more apparent
creases out of her dingy bombazine. The letter brings acceptance, which
the Squire, having made out by private study near to the dusky window,
announces to Mrs. Tew,--begging her to inform the people who should
happen in from "up the road."

"I hope he'll suit, Squire," says Mrs. Tew.

"I hope he may,--hope he may, Mrs. Tew; I hear well of him; there's good
blood in him. I knew his father, the Major,--likely man. I hope he may,
Mrs. Tew."

And the Squire, having penned a little notice, by favor of one of the
Tew partners, proceeds to affix it to the meeting-house door; after
which he walks to his own house, with the assured step of a man who is
conscious of having accomplished an important duty. It is the very house
we just now saw with the ponderous ogees over its front, the balustrade
upon its roof, and the dame in spectacles at the window: this latter
being the spinster, Miss Meacham, elder sister to the wife of the
Squire, and taking upon herself, with active zeal and a neatness that
knew no bounds, the office of housekeeper. This was rendered necessary
in a manner by the engagement of Mrs. Elderkin with a group of young
flax-haired children, and periodic threats of addition to the same. The
hospitalities of the house were fully established, and no state official
could visit the town without hearty invitation to the Squire's table.
The spinster received the announcement of the minister's coming with a
quiet gravity, and betook herself to the needed preparation.


VI.

Mr. Johns, meantime, when he had left the Handby parlor, where we saw
him last, and was fairly upon the stair, had replied to the suggestion
of his little wife about the sermon on Revelations with a fugitive kiss,
and said, "I will think of it, Rachel."

And he did think of it,--thought of it so well, that he left the
beautiful sermon in his drawer, and took with him a couple of strong
doctrinal discourses, upon the private hearing of which his charming
wife had commented by dropping asleep (poor thing!) in her chair.

But the strong men and women of Ashfield relished them better. There was
a sermon for the morning on "Regeneration the work only of grace"; and
another for the afternoon, on the outer leaf of which was written, in
the parson's bold hand, "The doctrine of Election compatible with the
infinite goodness of God." It is hard to say which of the two was the
better, or which commended itself most to the church full of people who
listened. Deacon Tourtelot,--a short, wiry man, with reddish whiskers
brushed primly forward,--sitting under the very droppings of the pulpit,
with painful erectness, and listening grimly throughout, was inclined to
the sermon of the morning. Dame Tourtelot, who overtopped her husband by
half a head, and from her great scoop hat, trimmed with green, kept her
keen eyes fastened intently upon the minister on trial, was enlisted in
the same belief, until she heard the Deacon's timid expression of
preference, when she pounced upon him, and declared for the Election
discourse. It was not her way to allow him to enjoy an opinion of his
own getting. Miss Almira, their only child, and now grown into a spare
womanhood, that was decorated with another scoop hat akin to the
mother's,--from under which hung two yellow festoons of ringlets tied
with lively blue ribbons,--was steadfastly observant; though wearing a
fagged air before the day was over, and consulting on one or two
occasions a little vial of "salts," with a side movement of the head,
and an inquiring nostril.

Squire Elderkin, having thrown himself into a comfortable position in
the corner of his square pew, is cheerfully attentive; and at one or two
of the more marked passages of the sermon bestows a nod of approval, and
a glance at Miss Meacham and Mrs. Elderkin, to receive their
acknowledgment of the same. The young Elderkins (of whom three are of
meeting-house size) are variously affected: Miss Dora, being turned of
six, wears an air of some weariness, and having despatched all the
edible matter upon a stalk of caraway, she uses the despoiled brush in
keeping the youngest boy, Ned, in a state of uneasy wakefulness. Bob,
ranking between the two in point of years, and being mechanically
inclined, devotes himself to turning in their sockets the little bobbins
which form a balustrade around the top of the pew; but being diverted
from this very suddenly by a sharp squeak that calls the attention of
his Aunt Joanna, he assumes the penitential air of listener for full
five minutes; afterward he relieves himself by constructing a small
meeting-house out of the psalm-books and Bible, his Aunt Joanna's
spectacle-case serving for a steeple.

There was an air of subdued reverence in the new clergyman, which was
not only agreeable to the people in itself, but seemed to very many
thoughtful ones to imply a certain respect for them and for the parish.
The men of that day in Ashfield were intolerant of mere elegances, or of
any jauntiness of manner. But Mr. Johns was so calm and serious, and yet
gave so earnest expression to the old beliefs they had so long
cherished,--he was so clearly wedded to all those rigidities by which
the good people thought it a merit to cramp their religious
thinking,--that there was but one opinion of his fitness.

Deacon Tourtelot, sidling down the aisle after service, out of hearing
of his consort, says to Elderkin, "Smart man, Squire."

And the Squire nods acquiescence. "Sound sermonizer,--sound sermonizer,
Deacon."

These two opinions were as good as a majority-vote in the town of
Ashfield,--all the more since the Squire was a thorough-going
Jeffersonian Democrat, and the Deacon a warm Federalist, so far as the
poor man could be warm at anything, who was on the alert every hour of
his life to escape the hammer of his wife's reproaches.

So it happened that the parish was called together, and an invitation
extended to Brother Johns to continue his ministrations for a month
further. Of course the novitiate understood this to be the crucial test;
and he accepted it with a composure, and a lack of impertinent effort to
please them overmuch, which altogether charmed them. On four successive
Saturdays he drove over to Ashfield,--sometimes stopping with one or the
other of the two deacons, and at other times with Squire Elderkin,--and
on one or two occasions taking his wife by special invitation. Of her,
too, the people of Ashfield had but one opinion: that she was of a
ductile temper was most easy to be seen; and there was not a
strong-minded woman of the parish but anticipated with delight the power
and pleasure of moulding her to her wishes. The husband continued to
preach agreeably to their notions of orthodoxy, and at the end of the
month they gave him a "call," with the promise of four hundred dollars a
year, besides sundry odds and ends made up by donation visits and
otherwise.

This sum, which was not an inconsiderable one for those days, enabled
the clergyman to rent as a parsonage the old house we have seen, with
the big brazen knocker, and diamond lights in either half of its green
door. It stood under the shade of two huge ashes, at a little remove
back from the street, and within easy walk from the central common. A
heavy dentilated cornice, from which the paint was peeling away in flaky
patches, hung over the windows of the second floor. Within the door was
a little entry--(for years and years the pastor's hat and cane used to
lie upon a table that stood just within the door); from the entry a
cramped stairway, by three sharp angles, led to the floor above. To the
right and left were two low parlors. The sun was shining broadly in the
south one when the couple first entered the house.

"Good!" said Rachel, with her pleasant, brisk tone,--"this shall be your
study, Benjamin; the bookcase here, the table there, a nice warm carpet,
we'll paper it with blue, the Major's sword shall be hung over the
mantel."

"Tut! tut!" says the clergyman, "a sword, Rachel,--in my study?"

"To be sure! why not?" says Rachel. "And if you like, I will hang my
picture, with the doves and the olive-branch, above it; and there shall
be a shelf for hyacinths in the window."

Thus she ran on in her pretty house-wifely manner, cooing like the doves
she talked of, plotting the arrangement of the parlor opposite, of the
long dining-room stretching athwart the house in the rear, and of the
kitchen under a roof of its own, still farther back,--he all the while
giving grave assent, as if he listened to her contrivance: he was only
listening to the music of a sweet voice that somehow charmed his ear,
and thanking God in his heart that such music was bestowed upon a sinful
world, and praying that he might never listen too fondly.

Behind the house were yard, garden, orchard, and this last drooping away
to a meadow. Over all these the pair of light feet pattered beside the
master. "Here shall be lilies," she said; "there, a great bunch of
mother's peonies; and by the gate, hollyhocks";--he, by this time,
plotting a sermon upon the vanities of the world.

Yet in due time it came to pass that the parsonage was all arranged
according to the fancies of its mistress,--even to the Major's sword and
the twin doves. Esther, a stout middle-aged dame, and stanch
Congregationalist, recommended by the good women of the parish, is
installed in the kitchen as maid-of-all-work. As gardener, groom, (a
sedate pony and square-topped chaise forming part of the establishment,)
factotum, in short,--there is the frowzy-headed man Larkin, who has his
quarters in an airy loft above the kitchen.

The brass knocker is scoured to its brightest. The parish is neighborly.
Dame Tourtelot is impressive in her proffers of advice. The Tew
partners, Elderkin, Meacham, and all the rest, meet the new housekeepers
open-handed. Before mid-winter, the smoke of this new home was piling
lazily into the sky above the tree-tops of Ashfield,--a home, as we
shall find by and by, of much trial and much cheer. Twenty years after,
and the master of it was master of it still,--strong, seemingly, as
ever; the brass knocker shining on the door; the sword and the doves in
place. But the pattering feet,--the voice that made music,--the tender,
wifely plotting,--the cheery sunshine that smote upon her as she
talked,--alas for us!--"All is Vanity!"




ROGER BROOKE TANEY.


A little more than two centuries ago, Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury
published his great treatise on government, under the title of
"Leviathan; or, the Matter, Form, and Power of the Commonwealth,
Ecclesiastical and Civil,"--in which he denied that man is born a social
being, that government has any natural foundation, and, in a word, all
of what men now agree to be the first principles, and receive as axioms,
of social and civil science; and declared that man is a beast of prey, a
wolf, whose natural state is war, and that government is only a
contrivance of men for their own gain, a strong chain thrown over the
citizen,--organized, despotic, unprincipled power. To this faithless and
impious work, which at least did good by shocking the world and rallying
many of the best minds to develop and defend the true principles of
society and the state, he put a fit frontispiece, a picture of the vast
form of Leviathan, the Sovereign State, the Mortal God,--a gigantic
figure, like that of Giant Despair or the horrid shapes we have
sometimes seen pictured as brooding over the Valley of the Shadow of
Death,--a Titanic form, whose crowned head and mailed body fill the
background and rise above the distant hills and mountain-peaks in the
broad landscape which is spread out below, with fields, rivers, harbors,
cities, castles, churches, towns and villages, and ships upon the seas
and in the ports. Its body and limbs are made up of countless human
figures, of every class, all bending reverently toward the sovereign
head. Its arms stretch forward to the foreground. In one hand it holds a
magnificent crosier, in the other a mighty sword, which reach across and
cover the whole. It is surrounded with emblems of power, of which it is
the life and embodiment. In the front is a fortified city, with its
streets and gate, its cathedral rising high above all other structures,
surmounted by the cross, the flag flying from the forts, the sentinel on
the ramparts. Its fortresses seem to defy and command the whole empire
over which Leviathan predominates. To show more fully how all-pervading
and resistless is the power of this monster made of mortal men, and the
means and extent of its control in Church and State, to impress the
senses, the emblems of its spheres and its instruments are depicted
below. First is a castle on a rocky height, with the smoke rolling from
its battlements, from which a cannon has just been fired; opposite, a
church, with a figure holding the cross above its roof of faith; here a
coronet, opposite a mitre; here is a cannon, to thunder in civil war;
opposite are the mythic thunderbolts for the fulminations of the Church;
below are arms, drums, banners and flags, helmet and halberd, spear and
sword and matchlock; opposite appears a front, between the devilish
horns of which, marked "dilemma," is formed a sort of trophy, made up of
a trident spear, labelled "syllogism," and bifurcated weapons, named
"real and intentional," "spiritual and temporal," and one beyond whose
long straight point, labelled "direct," there is another sharp, keen
one, curving round and covering it, labelled "indirect"; last is the
battle-field, with armies rushing together in deadly charge, their flags
flying above the long lines whose sloping spears bristle above the
clouds of smoke and dust, the cavalry and foot engaged with sabres and
pistols, men and horses fallen, the victors, the wounded, the dying, and
the dead,--the dread arbitrament of war; opposite, the judges ranged in
formal order, with their caps and black robes,--a Rhadamanthine
tribunal. Seeing such a summary and embodiment of his idea, a man will
shudder the more he ponders on such a conception of the state as such a
monstrous idol, which men have fashioned out of their own bodies and
invested with the attributes of superhuman power, and worshipped as the
creator of Justice and Law, Peace and Order, Truth and Religion, and
served and obeyed as their Tyrant and King.

The American state,--which, as Franklin said, "first set forth religious
truth as the basis of government," formed by the people, who, calling on
all mankind to witness their solemn appeal to the Supreme Judge of the
world, "pledged themselves," as Adams said, "to extinguish Slavery as
soon as practicable,"--the state formed to establish justice,--the state
for which the founders reverently adopted as the true emblem the Goddess
of Liberty,--had, at the time when Slavery, the patricide, waged this
war to finish the revolution already almost complete, so essentially
changed, that it bore a striking resemblance to that dreadful picture of
the giant form of the Leviathan. _Populus Romanus repente factus est
alius._

It will be difficult to decide which branch of our government was most
efficient in producing this change; as it will be difficult for one who
considers the principle, or want of principle, on which this Juggernaut
was constructed, to decide which would be the more horrible, a decision
by battle or by the robed ministers of evil. But as the Leviathan,
Slavery,--the Mortal God, the incarnation of Evil,--is growing more and
more shadowy, and men again behold the heavenly Guardian of their State,
Americans feel, and the world agrees, that war, though it reaches other
classes and in different form, is really attended with less horror and
woe at the time than several judicial decisions have occasioned; and
that the lasting results of battles are incalculably more insignificant
than the judgments of courts may be.

       *       *       *       *       *

Roger Brooke Taney was, when nearly sixty years old, placed at the head
of the Judiciary, at a critical time in American affairs. The Slave
Power, so successful in extending its dominion, and already the
controlling influence in the government, was pressing its unholy and
arrogant demands openly and without shame. It had destroyed civil
liberty in the Slave States, and was fast destroying it in the Free. It
was stifling the right of petition in Congress, and smothering free
speech in the States. The Executive was recommending that the mails
should be sifted for its safety. The question of the right of Slavery in
the Territories and the Free States was taking form, and the
slave-catchers claimed to hunt their prey through the Northern States,
without regard to the rights of freemen or the law of the land. Taney
had long been known as an astute and skilful lawyer, a man of ability
and learning in his profession--as ability and learning are commonly
gauged. He had been Attorney-General of Maryland, and in 1831 had been
appointed Attorney-General of the United States. He was an ardent
partisan supporter of the administration; and in 1833, when Duane
refused to remove the deposits, he was appointed to the Treasury as a
willing servant, and did not hesitate to do what was expected of him.

In 1835, while the country was deeply agitated by questions concerning
the rights of States and the powers of the government, he was nominated
to a vacancy on the Supreme Bench. His opinions on those questions were
well known, and the consideration of his nomination indefinitely
postponed.

But some time after the death of Chief Justice Marshall, which occurred
on the 6th of July, 1835, Taney was nominated as his successor, and in
1836, the political complexion of the Senate having in the mean time
changed, was confirmed by party influence, and took his seat at the head
of the Judiciary in January, 1837.

He was essentially a partisan judge, as much so as were the judges of
King Charles, who decided for the ship-money in accordance with their
previously announced opinions. The President wrote him a letter in which
he thanked him for abandoning the duties of his profession and promptly
aiding him by removing the deposits; and Webster declared he was the
pliant tool of the Executive. The Massachusetts, Kentucky, and New York
cases in the very first volume of the Reports showed that, if not swift
to do the work for which he had been selected, he did not hesitate to
embody his political principles in judicial decisions. But we do not
intend to examine these, or to review the long series of decisions,
extending over more than a quarter of a century, and through more than
thirty volumes, on the common or even the grander questions discussed in
that tribunal, which will all, or nearly all, be unknown,--save to the
profession,--and will have but little influence on the welfare of the
country and the course of history. We would consider only the more
important of those decisions touching Slavery, the cause of this
Revolution, which have already shaped the course of events, and become
the record of his character as a jurist, a patriot, and a man.

His private opinions about Slavery are not matter of comment or inquiry.
There are two official opinions given by him while Attorney-General in
1831 which relate to the matter. In one of these he had to consider
whether the United States would protect the right of a slave-master over
his slave, employed as a seaman on a ship trading to one of the States,
in which he expressed the opinion that the United States could not, by
treaty, control the several States in the exercise of their power of
declaring a slave free on being brought within their limits. In the
other, he held that a person removing his slaves with him to Texas,
merely for a temporary sojourn, and with the intention of returning
again in a short time to the United States, might safely bring his
slaves back with him. But he then declared, that if the owner had placed
his slaves in Texas as their domicile, he would be liable to
prosecution, under the act of Congress, if he should bring them back
into the United States.

In 1837, the very year Taney took his seat on the Supreme Bench, he gave
the opinion of the Court in the cases of the Garonne and the Fortune,
two vessels libelled, under the act of 1818, for bringing as slaves into
New Orleans persons who had, in 1831 and 1835, been carried to France
and some of them manumitted there. The judge then said that, "assuming
that by French law they were entitled to freedom, there is nothing in
this act to prevent their mistress bringing them back and holding them
_as before_."

He seems to have considered it immaterial, or to have been ignorant,
that, in accordance with the maxim, "Once free, forever free," declared
in the courts of his own State of Maryland, the courts of Louisiana
held, as did those of Kentucky and other States also, that, "having been
for one moment in France, it was not in the power of her former owner to
reduce her again to slavery," and to have forgotten the doctrines of one
of his own opinions.

Slavery, when he came upon the bench, began to look to the Supreme Court
as its surest defence.

The Prigg case, as it is called, or, as lawyers call it, Prigg _vs._ The
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, was an amicable suit; the parties in
interest being the States of Maryland and Pennsylvania, which were
represented by the ablest counsel, who came into court, as Johnson,
Attorney-General of Pennsylvania, said, "to terminate disputes and
contentions which were arising, and had for years arisen, along the
border line between them, on the subject of the escape and delivering up
of fugitive slaves." The counsel regarded themselves, as he said, as
engaged in "the work of peace," and "of patriotism also."

Edward Prigg and others were indicted in Pennsylvania for kidnapping a
negro woman on the 1st of April, 1837. The cause came to trial before
the York Quarter Sessions, May 22, 1839; and the counsel agreed that a
special verdict should be taken and judgment rendered, and thereupon the
case carried up, so as to present the questions of law arising, under
the Pennsylvania Emancipation Act of 1780, upon the United States act of
1793 touching fugitives from labor, and the statute of Pennsylvania
passed in 1826, which provided for the seizure and surrender of fugitive
slaves and for the punishment of kidnapping. The case was made up and
presented in that spirit of compromise which has been the bane and
delusion of America, (as if there could be any compromise of
justice,)--the counsel for Pennsylvania claiming that their statute was
auxiliary to that of the United States, really beneficial to Slavery,
and that they advocated the true interests of the South as well as of
the Union and the North,--in order to have the Judiciary authoritatively
settle the vital question of the rights of the master in the seizure,
and of the States in the rendition, of fugitive slaves. The Court
decided, fully, that the master had a right to seize his fugitive slave
wherever he could find him, and take him back without process; that the
law of 1793 was constitutional; and that the United States had the
exclusive power of legislation on that matter.

But this did not satisfy Chief Justice Taney. He agreed that the master
had the right of seizure. He declared that this right was the law of
each State, and that no State had power to abrogate or alter it, and
foreshadowed the idea that the Constitution carried Slavery over all
the Territories and States. But he dissented from the Court when they
held the Pennsylvania act to be invalid. And without relying on any
principle, without any discussion of, or the slightest allusion to, any
authorities or the great fundamental questions involved in that issue,
he coolly depicted the inconveniences the slave-catcher might be subject
to in States where there was but one District Judge, and how essentially
he would be aided by the State legislation; and pointed out to his
brethren those "_consequences_" which they did "_not contemplate_" and
to which they "did not suppose the opinion they had given would lead."
And he said that, where the States had such statutes, "it had not
heretofore been supposed necessary, in order to justify those laws, to
refer them to the questionable powers of internal and local police. They
were believed to stand upon surer and safer grounds, to secure the
delivery of the fugitive slave to his lawful owner."

Counsel said, "The long, impatient struggle on that question was nearly
over. The decision of this Court would put it at rest." It was not so.
This decision was made in 1843. But from that time the strife over that
question was more violent than ever. The Slave Power took this decision
as a new concession and guaranty. It certainly affirmed the right of the
master to exercise his absolute power, in the most offensive form, to be
beyond control of all legislation whatever, State or National. The Court
doubtless meant, as the States and the counsel did, by giving to
Congress the exclusive power of legislation on the surrender of
fugitives from labor, to settle this question in such form as to satisfy
the Slave Power.

If the opinion of Mr. Webster be worth anything, they forgot the maxim,
"Judicis est jus dicere, non dare." Most surely Taney ignored his
State-Rights doctrines when, looking far on for the interests of Slavery
and the convenience of slave hunters, he held the United States
authorized to legislate on the matter; and, disguising the poison under
the phrase, "the Constitution and every clause of it is part of the law
of every State of the land," he put forth the dogma that the rendition
clause merely provided for the rights of citizens, "put them under
protection of the General Government," and made "the rights of the
master the law of each State." He was declaring a rule of government,
not a rule of law, and creating a theory for the defence of property in
man.

In 1850 he went a step farther. A Kentucky slave-owner had been in the
habit of letting some of his slaves go into Ohio to sing as minstrels.
He filed a bill against a steamboat and her captain to recover the value
of those slaves, who, after their return, had been carried across the
river and escaped. It must be remembered that they had not first
escaped, but had been _carried_ to Ohio. But here, again, without
recurring to any of the principles presented and fairly involved in such
an issue, again looking far on to consequences in the interest of
Slavery, again ignoring, not only the first principles of jurisprudence
and the declared ends of the Constitution, but even his own political
State-Rights doctrine, (for if these men had not escaped, why could not
Ohio free them?) he declared a doctrine pregnant with mischief,--that
each State had the absolute right to decide the status of all persons
within its limits. This, too, has gone with war. But his intent is none
the less clear. The theory was obviously stated with a far-reaching view
to remote consequences. And it must be considered in connection with the
fact that, in lieu of the old rule which had been recognized by the
Slave States, that a slave, by being carried to a Free State or
domiciled for a day in a foreign country by whose law he was
enfranchised, was liberated forever,--once free, free forever and
everywhere,--the Slave Power was beginning to assert a new rule for
reënslavement by recapture and on return.

But the Slave Power, having controlled the executive and directed the
legislative branch of the government, again turned to judicial power as
the surest, and best able to work out easily the largest and most
lasting results. The Dred Scott case was begun in 1854, and brought up,
twice argued, and finally decided in 1856; Chief Justice Taney
delivering the opinion of the Court. The facts and result of that case
are well known. In a cause dismissed for want of jurisdiction, this
Court pretended to decide that no person of African slave descent could
ever be a citizen of the United States, and that the adoption of the
Missouri Compromise line by the Congress of 1820, acquiesced in for
thirty-five years, was unconstitutional. This doctrine was entirely
extrajudicial, and, as one of the judges declared, "_an assumption_ of
authority."

We do not propose to discuss this decision. It was the lowest depth. It
probably did more than all legislative and executive usurpations to
revive the spirit of liberty,--to recall the country to the principles
of the founders of the Constitution. It began the good work,--_evoking_
the truth, by showing its own fiendish principles,--which the war is
likely to finish forever. We wish, however, to give an analysis of the
doctrines and reasons on which his decision was based, and therefrom to
show what is the true place of Roger Brooke Taney as a jurist and a
patriot.

Now the course of his argument was this,--admitting that all persons who
were citizens of the several States at the time of the adoption of the
Constitution became citizens of the United States, to show that persons
of African descent, whose ancestors had been slaves, were not in any
State citizens.

And first, he tries to show this "by the legislation and histories of
the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence";
and after referring to the laws of two or three Colonies restricting
intermarriage of races, and affirming that, though freed, colored
persons were in all the Colonies held to be no part of the people, and
declaring that "in no nation was this opinion more uniformly acted upon
than by the English government and people," admitting that "the general
words '_all men_ are created equal,' etc., would seem to embrace the
whole human family," and that the framers of the Declaration were "high
in their sense of honor, and incapable of asserting principles
inconsistent with those on which they were acting," he argues that,
because they had not fully carried out, and did not afterwards fully
carry out, their avowed principles by instant and universal
emancipation, therefore he can give to as plain and absolute words as
were ever written, expressive of universal laws, a force just opposite
to their terms;--a new form of argument, which begins by assuming the
truth of the proposition desired, and ends by denying the truth of the
admitted premises.

He then proceeds, to inquire if the terms "we, the people," in the
Constitution, embraced the persons in question. Here, too, he admits
that they did embrace all who were members of the several States. Then,
turning round the power given Congress to end the slave-trade after
1808, and arguing from it as a reserved right to acquire property till
that time; laying aside the fact that the framers of the Declaration had
acted on their declared principles, and that in many States, as in
Massachusetts and Vermont, even in Southern States, as in North Carolina
they remained till 1837, many freed colored persons were citizens at
that time, with the remark, that "the numbers that had been emancipated
at that time were but few in comparison with those held in slavery,"
assuming that the very acts of the States suppressing the slave-trade
helped instead of destroying his argument; arguing from the fact that
Congress had not authorized the naturalization of colored persons, or
enrolled them in the militia; arguing even from State laws passed in the
most passionate moments as late as 1833; going back to the old Colonial
acts of Maryland in 1717, and of Massachusetts in 1705; even coming down
to the fact that Caleb Cushing gave his opinion that they could not have
passports as citizens; denying that the "free inhabitants" in the
Articles of Confederation, which he was forced to concede did in terms
embrace freemen, actually did include them, because the quota of land
forces was proportioned to the white inhabitants,--he affirmed that they
were not and never could become citizens, that neither the States nor
the nation had power to lift them from their abject condition. The
United States could naturalize Indians. But neither the United States
nor the individual States could make colored persons citizens.

The Chief Justice stated that colored persons were not, at the time of
the adoption of the Constitution, citizens under the laws of the several
States and the laws of the civilized world. But he knew, for it had been
shown to him in the arguments, that such persons, and many who had been
slaves, were then citizens in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and North
Carolina, as they likewise were in Vermont, Pennsylvania, and in other
States. And he knew--for in 1831 he himself said it was "a fixed
principle of the law of England, that a slave becomes free as soon as he
touches her shores"--that he declared as law what was not the law of
civilized nations; that in 1762 Lord Northington declared that "as soon
as a man sets foot on English ground he is free"; and that Lord
Mansfield had, in 1772, held that "Slavery is so odious that it cannot
be established without positive law." He knew (or he declared what he
did not know) that at that day the sentiment in France was so directly
to the contrary, that in 1791 the law was "_Tout individu est libre
aussitôt qu'il est en France_." At the time to which he referred, public
opinion in the American States and in foreign countries, and the
legislation of the various States, were just the opposite of what he
stated them to be. Liberty was just at the moment more truly the
sentiment of the country and of states in amity with it than at any
other. The assertion, that colored persons could not be and were not
citizens of the several States, was simply false. In most if not in all
of the States such persons were citizens. In 1776, the Quakers refused
fellowship with such as held slaves; that sect, through all the States,
enfranchised their slaves, who, on such enfranchisement, became
citizens. American courts were not behind the English courts. States
adopted the language of the Declaration into their Constitutions for the
purpose of universal emancipation, and the courts decided that that was
its effect. At the time of the adoption of the Constitution the leading
men of all sections considered emancipation essential to the realization
of the American idea; for their government was founded on a theory, and
avowed principles, which rendered it necessary, and which, with the
performance of the pledges of the States and the exercise of the powers
directly given to the Union, would make liberty universal and perpetual.

Taney even argued that persons of African descent could not be citizens,
because they could "enter every State when they pleased, without pass or
passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they
pleased, to go where they please, at every hour of the day or night,
without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for
which a white man would be punished; and it would give them full liberty
of speech, in public and in private, upon all subjects upon which its
own citizens might speak, to hold public meetings," and "to bear arms"!
As if this would not be to a true jurist and just judge expounding a
Constitution made "to establish justice" itself the ground to for
deciding that citizenship was opened to them by emancipation; as if the
blessings of liberty ought not to prevail over any inconveniences to
slave-holders.

His argument from subsequent legislation was perfectly idle. For, at
most, the statutes of Naturalization and Enrolment merely showed that
Congress did not then choose to apply to colored persons the power given
to them in absolute terms, and which he admits they had as to Indians.
While in other statutes, as that of 1808, of Seamen, and in several
treaties, as, for instance, those whereby Louisiana, Florida, and New
Mexico were acquired, colored persons are expressly named as citizens.

Having denied the clear facts of history, renounced the obligation of
explicit language, professed to stand on an argument every member of
which was destructive of his conclusion, he thus stated the result:
"They were at that time," 1789, "considered as a subordinate and
inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race,
and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their
authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held
the power and the government might choose to grant them"; that the
opinion had obtained "for more than a century" that they were "beings of
an inferior order," with "no rights which the white man was bound to
respect," who "might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery," "an
ordinary article of merchandise and traffic wherever a profit could be
made of it"; and this opinion was then "fixed and universal in the
civilized portion of the white race,"--"an _axiom_ in morals as well as
politics." He then declares, that to call them "citizens" would be "an
abuse of terms" "not calculated to exalt the character of the American
citizen in the eyes of other nations."

No wonder the nations pointed the finger of scorn, and cried out, "Is
this the perfection of beauty, the joy of the whole earth? Shade of
Jefferson! is this the reading America was to give the Declaration? Did
you publish a lie to the world? Spirits of Franklin, Adams, and
Washington! is this your work? Americans! is this your character?"

He declares, further, that the Court has no right to change the
construction of the Constitution; that "it speaks in the same words,
with the same meaning and intent, with which it spoke when it came from
the hands of its framers, and was voted on and adopted by the people of
the United States. Any other rule of construction would abrogate the
judicial character of this Court, and make it the mere reflex of the
popular opinion or passion of the day. This Court was not created by the
Constitution for such purposes. Higher and graver trusts have been
confided to it; and it must not falter in the path of duty!" Would to
God it had not faltered in the path of duty, that it had been true to
those higher and graver trusts! Would that it had not been the mere
reflex of popular opinion or the passion of the day, that it had not
abrogated its judicial character! Would that it had read the plain words
in the holy spirit in which they were written! Would that it had left
the Constitution as it was, and, instead of thus writing its own
condemnation, had shown how efficient an instrument that Constitution
would be, if fearlessly used to carry out the great principles of
humanity for which its preamble declares it was established!

Here is the key to the new distinction between the Constitution as it is
and the Constitution as it was. But as it was in the beginning, so it is
and shall be.

But Taney could not stop here. Compromises had been made through the
other branches of the government,--compromises held sacred for more than
a generation, in the vain hope to appease the insatiate lust of the
Slave Power. He went on with a longer and lower argument to declare one
branch of the Compromise--the act of Congress prohibiting slavery in
territory north of 36° 30'--void.

Even more,--for he seemed determined to make clean work of it,--he went
on to say that a slave who had been made free by being taken (not
escaping, but by being carried by his owner) to a Free State was reduced
to slavery again on arriving back in the State from which he had been
taken, and that that was the result of Strader _vs._ Graham, which
declared that the _status_ of persons, whether free or slave, depended
on the State law. Here, again, he sacrificed his cherished party
principles to his love for Slavery. Else how could the State to which
the slave had been carried be deprived of its right to enfranchise, or
how could the United States power be extended further than to the
expressly granted case of escape?

But no. He was a judicial Calhoun. His dogma was that the fundamental
law guaranteed property in man. He declared that therefore Congress
could not interfere with it in the Territories. Before he was judge, he
admitted the right of sojourn. There was but one step more,--the sacred
right of slave property in Free States. It was involved in what he had
already said, and was not so great an anomaly as he had already
sanctioned; for if the Constitution guarantees this property in every
State,--if the States do not reserve the power to interfere with
it,--if, in case of escape, Congress has the power to reclaim it,--why
is not the owner to be guaranteed it in the States as well as in the
Territories?

In looking across this long judicial Sahara of twenty-seven years, there
is but one oasis. In the Amistad case, the Court did declare that Cinque
and the rest, who had been kidnapped, had the right to regain their
natural liberty, even at the cost of the lives of those who held them in
bondage; and for once the Court, speaking by Story, did appeal to the
laws of nature and of nations, and decide the case "_upon the eternal
principles of justice_." But all else is, in the light of this question
of Slavery, by which this age will be remembered and judged, a dreary,
barren waste of shifting, blinding, stifling sand.

History will tell whether America is to be judged by the words spoken by
him who so long held the highest seat in her courts. We do not think she
has fallen to such a depth. He did not speak for her; but he did for
himself.

By this record will the world judge Chief Justice Taney. His great
familiarity with the special practice; his knowledge of the peculiar
jurisdiction of his tribunals; his acquaintance with the doctrines and
decisions of the common law, with equity and admiralty; his opinions on
corporate and municipal powers and rights, on land claims, State
boundaries, the Gaines case, the Girard will, on corporations; his
decisions on patent-rights and on copyrights; his opinions extending
admiralty jurisdiction to inner waters, on liability of public officers,
and rights of State or national taxation, on the liquor and passenger
laws, on State insolvent laws, on commercial questions, on belligerent
rights, and on the organization of States,--after doing service for the
day in the mechanical branch of his craft, will soon be all forgotten.
But the slavocrats' revolution of the last two generations, and the
Secession war, and the triumph of Liberty, will be the theme of the
world; and he, of all who precipitated them, will be most likely, after
the traitor leaders, to be held in infamous remembrance; for he did more
than any other individual,--more than any President, if not more than
all,--more in one hour than the Legislature in thirty years,--to extend
the Slave Power. Indeed, he had solemnly decided all and more than all
that President Buchanan, closing his long political life of servility in
imbecility, in December, 1860, asked to have adopted as an "explanatory
amendment" of the Constitution, to fully satisfy the Slave Power. Well
would it have been for that Power, for a while at least, had its members
recollected that "no tyranny is so secure, none so remediless, as that
of executive courts"; well for them,--if it is better to rule in hell
than serve in heaven,--but worse for the world, had they been patient.
But the dose of poison was too great. Nature relieved itself. War came,
not the ruin, but the only salvation, of the state.

The movements of events have been so rapid, the work of generations
being done in as many years, that Taney's character is already historic;
and we can judge of it by his relation to the great event which alone
will preserve it from oblivion.

In judging his public character as the head of the Judiciary of America,
consider the _cause_ he sought to promote, his motives, the means he
used, his resources as a jurist and a lawyer in that cause, the intended
effect and actual results.

And of the cause this must be said and agreed by all, that there was
never one of which a court could take cognizance in America, England, or
the world so utterly evil and infamous as that of Slavery in the United
States. Did he realize its extent? Yes, there were "few freedmen
compared with the slaves," say only sixty thousand out of seven hundred
thousand in 1789. He fully realized that, in repudiating the promise
made for those seven hundred thousand, a pledge made with the most
solemn appeal to man and to God, he utterly destroyed the rights and
hopes of four million men. He knew he was deciding, for a vast empire,
weal or woe; and he knew it was woe, or he had no sense of justice.

And his motives? He was not venal, not corrupt, not a respecter of
persons. But there is something bad besides venality, corruption, and
personal partiality. The worst of motives is disposition to serve the
cause of evil. The country knows, the world will declare, none served it
so well. But was he conscious of serving it? Yes,--unless the traitors
so eagerly sought to put all these interests under his jurisdiction
without motive,--unless his eager and unnecessary, and, as was declared
and is now agreed, assumed jurisdiction over it, his "far-seeing" care
and untiring defence of them, their appeal to his decisions, were all
mistakes,--unless all these, and his manner, their motives, and the
assured results, coincided so as by the law of chances was
impossible,--he was conscious. To deny it is to say that he was imbued
with the spirit of evil.

The world knows by what means he assumed to settle these questions. We
have seen something of the nature of his arguments. With these, too, men
are somewhat familiar, and by these let them judge of him as a jurist.

There is not in them all one faint recognition of the axioms of
law,--one position founded on the laws of nature or the rules of eternal
justice and the right,--one notice of the great primal rules laid down
by all jurists and great judges of ancient and modern times, or of the
precepts of religion by which any magistrate in a Christian land must
expect to be governed, or to be held infamous forever. Nay, more: he
does not recognize at all those fundamental principles of the
Constitution and Declaration which are stated in plain terms in the
first lines of both. He did worse than torture and pervert language: he
reversed its meaning. He denied the undoubted facts of history. He
denied the settled truths of science. He slandered the memory of the
founders of the government and framers of the Declaration. He was ready
to cover the most glorious page of the history of his country with
infamy, and insulted the intelligence and virtue of the civilized world.

Where, outside his "_axiom in morals and politics_" can be found so
monstrous a combination of ignorance, injustice, falsehood, and impiety?
Ignorant of the meaning of an "axiom"; denying the truths of science;
falsifying history; setting above the Constitution the most odious
theory of tyranny, long before exploded; scoffing at the rules of
justice and sentiments of humanity,--he tied in a knot those cords which
must end the life of his country or be burst in revolution.

He well knew, too, what would be the effects of his decision. Avowedly
he was ready to lay the time-honored principles of civil right and the
ancient law at the feet of the Slave Power. The passions of a mighty
people never raged more fiercely than whilst that last cause was before
his court,--save in open war; and there was almost war then. He
well-knew nothing would so force them to desperation,--the desperation
of unlicensed barbarism or the immovable determination of truth and
justice driven to the wall. He knew, or if he did not, was so ignorant
that he was incompetent, that in such a contest on such fundamental
principles, such a decision must end in revolution and civil war. If he
dreamed of peace, then he was ready to seal the doom of four million,
and at the end of this century of ten million souls.

In all these decisions he appeals to no one great principle. There is
little in all his judgments to raise him above the rank of respectable
jurists; and in these, presenting the fairest occasion ever offered to a
true lawyer, to one fit to be called an American, nothing that will not
cover his name with infamy, where, on far lesser occasions, Hale and
Holt, Somers and Mansfield, covered theirs with honor, and added to the
glory of their country, and did good to mankind.

He was not, indeed, of that class of the bad to which the profane
Jeffreys and Scroggs and the obscene Kelyng belong. But he was as prone
to the wrong as was Chief Justice Fleming in sustaining impositions, and
Chancellor Ellesmere in supporting benevolences for King James; as ready
to do it as Hyde and Heath were to legalize "general warrants" "by
expositions of the law"; as Finch and Jones, Brampton and Coventry, were
to legalize "ship-money" for King Charles; as swift as Dudley was under
Andros; as Bernard and Hutchinson and Oliver were in Colonial times to
serve King George III.; as judges have been in later times to do like
evil work. Some of these, perhaps, had no conscious intent to do
specific wrong. Their failure was judicial blindness; their sin,
unconscious love of evil. But this question of Slavery towers above all
others that Taney ever had to consider; America professed a loftier
standard of justice than England ever adopted; the question of the
liberty of a race is more important, the question whether the State is
founded on might or on right is more vital, than those of warrants and
ship-money, benevolences and loans; and Roger Brooke Taney sinks below
all these tools of Tyranny.

Hobbes said, that, "when it should be thought contrary to the interest
of men that have dominion that the three angles of a triangle should
equal two right angles, that truth would be suppressed." Taney did deny
truths far plainer than that,--the axioms of right itself. He did more
than any other man to make actual that awful picture of the Great
Leviathan, the Mortal God. How just, how true, were those last symbols
of the State founded on mortal power! The end of the dread conflict of
battle is the same as the end of the equally dreadful issue of the
Court.

But those he served themselves with the sword cut the knot he so
securely tied; his own State was tearing off the poisoned robe in the
very hour in which he was called before the Judge of all. America stood
forth once more the same she was when the old man was a boy. The work
which he had watched for years and generations, the work of evil to
which all the art of man and the power of the State had been
subservient, that work which he sought to finish with the fatal decree
of his august bench, one cannon-shot shattered forever.

He is dead. Slavery is dying. The destiny of the country is in the hand
of the Eternal Lord.




THE MANTLE OF ST. JOHN DE MATHA

A LEGEND OF "THE RED, WHITE, AND BLUE," A.D. 1154-1864


    A strong and mighty Angel,
      Calm, terrible, and bright,
    The cross in blended red and blue
      Upon his mantle white!

    Two captives by him kneeling,
      Each on his broken chain,
    Sang praise to God who raiseth
      The dead to life again!

    Dropping his cross-wrought mantle,
      "Wear this," the Angel said;
    "Take thou, O Freedom's priest, its sign,--
      The white, the blue, and red."

    Then rose up John de Matha
      In the strength the Lord Christ gave,
    And begged through all the land of France
      The ransom of the slave.

    The gates of tower and castle
      Before him open flew,
    The drawbridge at his coming fell,
      The door-bolt backward drew.

    For all men owned his errand,
      And paid his righteous tax;
    And the hearts of lord and peasant
      Were in his hands as wax.

    At last, outbound from Tunis,
      His bark her anchor weighed,
    Freighted with seven score Christian souls
      Whose ransom he had paid.

    But, torn by Paynim hatred,
      Her sails in tatters hung;
    And on the wild waves, rudderless,
      A shattered hulk she swung.

    "God save us!" cried the captain,
      "For nought can man avail:
    Oh, woe betide the ship that lacks
      Her rudder and her sail!

    "Behind us are the Moormen;
      At sea we sink or strand:
    There's death upon the water,
      There's death upon the land!"

    Then up spake John de Matha:
      "God's errands never fail!
    Take thou the mantle which I wear,
      And make of it a sail."

    They raised the cross-wrought mantle,
      The blue, the white, the red;
    And straight before the wind off-shore
      The ship of Freedom sped.

    "God help us!" cried the seamen,
      "For vain is mortal skill:
    The good ship on a stormy sea
      Is drifting at its will."

    Then up spake John de Matha:
      "My mariners, never fear!
    The Lord whose breath has filled her sail
      May well our vessel steer!"

    So on through storm and darkness
      They drove for weary hours;
    And lo! the third gray morning shone
      On Ostia's friendly towers.

    And on the walls the watchers
      The ship of mercy knew,--
    They knew far off its holy cross,
      The red, the white, and blue.

    And the bells in all the steeples
      Rang out in glad accord,
    To welcome home to Christian soil
      The ransomed of the Lord.

    So runs the ancient legend
      By bard and painter told;
    And lo! the cycle rounds again,
      The new is as the old!

    With rudder foully broken,
      And sails by traitors torn,
    Our Country on a midnight sea
      Is waiting for the morn.

    Before her, nameless terror;
      Behind, the pirate foe;
    The clouds are black above her,
      The sea is white below.

    The hope of all who suffer,
      The dread of all who wrong;
    She drifts in darkness and in storm,
      How long, O Lord! how long?

    But courage, O my mariners!
      Ye shall not suffer wreck,
    While up to God the freedman's prayers
      Are rising from your deck.

    Is not your sail the banner
      Which God hath blest anew,
    The mantle that De Matha wore,
      The red, the white, the blue?

    Its hues are all of heaven,--
      The red of sunset's dye,
    The whiteness of the moon-lit cloud,
      The blue of morning's sky.

    Wait cheerily, then, O mariners,
      For daylight and for land;
    The breath of God is in your sail,
      Your rudder is His hand.

    Sail on, sail on, deep-freighted
      With blessings and with hopes;
    The saints of old with shadowy hands
      Are pulling at your ropes.

    Behind ye holy martyrs
      Uplift the palm and crown;
    Before ye unborn ages send
      Their benedictions down.

    Take heart from John de Matha!--
      God's errands never fail!
    Sweep on through storm and darkness,
      The thunder and the hail!

    Sail on! The morning cometh,
      The port ye yet shall win;
    And all the bells of God shall ring
      The good ship bravely in!




NEEDLE AND GARDEN.

THE STORY OF A SEAMSTRESS WHO LAID DOWN HER NEEDLE AND BECAME A
STRAWBERRY-GIRL.

WRITTEN BY HERSELF.


CHAPTER II.

All of us children were sent to the public school as soon as we were old
enough. There was no urgency required to get us off in the morning, as
we were too fond of books and reading to be found lagging as to time,
neither were we often caught at the tail of a class. Fred was
particularly smart in his studies, and was generally so much in advance
of myself as to be able to give me great assistance in things that I did
not fully understand, and there was so much affection between us that he
was always ready to play the teacher to us at home.

When fifteen years old, I was taken from school,--my education was
finished,--that is to say, I had received all I was to get, and that was
supposed to be enough for me: I was not to shine in the world. Though
far short of what the children of wealthy parents receive at fashionable
establishments, yet it was quite sufficient for my station in life,
which no one expected me to rise above. I had not studied either French
or music or dancing, nor sported fine dresses or showy bonnets; for our
whole bringing up was in keeping with our position. Was I not to be a
sewing-girl?--and how improper it would have been to educate me with
tastes which all the earnings of a sewing-girl would be unable to
gratify! I presume, that, if we had had the means, notwithstanding our
peculiarly strict training, we should have been indulged in some of
these superfluities. I know that I could easily have learned to enjoy
them quite as much as others do. But we were so taught at home that the
desire for them was never so strong as to occasion grief because it
could not be gratified. I think we were quite as happy without them.

As soon as I had left school, my mother installed me as her assistant
seamstress. She had at intervals continued to work for the slop-shops,
in spite of the low prices and the discourteous treatment she received;
and now, when established as her regular helper, I saw and learned more
of the trials inseparable from such an employment. I had also grown old
enough to understand what they were, and how mortifying to an honorable
self-respect. But I took to the needle with almost as great a liking--at
least at the beginning--as to my books. The desire to assist my mother
was also an absorbing one. I was as anxious to make good wages as she
was; for I now consumed more stuff for dresses, as well as a more costly
material, and in other ways increased the family expenses. It was the
same with Fred and Jane,--they were growing older, and added to the
general cost of housekeeping, but without being able to contribute
anything toward meeting it.

A girl in my station in life feels an honorable ambition to clothe
herself and pay for her board, as soon as she reaches eighteen years of
age. This praiseworthy desire seems to prevail universally with those
who have no portion to expect from parents, if their domestic training
has been of the right character. It does not spring from exacting
demands of either father or mother, but from a natural feeling of duty
and propriety, and a commendable pride to be thus far independent. If
able to earn money at any reputable employment, such girls eagerly
embrace it. They pay their parents from their weekly wages as
punctually as if boarding with a stranger, and it is to many of them a
serious grief when dull times come on and prevent them from earning
sufficient to continue these payments.

So unjustly low is the established scale of female wages, that girls of
this class are rarely able to save anything. They earn from two to three
dollars per week, and in thousands of cases not more than half of the
larger sum. It is because of these extremely small wages that the price
of board for a working-woman is established at so low a figure,--being
graduated to her ability to pay. But low as the price may be, it
consumes the chief part of her earnings, leaving her little to bestow on
the apparel in which every American woman feels a proper pride in
clothing herself. She must dress neatly at least, no matter how the
doing so may stint her in respect of all bodily or mental recreation;
for, with her, appearance is everything. A mean dress would in many
places exclude her from employment,--while a neat one would insure it.
Then, if working with other girls in factories, or binderies, or other
places where girls are largely employed, and where even a fashionable
style of dress is generally to be observed, she feels it necessary to
maintain a style equal to that of her fellow-workers. Thus the tax
imposed upon her by the absolute necessity of keeping up a genteel
appearance absorbs all the remainder of her little earnings.

Not so with the servant-girl in a family. She pays no board-tax,--her
earnings are all profit. But thus having more to spend on dress, she
clothes herself in expensive fabrics, until she generally outshines even
her mistress. So numerous is this class in our country, so high are
their wages, and so uniformly do they spend their earnings in costly
goods of foreign manufacture, all now paying an excessive import duty,
that I am half inclined to think these foreign cooks and chambermaids
may even be depended on to pay the interest of the public debt, if not
the great bulk of the debt itself. Their consumption of imported fabrics
on which a high duty is levied is very large, and no increase of price
seems to prevent them from continuing to purchase. Whoever shall inquire
of a shopkeeper on this subject will be told that this class of women
generally buy the most expensive goods. Indeed, one has only to observe
them in the street to see that they all have silks as essential to their
outfit, with abundance of laces and other foreign stuffs.

The change from the low wages, the hard work, and the mean fare in
Ireland to the high pay, the light work, and the abundant food of the
kitchens in this country, seems to produce a total revolution in their
habits and aspirations. Look at them as they land upon our wharves, all
of them in the commonest attire, the very coarsest shoes, many without
bonnets. Mark the contrast in their appearance which only a few months'
employment as cooks or chambermaids produces. Every thread of the cheap
home-made fabrics in which they came to this country has disappeared;
and in place of them may be seen flashy silks or equally flashy chintzes
or delaines, all the product of foreign looms. Every dollar they may
have thus far earned has been spent in personal adornment. At home,
extremely low wages and scanty employment made money comparatively
unattainable. Here, high wages and an active competition for their
services have put money into their hands so plenteously as to open to
them a new life. They see that American women generally dress
extravagantly; that even their own countrywomen whom they meet on their
arrival here are expensively attired; and the power of these pernicious
examples is such, that, when aided by that natural fondness for personal
decoration which I freely confess to be inherent in my sex, they begin
their new career by imitating them. At home, public example taught them
to be saving of their money; here, it teaches no other lesson than to
spend it. There, it came slowly and painfully, and was consequently
valued; here, it comes readily and for the asking, and is parted with
almost as quickly as it has been earned. I have never been the victim of
this common infatuation, to spend my last dollar on a dress that would
not become my station; I have been the architect of my own bonnets; I
have never been the owner of a silken outfit.

The idea of this class of women being large enough to pay the interest
on our public debt, in the shape of duties on the imported goods which
they consume, will of course excite a smile in all to whom it is
suggested. It will be a wonder, moreover, how the attention of a quiet
sewing-girl like myself should have been drawn to a subject so
exclusively within the domain of masculine thought. But all know that
the nation has been feeling the pressure of a universal rise of prices.
When any woman comes to buy the commonest article of dry goods for the
family, she finds that foreign fabrics are generally much higher in
price than goods of the same quality made in this country. On asking the
reason for this difference, she is told it is owing to the tariff, to
the greatly enhanced duty that has been put on foreign goods, and that
those who buy and consume them must pay this duty in the shape of an
increase of price. I have resolutely refused to purchase the imported
goods, and preferred those made at home, thus unconsciously becoming a
member of the woman's league for the support of domestic manufactures.

But it is not so with the army of foreign servant-girls among us. They
choose the finest and most expensive articles, loaded as they are with a
heavy duty. There are millions of American women who purchase in the
same way. This craving after foreign luxuries seems to be unconquerable
by anything short of absolute inability to indulge in it. But I suppose
there must always be somebody to purchase and consume these imported
goods. And perhaps, after all, it is well that there should be; for if
the nation is to pay a great sum every year for interest out of its
import duties, it could hardly raise the means, unless there were an
army of thoughtless American women and Irish servant-girls to help it do
so. If they are willing to undertake the task, I am sure they have my
consent.

If the reader should be surprised at the idea of the interest on the
public debt being paid from the extravagance of one class of women, he
will be more so at the assertion made by a speaker in the highest
deliberative body in the country, that another class would be able to
pay the debt itself. He said our dairy-women alone were able to do
it,--that in ten years they would churn it out,--because within that
short period they would produce butter enough to discharge the whole
amount. This may be all true; for how should I know the number of cows
in this country, or the disposition of the dairy-maids? But I presume he
had not consulted them as to whether they were willing to milk cows and
churn butter for a term of ten years for the sole benefit of the nation.
I am inclined to think they would make no such patriotic sacrifice,
except on compulsion. But with tawdry servant-girls and equally tawdry
ladies, the case is widely different; the latter pursue their great task
voluntarily; indeed, it would seem that they rather enjoy it; so that
the more one reflects on the idea, the less absurd does it appear.

It is very certain that the Irish who come among us have for many years
been sending home millions of dollars to pay the passage hither of
friends whom they had left behind. When these friends arrive here, and
have earned money enough, they repeat the process of sending for others
whom they in turn have left. The most limited inquiry will show how
universal this system of thus helping one another has become. Thus the
stream of remittances swells annually. The millions of money so
transmitted proves the ability of this class to achieve great pecuniary
results in a certain direction. That they thus exert themselves is
strong evidence of the intense affection existing among them. There are
innumerable instances of the father of a large family of children coming
out as a pioneer, then sending for the most useful child, and their
joint savings being devoted to sending for others, until finally the
amount becomes large enough to bring the mother with the younger
children,--the latter being meanwhile generally supported at home from
savings remitted with affectionate punctuality from this country, until
the happy day when they, too, receive the order for a passage. Many
times the entire family of a widowed mother, with the mother herself,
has been thus transferred to our shores from the savings of the son or
daughter who first ventured over. I refer to this remarkable trait in
the Irish character, not to censure, but to praise.

But they remit only a fraction of their total earnings, yet that
fraction constitutes a very large sum. The remainder, which so many of
them spend principally in dress, must be enormous. I have neither the
taste nor the talent for reducing it to figures; but the more one looks
at this question, the more reasonable does the idea seem that the Irish
servant-girls, together with the flash women of this country, have
deliberately undertaken to pay the interest on our great national debt.

How much it costs to clothe one of these gaudy creatures I cannot say;
but the silks and finery worn by them are known to every shopkeeper as
expensive articles. As I have never been able to indulge in such, I have
been content to admire them as they flirted by me in the street, or
swept up the aisles of our church on Sunday. It is so natural for a
woman to admire ornament in dress, that I could not avoid being struck
with the finish of an exquisite bonnet, the shape of a fashionable
cloak, or the pattern of an elegant collar. All these were paraded
through the streets and in the church, as much to my gratification as to
that of the wearers. They felt a pride in making the display, and a
pleasure in beholding it. I was like the poor lodger in the upper story
of an old house, the windows of which overlooked a magnificent garden.
The wealthy proprietor had lavished on his domain all that taste and art
and money could command to make it gorgeous with shrubbery and flowers.
The poor lodger, equally fond of floral beauties, beheld their glories,
and inhaled their soft perfumes, as fully and as appreciatively as the
owner. No emotion of envy disturbed her,--no longing to possess that of
which she enjoyed gratuitously so abundant a share. Her mere oversight
was all the possession she desired.

It was ever thus with me when the fine dresses of others swept by me
over the pavement. I confess that I admired, but no repining thought
ever came to disturb the perfect contentment with which I regarded my
plainer costume. It was no grief to me to be unable to indulge in these
luxuries. I saw them all, which was more than even the wearers could
say. They wore them for the gratification of the crowd of lookers-on;
and if the crowd were gratified, their mission was fulfilled. But I did
sometimes think upon the cost of these expensive outfits,--how some
girls equally poor with me must toil and struggle to obtain means for an
indulgence so unbecoming their position,--how others, the wealthy ones,
who, having never earned a dollar, knew nothing of its value, clothed
themselves with all the lavish finery that money could command, while
the meek sewing-girl who passed them on her way to the tailor's might
perhaps be kept from starving by the sums expended on the rich silks
which hung round them in superfluous flounces, or the costly brilliants
which depended from their ears.

It was said by Solomon, that "every wise woman buildeth her house." It
was averred by another wise man, that the mother of a family must
furnish it with brains, and that he never knew a man or woman of large
capacity who had a foolish mother. It is historically true that the
great men of all ages have been the children of wise and careful
mothers. Such women understand the art of skilfully managing the whole
machinery of the family. Taste and manners come to such by nature. They
cultivate the heart, the mind, and the conscience. They moderate the
aspirations of their daughters, and purify and elevate those of their
sons. It is from the influence which such mothers exercise over the
household that respectability and happiness result. My mother taught us
moderation in our views, and conformity to our position in life,
especially to avoid overstepping it in the article of dress. She was at
the very foundation of our house; it may be said that she built it.
While, therefore, our appearance was uniformly neat and genteel, none of
us were at any time dressed extravagantly. Thus educated from childhood,
it became a fixed habit of the mind to feel no envious longings at the
display which others made.

But curiosity could not be repressed. It was always interesting to know
the cost of this or that fine article which others wore. There was
little difficulty in obtaining this information as to the outfits of our
neighbors. The fine lady invariably told her acquaintances how much her
cloak or bonnet cost, and from these the information was communicated to
the servants, whence it quickly radiated over the entire neighborhood.
The pride seemed to be, not that the new bonnet was a superb affair, but
that such a fashionable artist produced it, and that it cost so much
money. Had it been equally beautiful at half the cost, or the handiwork
of an obscure milliner, it would have been considered mean. Thus,
instead of a necessity for being extravagant, it struck me there was a
desire to be so, and principally in order that others, when they looked
on the display, might be awed into deference, if not into admiration, by
exact knowledge of the number of dollars which dangled from the
shoulders of the fashionable butterfly. This boastful parade of
information as to how much one expends in this or that article implies
an undertone of vulgarity peculiar to those who have nothing but money
to be proud of. The cultivated and truly genteel mind is never guilty of
it. Yet it somehow prevails too extensively among American women.
Display is a sort of mania with too many of them. A family in moderate
circumstances marries off a daughter with a portion of only two or three
thousand dollars, yet it is all laid out in furnishing a house which is
twice as spacious as a first start in life can possibly require. Not a
dollar is saved for the future. The wedding also has its shams. Costly
silver plate is hired in large quantities from the manufacturer, and
spread ostentatiously over tables, to which the wedding-guests are
invited, that they may admire the pretended presents thus insincerely
represented as having been made to the bride. When the feast is over, it
is all returned to the maker. Truth is sacrificed to display. The latter
must be had, no matter what may become of the former.

As I was animated by the common ambition of all properly educated girls
in my position, to pay my own way, so I worked with my needle with the
utmost assiduity. I worked constantly on such garments as my mother
could obtain from the shops, going with her to secure them, as well as
to deliver such as we had made up, each of us very frequently carrying a
heavy bundle to and fro. Should the tailor sell the cheapest article in
his shop, scarcely weighing a pound, he was all courtesy to the buyer,
and his messenger would be despatched half over the city to deliver it.
Not so, however, with the sewing-women. There was no messenger to wait
on them; their heavy bundles they must carry for themselves.

The prices paid to us were always low. As the character of the work
varied, so did the price. Sometimes we brought home shirts to make up at
only twenty cents apiece, sometimes pantaloons at a trifle more, and
sometimes vests at a shilling. No fine lady knows how many thousand
stitches are required to make up one of these garments, because she has
never thus employed her fingers. But I know, because I have often sat a
whole day and far into the night, in making a single shirt. No matter
how sick one might feel, or how sultry and relaxing the weather, the
work must go on; for it must be delivered within a specified time. I
have seen the most heartless advertisements in the newspapers, calling
on some one, giving even her name and the place of her residence, to
return to the tailor certain articles she had taken to make up, with a
threat to prosecute her, if they were not returned immediately. But the
poor sewing-girl thus publicly traduced as a thief may have been taken
ill, and been thus disabled from completing her task; she may have lived
a great distance from the shop, and had no one to send with notice of
her illness, so as to account for the non-delivery of the work; yet in
her helplessness the stigma of dishonesty has been cruelly cast upon
her.

One of my schoolmates, the eldest child of a widow who had five others
to provide for, had just begun working for a shop situated a full mile
from her mother's residence. She was a bright, lively, and highly
sensitive girl of sixteen. The day after bringing home a heavy bundle of
coarse pantaloons, she was taken down with brain-fever. It was believed
that she had been overcome by the effort required of her young and
fragile frame in carrying the great burden under a hot noonday sun. She
languished for days, but with intervals of consciousness, during which
her inability to finish the work at the stipulated time was her constant
anxiety. Her mother soothed her apprehension by assurances that a delay
of a few days in the delivery could be of no consequence; and so
believing, in fact, she sent no message to the tailor that her child was
ill and unable to complete her task. A week of suffering thus passed.
Saturday came and went without the work being delivered to her employer.
But the poor girl was better, even convalescent; another week would
probably enable her to resume the needle. On Sunday I went to see her.
She was quiet, and in her right mind, but still anxious about her
failure to be punctual.

I volunteered to call the next morning and inform the employer of her
illness. I did so. He was in a mean shop, whose whole contents had been
displayed in thick festoons, of jackets, shirts, and pantaloons, on the
outside, where a man was pacing to and fro upon the pavement, whose
vocation it was to accost and convert into a purchaser every passer-by
who chanced even to look, at his goods. I was most unfavorably impressed
with all that I saw about the shop. When I went in, the impression
deepened. There sat the proprietor in his shirt-sleeves, a
vulgar-looking creature, smoking a cigar; neither did he rise or cease
to puff when I accosted him. Why should he? I was only a sewing-girl. I
told him my business,--that my friend had been ill and unable to
complete her work, but that she was now recovering, and would return it
before many days. Putting on a sneer so sinister and vicious that it was
long before I ceased to carry it in my memory, he replied,--

"It's of no consequence,--I've seen to it. She's too late."

Though the man's manner was offensive, yet I attached no particular
meaning to his words. But on reaching home, my mother showed me an
advertisement in a widely circulated penny-paper which we took, warning
the poor sick sewing-girl to return her work immediately, on pain of
being prosecuted. There was her name in full, and the number of the
house in the little court where she lived. My mother was almost in tears
over the announcement. We knew the family well; they were extremely
poor, had been greatly afflicted by sickness, while the mother was a
model of patient industry, with so deep a sense of religious obligation
that nothing but her perfect reliance on the wisdom and goodness of God
could have supported her through all her multiplied afflictions. Her
husband had been for years a miserable drunkard, as well as dreadfully
abusive of his wife and family. The daughter had sat next to me at
school, to and from which we had been in the daily habit of going
together. I had a strong affection for her. It was natural that I should
be overwhelmed with indignation at the man who had perpetrated this
wanton outrage, and excited with alarm for my poor friend, should she be
made acquainted with it. All day I was in an agony of apprehension for
her. It was impossible for me to go to her, as she lived a great way
off, and we, too, had work on our hands which was pressingly required at
the end of the week.

But that evening I stole off to see her. I had no sooner set foot within
the narrow court than it was apparent that something had gone wrong.
There was a group of neighbors gathered round the door, conversing in a
subdued tone, as if overtaken by a common calamity. They told me that my
poor young friend was dying! Some one, at the very hour when I was in
the shop of the unfeeling tailor, excusing the delinquency of his sick
sewing-girl, had incautiously gone up into her chamber with the morning
paper, and, in the absence of her mother, had read to the unfortunate
girl the terrible proclamation of her shame. The effect was immediate
and violent. The fever on her brain came back with renewed intensity,
and absolute madness supervened. All day she raved with agonizing
incoherency, no medical skill availing to mitigate the violence of the
attack. As evening came on, it brought exhaustion of strength, with
indications of speedy dissolution. When I reached the bedside, the poor
body lay calm and still; but the yet unconquered mind was breaking forth
in occasional flashes of consciousness. Suddenly starting up and looking
round the group at her bedside, she exclaimed,--

"A thief, mother! I am not a thief!"

Oh, this death-bed--the first that I had ever seen--was awful! But my
nervous organization enabled me to witness it without trepidation or
alarm. Love, sympathy, regret, and indignation were the only emotions
that took possession of my heart. I even held in my own the now almost
pulseless hand of this poor victim of a brutal persecution, and felt the
lessening current of her innocent life become weaker and weaker. For
three long hours--long indeed to me, but far longer to her--we watched
and prayed. Suddenly the restlessness of immediate dissolution came over
her. Turning to her mother, she again exclaimed, as if perfectly
conscious,--

"Dear mother, tell them I was not a thief!"

Oh, it was grievous unto heart-breaking to see and hear all this! But it
was the last effort, the last word, the closing scene. I felt the
pulsation stop short; I looked into her face; I saw that respiration had
ceased; I saw the lustre of the living eye suddenly disappear: her
gentle spirit had burst the shackles which detained it here, and winged
its flight, we humbly trusted, to a mansion of eternal rest.

Not until then did a single tear come to relieve me. We sat by the poor
girl's bedside in weeping silence. No heavier heart went to its pillow
that night than mine.

I have related this incident as an illustration of the hazards to which
needle-women are exposed when dealing with the more unprincipled
employers. I will not say that tragedies of this character are of
frequent occurrence,--or that the provocation to them has not been too
often given. There have no doubt been frequent instances of employers
being defrauded by sewing-women who have dishonestly failed to return
the work taken out, even giving to them a fictitious name and residence.
In such cases, an effort to obtain redress by public exposure, the only
apparent remedy, might seem excusable. But though the fraud is
vexatious, yet, as the utmost that a sewing-girl could steal would be of
small value, the resort to newspaper exposure seems to be a very harsh
mode of obtaining restitution. It appears to me that vengeance, more
than restitution, is the object of him who hastily adopts it. It may
lead to sad and even fatal mistakes,--fatal to life itself, as well as
to the purest reputation, the only capital which too many sewing-women
possess.

My weekly earnings with the needle, while a girl, never reached a sum
more than enough to board and clothe me. But I felt proud of being able
to accomplish even what I did. When any little sum for recreation was
wanted, it was cheerfully handed out to me, but our recreations were
rare and cheap, for we selected those which were moderate and homely. My
father taught me to work in the garden; and there I spent many odd hours
in hoeing among the vegetables and flowers, clearing the beds of weeds,
and raking the ground smooth and even. This employment was beneficial to
health and appetite, and afforded an excellent opportunity for
reflection. He taught me all the botanical names that he had picked up
from the gentlemen for whom he worked, having acquired an amusing
fondness for remembering and repeating them. I learned them all, because
he desired me to do so, and because I saw it gratified him for me to
take an interest in such things. I do not think this kind of knowledge
did him much good; for he was unable to give reasons when I inquired for
them.

But for the use of these sonorous designations for common things was a
sort of conversational hobby with him. I cannot say that he was unduly
proud of the little draughts of learning he had thus taken at the
neighboring fountains, but rather that it became a sort of passion with
him, yet regulated by a sincere desire to impart to his children all the
knowledge he had himself acquired. There was great merriment among us
when he first began to use some of these hard botanical names. He did so
with the utmost gravity of countenance, which only increased our
amusement. I remember one summer evening he told Fred, on leaving the
supper-table, to go out and pull up a _Phytolacca_ that was going to
seed just over the garden-fence. Fred stopped in amazement at hearing so
strange a word; and I confess that it bewildered even me. Then followed
the very explanation which father had intended to give. He told us it
was a poke-bush.

"Oh," said Fred, with a broad laugh, "is that all?"

But the word was forthwith written down, so as to impress it on our
memories, and none of us have yet forgotten it. It was singular,
moreover, how the imitative faculty gained strength among us. We
children acquired the habit of speaking of all our garden-plants by such
outlandish names as father then taught us,--not seriously, of course,
but as a capital piece of fun. We knew no more of relations and
affinities than he, and so used these names much as parrots repeat the
chance phrases they sometimes learn; still, the faint glimmerings of
knowledge thus early shed upon our minds came back to us in after life,
and, explained and illustrated by study and observation, now serve as
positive lights to the understanding.

I thus learned a great deal by working in the garden, and at the same
time became extremely fond of it, taking the utmost delight in planting
the seeds and watching the growth of even a cabbage-head, as well as in
keeping the ground clear of interloping weeds. I even learned to combine
the useful with the beautiful, which some have declared to be the
highest phase of art. Fred did all the digging, and in dry times was
very ready to water whatever might be suffering from drought.

My mother encouraged these labors as aids to health. The time they
occupied could be spared from the needle, as the garden required
attention but a few months, and only occasionally even then, while the
needle could be employed the whole year round. Besides, the family
earnings were not all absorbed by our weekly expenses. We had no rent to
pay, and there was nothing laid out in improvements. Hence a small
portion of father's earnings was carefully laid by every week,--not
enough to make us rich, but still sufficient to prevent us, if
continued, from ever becoming poor.

While thus industriously working with the needle, we began to feel the
effect on female labor which the introduction of sewing-machines had
occasioned. The prices given by the tailors were not only becoming less
and less, but our employers were continually more exacting as to the
quality of the work, and evidently more independent of us. In very busy
seasons, when they really needed all the clothing we could make up, they
were courteous enough, because they were then unable to do without us.
But the introduction of sewing-machines seemed to revolutionize their
behavior. As every movement of the machine was exactly like every other,
so there was an astonishing uniformity in the work it performed; and if
it made the first stitch neatly, all the succeeding ones must be equally
neat. Hence the beautiful regularity of the work it turned out. It
looked nicer than any we could do by hand, though in reality not more
substantial. Its amazing rapidity of execution was another element of
superiority, against which, it was believed, no sewing-woman could
successfully contend.

Heretofore, I had noticed that our employers had, on numerous occasions,
set up the most frivolous pretexts for reducing our wages. In all my
experience they never once advanced them, even when crowding us so hard
as to compel us to sew half the night. The standing cry was that we must
work for less, but there was never a lisp of giving us more. At one time
the reason was--for reasons were plenty enough--that the merchant had
advanced the prices of his cloths; at another, that a new tariff had
enhanced the cost of goods; at another, that the men in their employ had
struck for higher wages. Generally, the reason alleged for the new
imposition on us was foolish and unsatisfactory, and to most women, who
knew so little of merchandise and tariffs, quite incomprehensible. The
whole drift was, that, as others laid it on the tailors, the latter must
lay it on the sewing-women. But all the reasons thus set before us I
turned over in my mind, and thought a great deal about. I never had the
uncomplaining timidity of my mother, when dealing with these men,--and
so, on more than one occasion, was bold enough to speak out for our
rights. It struck me, from the various pretexts set up for cutting down
our scanty wages, that they were untrue, and had been trumped up for the
sole purpose of cheapening our work. Some of them were so transparently
false that I wondered how any one could have the impudence to present
them. Those who did so must have considered a sewing-woman as either too
dull to detect the fallacy, or too timid to expose and resent it.

We had on one occasion just begun sewing for a tailor who was considered
to be of the better class,--that is, one who kept a shop in a
fashionable street, and sold a finer and better description of goods
than were to be found in the slop-shops,--and while making up a dozen
fine vests, were congratulating ourselves on having advanced a step in
our profession. The man was very civil to us, and had justly acquired
the reputation, among the sewing-women, of dealing fairly and
courteously with those he employed. When our first dozen vests were
done, we took them in. There was a decided commendation as to the
excellence of the work,--it was entirely satisfactory,--the price was
paid,--but if we wanted more, he would have to pay us so much less. This
was at the very beginning of the season, when such vests would be in
demand. Had it been at the close, when sales were dull and little work
needed, I could have understood why a reduction was demanded, or why no
more vests were to be given out; but now I could not, and felt mortified
and indignant.

My mother said nothing. On such occasions she invariably submitted to
the imposition without remonstrance. It is the misfortune of most
sewing-women to be obliged to bear these hard exactions in silence.
Continued employment is with them so great a necessity as to compel them
to do so. But not feeling this urgency myself, and being now grown a
little older, and no doubt a little bolder, I ventured to address the
tailor in reply.

"Why do you ask us to take less for our work, Sir?"

"Goods have gone up, Miss," he responded. "The importers charge us
twenty per cent more."

"Do you require _them_ to take less, as you do us?"

"Oh," said he, "they're very independent. We may buy or not, they say,
just as we please. Everybody wants these goods,--they are very scarce in
the market, and we must pay the advance or go without them."

"Then," I added, "if the goods are so scarce and desirable, the vests
made of them ought to be equally so, and thus command a corresponding
advance from the consumer."

"Certainly," he quickly replied, "we put the advanced cost on the
buyer."

"Then the same reason holds good to make him pay more and us to take
less," I replied, with an impetuosity of tone and manner that I could
not resist, "If you get the advance out of him, why do you take it off
of us?"

I saw that my mother was growing restless and uneasy, but I continued,--

"Do you consider the reason you have given for reducing our scanty wages
to be either just or generous? You require us to sit up half the night
to get this work done, that you may supply customers who, by your own
statement, will pay you as good a profit on our next week's work as you
get on that which we have just delivered. You advance your own prices,
but cut down ours. By the money paid us you see that we have made only
four dollars in the week, and now you ask us to work for three. Can two
women live on three dollars a week? You might"----

I was so fully under way, that there is no knowing what more I might
have said, had not my mother stopped me short. But my indignation was
roused, and I was about to begin again, when the tailor interposed by
saying,--

"Do as you please, Miss,--that's my price,--and yours too, or not, just
as you choose."

Just then the man's wife came into the shop, and called off his
attention from us. I noticed that she was dressed in the extreme of the
fashion. There were silks, and laces, and jewelry in abundance, the
profits of the unrequited toil of many poor sewing-women. I told my
mother we would take no more vests from this shop, and would look for a
new employer, and started to go out. But she, being less excitable,
lingered, asked for a second bundle, and came out with it on her arm. I
carried it home, but it weighed heavily on my hands. We made up the
vests, but the otherwise pleasant labor of my needle was embittered by
the reflection of how great a wrong had been done to us. The sting of
this imposition continued to rankle in my heart so long as we were the
bondwomen of this particular man.

This persistent tendency to a reduction of wages acquired new strength
from the introduction of sewing-machines. As they came gradually into
general use, we found the cry raised in all the shops that machine-work
was so much better than hand-work, that nothing but the former was
wanted,--customers would have no other. I am satisfied that this also
was to some extent a mere pretext to accomplish a fresh reduction of
prices. The work may really have been better done, yet, notwithstanding
that fact, we were told the shops would continue to employ us at
hand-work, if we would do it at the same rate with the machine-work. It
was thus evident that it was not a question as to the quality of the
sewing, but simply one of price. Machinery had been made to compete with
muscle, and we were fairly in a dilemma which occasioned us an amount of
uneasiness that was truly distressing.

I did not attempt to fly in the face of this state of things by argument
or repining. I saw the result--at least I thought so--from the
beginning. To satisfy my doubts, I first went to see the machines while
in operation. How they could possibly overcome the mechanical
perplexities of needle and thread I could not imagine; neither, when I
saw them performing their work with such beautiful simplicity, could I
clearly understand how it was done. But my curiosity was gratified, and
my doubts resolved,--the great fact was made manifest. It struck me with
a sort of dismay. My mother was with me on this occasion, and she was
quite as much discouraged as myself, for her darling theory of the
supremacy of the needle had been blown to the winds. She would be
compelled to admit that hereafter the machine was to be paramount, and
the seamstress comparatively obsolete.

It could not be denied that the machines were capable of doing work as
beautifully as it could be done by needle-women. Then we were confounded
by the amazing rapidity with which they made the stitches. We saw that
it was vain to expect our slow fingers to compete with the
lightning-like velocity attained by simply putting the foot upon a
treadle. I have no doubt that thousands of sewing-girls, all over the
country, were equally astonished and disheartened, when they came to be
assured of the success of these machines. They must have seen, as we
did, that prices would speedily go down. Indeed, all who were in
immediate communication with the tailors became aware, at a very early
day, of the downward tendency. I confess that no other result was to be
expected, and that in this instance the call upon us was not entirely a
pretext of the tailors, but a necessity forced upon them by a new agency
suddenly introduced into their business, which they must immediately
counteract or embrace, or else give up their occupation.

The first tailor who bought a dozen machines found no difficulty in
having as many girls taught to operate them. The makers saw to it that
no impediment to their sale should occur from girls of ordinary
intelligence being unable to use them; so the first sewers were taught
either by the inventors themselves or by the skilled mechanics who
constructed the machines. As the girls learned quickly, so, when only a
small number had become expert at using them, they served as teachers to
others. Thus the operatives were multiplied almost as rapidly as the
machines. It was quite as difficult, at the first introduction, to
obtain the machines as it was to procure operators, so immediately was
the invention recognized by a vast industrial interest as the forerunner
of a complete revolution in all departments of sewing.

But, as already mentioned, the first tailor who bought machines was able
to set them at work directly. As one machine would perform about as much
in a day as ten women, the saving in the labor of the nine thus
dispensed with enabled him to reduce the price of his manufactured goods
to a figure so low that he could undersell all others in the trade.
Cheapness being everywhere the cry, he who sold at the lowest rates was
able to dispose of the most goods. It is not likely that he gave his
customers the full benefit of all the saving made by discharging nine
girls out of ten. This was large; for, while he saved their wages, he
made little or no advance in those of the remaining girl, who now did on
a machine as much work as the whole ten had previously done with their
needles. The only difference to her was, that she dropped the needle,
and employed a machine. She was, in either case, a mere sewing-girl; and
if she made her two or three dollars a week, it was enough. She had
never made more: why should she be permitted to do so now? It would have
been altogether contrary to usage to permit such a hand to have any
benefit from any general improvement or economy in the employer's great
establishment. The men are frequently able to exact it, but the women
never.

A tailor thus underselling all others, and yet making greater profits
than ever, invited imitation and competition. All who were able to
procure machines did so as fast as the inventors could supply the
demand. This became so enormous and pressing that new manufactories were
speedily established, and rival machines came into use by scores.
Clothing-shops and other establishments went into operation with a
hundred machines in each, throwing multitudes of sewing-women out of
employment. Steam was called in to take the place of female fingers. The
human, machine was suddenly discarded,--turned off, without notice or
compunction, to seek other occupation, or to suffer for want of it.

No wonder that we should be dismayed when such a prospect as this was
seen opening itself before us. Neither is it to be wondered at that
prices broke down as the revolution progressed. I was confounded at the
low rates to which wages fell. The price for making a shirt was reduced
one half. Fine bosoms, crowded with plaits and full of seams, were made
for a few cents per dozen. Even the mean slop-shop work was so poorly
paid, that no woman, working full time, could earn much more than a
dollar a week. If ill, or with a family of children to look after, her
case was apparently hopeless. How all the sewing-women thus suddenly
reduced to idleness were to gain a livelihood I could not comprehend. A
cry of distress rose up from the toiling inmates of many a humble home
around us. The privilege to toil had been suddenly withdrawn from them.

Even my mother, as I have said, began to wake up from the delusion under
which she had hitherto labored, that the needle was a woman's best and
surest dependence; for here was a revolution that had not entered into
her imagination. Though not at any time impoverished or even straitened
by it, yet she saw how others were; and it led her to think that women
might be not only usefully employed at many new things, but that they
ought to be qualified by education for even a variety of occupations, so
that, when one staff gave way, another would remain to lean upon. I
suggested that the reason why so many were at that time idle was, that
all of them had been brought up to do the same thing,--to sew,--and that
they did not seek employment in other pursuits because their industrial
education had not been sufficiently diversified; they were not
qualified, and consequently would not be employed.

A woman can become expert at the needle only by proper training through
a regular apprenticeship. If necessary in that instance, it is equally
so in all others. Every great city abounds in employments for which
women are especially fitted, both mentally and physically; and they are
shut out from them only for want of proper training, and the deplorable
absence of available facilities for acquiring it. The boy is
apprenticed, serves out his time, and secures remunerative wages. Why
not give a similar training to his sister? If girls were properly
instructed, they would be profitably employed. It has been so with the
seamstress: why should it be otherwise in a different sphere?

At no time had we been in the habit of telling my father the particulars
of our experience with the tailors. He heard only incidentally how
little we earned, while our greatest grievances were rarely spoken of
before him. The truth is, that he had a very poor opinion of the craft.
I am sure, that, if he had known as much of them as we did, it would
have been even more unfavorable. But here was an entirely new trouble to
be met and overcome, requiring the utmost wisdom of the whole family to
master it. As to our ceasing work, no one dreamed of that; the anxiety
was, to be kept at it. Our consultations and discussions were
consequently frequent and long. My father joined in these with great
interest, but could suggest no remedy.

I had noticed that our penny paper was crowded with advertisements for
girls who understood working on a sewing-machine; and I learned from
several of my acquaintances that not only was the demand for such
operatives unlimited, but that an expert hand was able to earn quite as
much as with the needle formerly, while some were earning much more. It
struck me that I had overlooked the important fact that all the sewing
for the public was still to be done by women, even though machines had
been invented on which to do it: in our first depression, we had
innocently supposed that in future it was to be done by men. It was
obvious, then, that our only course was to get machines,--one for my
mother, and one for myself. I knew that I should learn quickly, and was
sure that I could earn as much as any one else.

My mother entered heartily into the plan, as it held out to us the
certainty of continued employment. We explained the case to my father,
and he also approved of the project, and agreed to buy us a machine. He
thought it better to begin with only one, to see whether we could
understand it, and find a sale for our work, as well as how we liked it.
Besides, when these machines were first made, the inventors exacted an
exorbitant price for them,--they, too, in this way levying a cruel tax
on the sewing-women. The cost at that time was from a hundred and twenty
to a hundred and fifty dollars. My father could manage to provide us
with one, but the expense of two was more than he could assume. I was
then within a few weeks of being eighteen; and it was arranged that I
should devote the intervening time to learning how to operate a machine,
by attending one of the schools for beginners then opened by lady
teachers, and that the new purchase should be my birthday present. So,
paying ten dollars for instruction, and agreeing to work eight weeks
without wages, I took my position, with more than a dozen others, as a
learner at the sewing-machine.




NOTES OF A PIANIST.


I.

There is a class of persons to whom art in general is but a fashionable
luxury, and music in particular but an agreeable sound, an elegant
superfluity serving to relieve the tedium of conversation at a soiree,
and fill up the space between sorbets and supper. To such, any
philosophical discussion on the æsthetics of art must seem as puerile an
occupation as that of the fairy who spent her time weighing grains of
dust with a spider's web. Artists, to whom, through a foreign prejudice
which dates back to the barbarism of the Middle Ages, they persist in
refusing any high place in the social scale, are to them only petty
tradesmen dealing in suspicious wares (in most instances unshrewdly,
since they rarely get rich, which aggravates their position); while what
they call performers are looked upon by them as mere tricksters or
jugglers, who profit by the dexterity of their fingers, as dancers and
acrobats by the suppleness of their limbs. The painter whose works
decorate their saloons figures in the budget of their expenses on a line
with the upholsterer, whose hangings they speak of in the same breath
with Church's "Heart of the Andes," and Rosa Bonheur's "Cattle Fair."

It is not for such people that I write; but there are others,--and to
these I address myself,--who recognize in the artist the privileged
instrument of a moral and civilizing influence; who appreciate art
because they derive from it pure and ennobling inspirations; who respect
it because it is the highest expression of human thought, aiming at the
absolute ideal; and who love it as we love the friend to whom we
confide our joys and sorrows, and in whom we find a faithful response to
every movement of the soul.

Lamartine has said, with truth, "Music is the literature of the heart;
it commences where speech ends." In fact, music is a psycho-physical
phenomenon. In its germ, it is a sensation; in its full development, an
ideal. It is sufficient not to be deaf to perceive music, at least, if
not to appreciate it. Even idiots and maniacs are subject to its
influence. Not being restricted to any precise sense, going beyond the
mere letter, and expressing only states of the soul, it has this
advantage over literature, that every one can assimilate it to his own
passions, and adapt it to the sentiments which rule him. Its power,
limited in the intellectual order to the imitative passions, is in that
of the imagination unlimited. It responds to an interior, indefinable
sense possessed by all,--the ideal.

Literature is always objective: it speaks to the understanding, and
determines in us impressions in keeping with the determined sense which
it expresses. Music, on the contrary, may be, in turn, objective and
subjective, according to the disposition in which we find ourselves at
the moment of hearing it. It is objective when, affected only by the
purely physical sensation of sound, we listen to it passively, and it
suggests to us impressions. A march, a waltz, a flute imitating the
nightingale, the chromatic scale imitating the murmuring of the wind in
the "Pastoral Symphony," may be taken as examples.

It is subjective when, under the empire of a latent impression, we
discover in its general character an accordance with our psychological
state, and we assimilate it to ourselves; it is then like a mirror in
which we see reflected the movements which agitate us, with a fidelity
all the more exact from the fact that, without being conscious of it, we
ourselves are the painters of the picture which unrolls itself before
our imagination.

Let me explain. Play a melancholy air to a proscript thinking of his
distant home; to a deserted lover; to a mother mourning the loss of a
child; to a vanquished warrior;--and be assured they will all
appropriate to themselves the plaintive harmonies, and fancy they detect
in them the accents of their own grief.

The fact of music is still a mystery. We know that it is composed of
three principles,--air, vibration, and rhythmic symmetry. Strike an
object in an exhausted receiver, and it produces no sound, because no
air is there; touch a ringing glass, and the sound stops, because there
is no vibration; take away the rhythm of the simplest air by changing
the duration of the notes that compose it, and you render it obscure and
unrecognizable, because you have destroyed its symmetry.

But why, then, do not several hammers striking in cadence produce music?
They certainly comply with the three conditions of air, vibration, and
rhythm. Why is the accord of a third so pleasing to the ear? Why is the
minor mode so suggestive of sadness? There is the mystery,--there the
unexplained phenomenon.

We restrict ourselves to saying that music, which, like speech, is
perceived through the medium of the ear, does not, like speech, call
upon the brain for an explanation of the sensation produced by the
vibration on the nerves; it addresses itself to a mysterious agent
within us, which is superior to intelligence, since it is independent of
it, and makes us feel that which we can neither conceive nor explain.

Let us examine the various attributes of the musical phenomenon.

1. _Music is a physical agent._ It communicates to the body shocks which
agitate the members to their base. In churches the flame of the candles
oscillates to the quake of the organ. A powerful orchestra near a sheet
of water ruffles its surface. A learned traveller speaks of an iron ring
which swings to and fro to the murmur of the Tivoli Falls. In
Switzerland I excited at will, in a poor child afflicted with a
frightful nervous malady, hysterical and catalyptic crises, by playing
in the minor key of E flat. The celebrated Doctor Bertier asserts that
the sound of a drum gives him the colic. Certain medical men state that
the notes of the trumpet quicken the pulse and induce slight
perspiration. The sound of the bassoon is cold; the notes of the French
horn at a distance, and of the harp, are voluptuous. The flute played
softly in the middle register calms the nerves. The low notes of the
piano frighten children. I once had a dog who would generally sleep on
hearing music, but the moment I played in the minor key he would bark
piteously. The dog of a celebrated singer whom I knew would moan
bitterly, and give signs of violent suffering, the instant that his
mistress chanted a chromatic gamut. A certain chord produces on my sense
of hearing the same effect as the heliotrope on my sense of smell and
the pine-apple on my sense of taste. Rachel's voice delighted the ear by
its ring before one had time to seize the sense of what was said, or
appreciate the purity of her diction.

We may affirm, then, that musical sound, rhythmical or not, agitates the
whole physical economy,--quickens the pulse, incites perspiration, and
produces a pleasant momentary irritation of the nervous system.

2. _Music is a moral agent._ Through the medium of the nervous system,
the direct interpreter of emotion, it calls into play the higher
faculties; its language is that of sentiment Furthermore, the motives
which have presided over particular musical combinations establish links
between the composer and the listener. We sigh with Bellini in the
finale of La Somnambula; we shudder with Weber in the sublime
phantasmagoria of Der Freischutz; the mystic inspirations of Palestrina,
the masses of Mozart, transport us to the celestial regions, toward
which they rise like a melodious incense. Music awakens in us
reminiscences, souvenirs, associations. When we have wept over a song,
it ever after seems to us bathed in tears.

A celebrated pianist tells me that, in a city where he was giving
concerts, he became acquainted with a charming young girl. He was twenty
years old, and had all the poetic and generous illusions of that
romantic age. She was sixteen. They loved each other without daring to
confess it, and perhaps without knowing it themselves. But the hour of
separation came: he was passing his last evening at her house. Observed
by the family, he could only furtively join hands with her at the moment
of parting. The poem was but commenced, to be arrested at the first
page: he never saw her again. Disheartened, distracted with grief, he
wandered through the dark streets, until at two in the morning he found
himself again under her windows. She too was awake. Their thoughts,
drawn together by that divine tie which merits the name of love only in
the morning of life, met in unison, for she was playing gently in the
solitude of her chamber the first notes of a mazurka which they had
danced together. "Tears came to my eyes," said my friend, "on hearing
this music, which seemed to me sublime; it was the stifled plaint of her
heart; it was her grief which exhaled from her fingers; it was the
eternal adieu. For years I believed this mazurka to be a marvellous
inspiration, and it was not till long after, when age had dispelled my
illusions and obliterated the adored image, that I discovered it was
only a vulgar and trivial commonplace: the gold was changed to brass."

The old man, chilled by years, may be insensible to the pathetic accents
of Rossini, of Mozart: but repeat to him the simple songs of his youth,
the present vanishes, and the illusions of the past come back again. I
once knew an old Spanish general who detested music. One day I began to
play to him my "Siege of Saragossa," in which is introduced the "Marcha
Real" (Spanish national air), and he wept like a child. This air
recalled to him the immortal defence of the heroic city, behind the
falling walls of which he had fought against the French, and sounded to
him, he said, like the voice of all the holy affections expressed by the
word _home_. The mercenary Swiss troops, when in France and Naples,
could not hear the "Ranz des Vaches" (the shepherd song of old and rude
Helvetia) without being overcome by it. When from mountain to mountain
the signal of revolt summoned to the cause the three insurgent Cantons,
the desertions caused by this air became so frequent that the government
prohibited it. The reader will remember the comic effect produced upon
the French troops in the Crimea by the Highlanders marching to battle to
the sound of the bagpipe, whose harsh, piercing notes inspired these
brave mountaineers with valor, by recalling to them their country and
its heroic legends. Napoleon III. finds himself compelled to allow the
Arab troops incorporated into his army their barbarous tam-tam music,
lest they revolt. The measured beat of the drum sustains the soldier in
long marches which otherwise would be insupportable. The Marseillaise
contributed as much toward the republican victories of 1793, when France
was invaded, as the genius of General Dumouriez.

3. _Music is a complex agent._ It acts at once on life, on the instinct,
the forces, the organism. It has a psychological action. The negroes
charm serpents by whistling to them; it is said that fawns are
captivated by a melodious voice; the bear is aroused with the fife;
canaries and sparrows enjoy the flageolet; in the Antilles, lizards are
enticed from their retreats by the whistle; spiders have an affection
for fiddlers; in Switzerland, the herdsmen attach to the necks of their
handsomest cows a large bell, of which they are so proud, that, while
they are allowed to wear it, they march at the head of the herd; in
Andalusia, the mules lose their spirit and their power of endurance, if
deprived of the numerous bells with which it is customary to deck these
intelligent animals; in the mountains of Scotland and Switzerland, the
herds pasture best to the sound of the bagpipe; and in the Oberland,
cattle strayed from the herd are recalled by the notes of the trumpet.

Donizetti, a year before his death, had lost all his faculties, in
consequence of a softening of the spinal marrow. Every means was
resorted to for reviving a spark of that intellect once so vigorous; but
all failed. In a single instance only he exhibited a gleam of
intelligence; and that was on hearing one of his friends play the
septette of his opera of "Lucia." "Poor Donizetti!" said he; "what a
pity he should have died so soon!" And this was all.

In 1848, after the terrible insurrection which made of Paris a vast
slaughter-house, to conceal my sadness and my disgust I went to the
house of one of my friends, who was superintendent of the immense insane
asylum in Clermont-sur-Oise. He had a small organ, and was a tolerably
good singer. I composed a mass, to the first performance of which we
invited a few artists from Paris and several of the most docile inmates
of the asylum. I was struck with the bearing of the latter, and asked my
friend to repeat the experiment, and extend the number of invitations.
The result was so favorable, that we were soon able to form a choir from
among the patients, of both sexes, who rehearsed on Saturdays the hymns
and chants they were to sing on Sunday at mass. A raving lunatic, a
priest, who was getting more and more intractable every day, and who
often had to be put in a strait-jacket, noticed the periodical absence
of some of the inmates, and exhibited curiosity to know what they were
doing. The following Saturday, seeing some of his companions preparing
to go to rehearsal, he expressed a desire to go with them. The doctor
told him he might go on condition that he would allow himself to be
shaved and decently dressed. This was a thorny point, for he would never
attend to his person, and became furious when required to dress; but, to
our great astonishment, he consented at once. This day he not only
listened to the music quietly, but was detected several times joining
his voice with that of the choir. When I left Clermont, my poor old
priest was one of the most constant attendants at the rehearsals. He
still had his violent periods, but they were less frequent; and when
Saturday arrived, he always dressed himself with care, and waited
impatiently for the hour to go to chapel.

To resume: Music being a _physical agent_,--that is to say, acting on
the individual without the aid of his intelligence; a _moral
agent_,--that is to say, reviving his memory, exciting his imagination,
developing his sentiment; and a _complex agent_,--that is to say, having
a physiological action on the instinct, the organism, the forces, of
man,--I deduce from this that it is one of the most powerful means for
ennobling the mind, elevating the morals, and, above all, refining the
manners. This truth is now so well recognized in Europe that we see
choral societies--Orpheons and others--multiplying as by enchantment,
under the powerful impulse given them by the state. I speak not simply
of Germany, which is a singing nation, whose laborious, peaceful,
intelligent people have in all time associated choral music as well with
their labors as with their pleasures; but I may cite particularly
France, which counts to-day more than eight hundred Orpheon societies,
composed of workingmen. How many of these, who formerly dissipated their
leisure time at drinking-houses, now find an ennobling recreation in
these associations, where the spirit of union and fraternity is
engendered and developed! And if we could get at the statistics of
crime, who can doubt that they would show it had diminished in
proportion to the increase of these societies? In fact, men are better,
the heart is in some sort purified, when impregnated with the noble
harmonies of a fine chorus; and it is difficult not to treat as a
brother one whose voice has mingled with your own, and whose heart has
been united to yours in a community of pure and joyful emotions. If
Orpheon societies ever become established in America, be assured that
bar-rooms, the plague of the country, will cease, with revolvers and
bowie-knives, to be popular institutions.

Music, when employed in the service of religion, has always been its
most powerful auxiliary. The organ did more for Catholicism in the
Middle Ages than all its preaching; and Palestrina and Marcello have
reclaimed and still reclaim more infidels than all the doctors of the
Church.

We enter a house of worship. Still under the empire of the external
world, we carry there our worldly thoughts and occupations; a thousand
distractions deter us from religious reflection and meditation. The word
of the preacher reaches the ear indeed, but only as a vague sound. The
sense of what is said is arrested at the surface, without penetrating
the heart. But let the grand voice of the organ be heard, and our whole
being is moved; the physical world disappears, the eyes of the soul
open; we bow the head, we bend the knee, and our thoughts, disengaged
from matter, soar to the eternal regions of the Good, the Beautiful, and
the True.




GARNAUT HALL.


      Here or hereafter? In the body here,
    Or in the soul hereafter do we writhe,
    Atoning for the malice of our lives?
    Of the uncounted millions that have died,
    Not one has slipped the napkin from his chin
    And loosed the jaw to tell us: even he,
    The intrepid Captain, who gave life to find
    A doubtful way through clanging worlds of ice,--
    A fine inquisitive spirit, you would think,
    One to cross-question Fate complacently,
    Less for his own sake than Science's,--
    Not even he, with his rich gathered lore,
    Returns from that dark journey down to death.
    Here or hereafter? Only this I know,
    That, whatsoever happen afterwards,
    Some men do penance on this side the grave.
    Thus Regnald Garnaut for his cruel heart.

      Owner and lord was he of Garnaut Hall,
    A relic of the Norman conquerors,--
    A quaint, rook-haunted pile of masonry,
    From whose top battlement, a windy height,
    Regnald could view his twenty prosperous farms;
    His creaking mill, that, perche

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