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Mosses from an old manse

by Nathaniel Hawthorne · English · Gutenberg #512 · 922,268 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Mosses from an old manse

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne


        
Release date: April 1, 1996 [eBook #512]
                Most recently updated: November 9, 2022

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/512

Credits: Charles Keller


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE ***




Mosses from an Old Manse

by Nathaniel Hawthorne




Contents

 The Old Manse
 The Birthmark
 A Select Party
 Young Goodman Brown
 Rappaccini’s Daughter
 Mrs. Bullfrog
 Fire Worship
 Buds and Bird Voices
 Monsieur du Miroir
 The Hall of Fantasy
 The Celestial Railroad
 The Procession of Life
 Feathertop: A Moralized Legend
 The New Adam and Eve
 Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent
 The Christmas Banquet
 Drowne’s Wooden Image
 The Intelligence Office
 Roger Malvin’s Burial
 P.’s Correspondence
 Earth’s Holocaust
 Passages from a Relinquished Work
 Sketches from Memory
 The Old Apple Dealer
 The Artist of the Beautiful
 A Virtuoso’s Collection




THE OLD MANSE

The Author makes the Reader acquainted with his Abode.


Between two tall gate-posts of rough-hewn stone (the gate itself having
fallen from its hinges at some unknown epoch) we beheld the gray front
of the old parsonage, terminating the vista of an avenue of black-ash
trees. It was now a twelvemonth since the funeral procession of the
venerable clergyman, its last inhabitant, had turned from that gateway
towards the village burying-ground. The wheel-track leading to the
door, as well as the whole breadth of the avenue, was almost overgrown
with grass, affording dainty mouthfuls to two or three vagrant cows and
an old white horse who had his own living to pick up along the
roadside. The glimmering shadows that lay half asleep between the door
of the house and the public highway were a kind of spiritual medium,
seen through which the edifice had not quite the aspect of belonging to
the material world. Certainly it had little in common with those
ordinary abodes which stand so imminent upon the road that every
passer-by can thrust his head, as it were, into the domestic circle.
From these quiet windows the figures of passing travellers looked too
remote and dim to disturb the sense of privacy. In its near retirement
and accessible seclusion, it was the very spot for the residence of a
clergyman,—a man not estranged from human life, yet enveloped, in the
midst of it, with a veil woven of intermingled gloom and brightness. It
was worthy to have been one of the time-honored parsonages of England,
in which, through many generations, a succession of holy occupants pass
from youth to age, and bequeath each an inheritance of sanctity to
pervade the house and hover over it as with an atmosphere.

Nor, in truth, had the Old Manse ever been profaned by a lay occupant
until that memorable summer afternoon when I entered it as my home. A
priest had built it; a priest had succeeded to it; other priestly men
from time to time had dwelt in it; and children born in its chambers
had grown up to assume the priestly character. It was awful to reflect
how many sermons must have been written there. The latest inhabitant
alone—he by whose translation to paradise the dwelling was left
vacant—had penned nearly three thousand discourses, besides the better,
if not the greater, number that gushed living from his lips. How often,
no doubt, had he paced to and fro along the avenue, attuning his
meditations to the sighs and gentle murmurs and deep and solemn peals
of the wind among the lofty tops of the trees! In that variety of
natural utterances he could find something accordant with every passage
of his sermon, were it of tenderness or reverential fear. The boughs
over my head seemed shadowy with solemn thoughts, as well as with
rustling leaves. I took shame to myself for having been so long a
writer of idle stories, and ventured to hope that wisdom would descend
upon me with the falling leaves of the avenue, and that I should light
upon an intellectual treasure in the Old Manse well worth those hoards
of long-hidden gold which people seek for in moss-grown houses.
Profound treatises of morality; a layman’s unprofessional, and
therefore unprejudiced, views of religion; histories (such as Bancroft
might have written had he taken up his abode here, as he once purposed)
bright with picture, gleaming over a depth of philosophic
thought,—these were the works that might fitly have flowed from such a
retirement. In the humblest event, I resolved at least to achieve a
novel that should evolve some deep lesson, and should possess physical
substance enough to stand alone.

In furtherance of my design, and as if to leave me no pretext for not
fulfilling it, there was in the rear of the house the most delightful
little nook of a study that ever afforded its snug seclusion to a
scholar. It was here that Emerson wrote Nature; for he was then an
inhabitant of the Manse, and used to watch the Assyrian dawn and
Paphian sunset and moonrise from the summit of our eastern hill. When I
first saw the room, its walls were blackened with the smoke of
unnumbered years, and made still blacker by the grim prints of Puritan
ministers that hung around. These worthies looked strangely like bad
angels, or at least like men who had wrestled so continually and so
sternly with the Devil that somewhat of his sooty fierceness had been
imparted to their own visages. They had all vanished now; a cheerful
coat of paint and golden-tinted paper-hangings lighted up the small
apartment; while the shadow of a willow-tree that swept against the
overhanging eaves atempered the cheery western sunshine. In place of
the grim prints there was the sweet and lovely head of one of Raphael’s
Madonnas, and two pleasant little pictures of the Lake of Como. The
only other decorations were a purple vase of flowers, always fresh, and
a bronze one containing graceful ferns. My books (few, and by no means
choice; for they were chiefly such waifs as chance had thrown in my
way) stood in order about the room, seldom to be disturbed.

The study had three windows, set with little, old-fashioned panes of
glass, each with a crack across it. The two on the western side looked,
or rather peeped, between the willow branches, down into the orchard,
with glimpses of the river through the trees. The third, facing
northward, commanded a broader view of the river, at a spot where its
hitherto obscure waters gleam forth into the light of history. It was
at this window that the clergyman who then dwelt in the Manse stood
watching the outbreak of a long and deadly struggle between two
nations; he saw the irregular array of his parishioners on the farther
side of the river, and the glittering line of the British on the hither
bank. He awaited, in an agony of suspense, the rattle of the musketry.
It came; and there needed but a gentle wind to sweep the battle-smoke
around this quiet house.

Perhaps the reader, whom I cannot help considering as my guest in the
Old Manse, and entitled to all courtesy in the way of
sight-showing,—perhaps he will choose to take a nearer view of the
memorable spot. We stand now on the river’s brink. It may well be
called the Concord,—the river of peace and quietness; for it is
certainly the most unexcitable and sluggish stream that ever loitered
imperceptibly towards its eternity,—the sea. Positively I had lived
three weeks beside it before it grew quite clear to my perception which
way the current flowed. It never has a vivacious aspect, except when a
northwestern breeze is vexing its surface on a sunshiny day. From the
incurable indolence of its nature, the stream is happily incapable of
becoming the slave of human ingenuity, as is the fate of so many a
wild, free mountain torrent. While all things else are compelled to
subserve some useful purpose, it idles its sluggish life away in lazy
liberty, without turning a solitary spindle or affording even
water-power enough to grind the corn that grows upon its banks. The
torpor of its movement allows it nowhere a bright, pebbly shore, nor so
much as a narrow strip of glistening sand, in any part of its course.
It slumbers between broad prairies, kissing the long meadow grass, and
bathes the overhanging boughs of elder-bushes and willows, or the roots
of elms and ash-trees and clumps of maples. Flags and rushes grow along
its plashy shore; the yellow water-lily spreads its broad, flat leaves
on the margin; and the fragrant white pond-lily abounds, generally
selecting a position just so far from the river’s brink that it cannot
be grasped save at the hazard of plunging in.

It is a marvel whence this perfect flower derives its loveliness and
perfume, springing as it does from the black mud over which the river
sleeps, and where lurk the slimy eel, and speckled frog, and the
mud-turtle, whom continual washing cannot cleanse. It is the very same
black mud out of which the yellow lily sucks its obscene life and
noisome odor. Thus we see, too, in the world that some persons
assimilate only what is ugly and evil from the same moral circumstances
which supply good and beautiful results—the fragrance of celestial
flowers—to the daily life of others.

The reader must not, from any testimony of mine, contract a dislike
towards our slumberous stream. In the light of a calm and golden sunset
it becomes lovely beyond expression; the more lovely for the quietude
that so well accords with the hour, when even the wind, after
blustering all day long, usually hushes itself to rest. Each tree and
rock and every blade of grass is distinctly imaged, and, however
unsightly in reality, assumes ideal beauty in the reflection. The
minutest things of earth and the broad aspect of the firmament are
pictured equally without effort and with the same felicity of success.
All the sky glows downward at our feet; the rich clouds float through
the unruffled bosom of the stream like heavenly thoughts through a
peaceful heart. We will not, then, malign our river as gross and impure
while it can glorify itself with so adequate a picture of the heaven
that broods above it; or, if we remember its tawny hue and the
muddiness of its bed, let it be a symbol that the earthiest human soul
has an infinite spiritual capacity and may contain the better world
within its depths. But, indeed, the same lesson might be drawn out of
any mud-puddle in the streets of a city; and, being taught us
everywhere, it must be true.

Come, we have pursued a somewhat devious track in our walk to the
battle-ground. Here we are, at the point where the river was crossed by
the old bridge, the possession of which was the immediate object of the
contest. On the hither side grow two or three elms, throwing a wide
circumference of shade, but which must have been planted at some period
within the threescore years and ten that have passed since the
battle-day. On the farther shore, overhung by a clump of elder-bushes,
we discern the stone abutment of the bridge. Looking down into the
river, I once discovered some heavy fragments of the timbers, all green
with half a century’s growth of water-moss; for during that length of
time the tramp of horses and human footsteps have ceased along this
ancient highway. The stream has here about the breadth of twenty
strokes of a swimmer’s arm,—a space not too wide when the bullets were
whistling across. Old people who dwell hereabouts will point out, the
very spots on the western bank where our countrymen fell down and died;
and on this side of the river an obelisk of granite has grown up from
the soil that was fertilized with British blood. The monument, not more
than twenty feet in height, is such as it befitted the inhabitants of a
village to erect in illustration of a matter of local interest rather
than what was suitable to commemorate an epoch of national history.
Still, by the fathers of the village this famous deed was done; and
their descendants might rightfully claim the privilege of building a
memorial.

A humbler token of the fight, yet a more interesting one than the
granite obelisk, may be seen close under the stone wall which separates
the battle-ground from the precincts of the parsonage. It is the
grave,—marked by a small, mossgrown fragment of stone at the head and
another at the foot,—the grave of two British soldiers who were slain
in the skirmish, and have ever since slept peacefully where Zechariah
Brown and Thomas Davis buried them. Soon was their warfare ended; a
weary night-march from Boston, a rattling volley of musketry across the
river, and then these many years of rest. In the long procession of
slain invaders who passed into eternity from the battle-fields of the
Revolution, these two nameless soldiers led the way.

Lowell, the poet, as we were once standing over this grave, told me a
tradition in reference to one of the inhabitants below. The story has
something deeply impressive, though its circumstances cannot altogether
be reconciled with probability. A youth in the service of the clergyman
happened to be chopping wood, that April morning, at the back door of
the Manse; and when the noise of battle rang from side to side of the
bridge, he hastened across the intervening field to see what might be
going forward. It is rather strange, by the way, that this lad should
have been so diligently at work when the whole population of town and
country were startled out of their customary business by the advance of
the British troops. Be that as it might, the tradition, says that the
lad now left his task and hurried to the battle-field with the axe
still in his hand. The British had by this time retreated; the
Americans were in pursuit; and the late scene of strife was thus
deserted by both parties. Two soldiers lay on the ground,—one was a
corpse; but, as the young New-Englander drew nigh, the other Briton
raised himself painfully upon his hands and knees and gave a ghastly
stare into his face. The boy,—it must have been a nervous impulse,
without purpose, without thought, and betokening a sensitive and
impressible nature rather than a hardened one,—the boy uplifted his axe
and dealt the wounded soldier a fierce and fatal blow upon the head.

I could wish that the grave might be opened; for I would fain know
whether either of the skeleton soldiers has the mark of an axe in his
skull. The story comes home to me like truth. Oftentimes, as an
intellectual and moral exercise, I have sought to follow that poor
youth through his subsequent career and observe how his soul was
tortured by the blood-stain, contracted as it had been before the long
custom of war had robbed human life of its sanctity and while it still
seemed murderous to slay a brother man. This one circumstance has borne
more fruit for me than all that history tells us of the fight.

Many strangers come in the summer-time to view the battle-ground. For
my own part, I have never found my imagination much excited by this or
any other scene of historic celebrity; nor would the placid margin of
the river have lost any of its charm for me, had men never fought and
died there. There is a wilder interest in the tract of land-perhaps a
hundred yards in breadth—which extends between the battle-field and the
northern face of our Old Manse, with its contiguous avenue and orchard.
Here, in some unknown age, before the white man came, stood an Indian
village, convenient to the river, whence its inhabitants must have
drawn so large a part of their substance. The site is identified by the
spear and arrow-heads, the chisels, and other implements of war, labor,
and the chase, which the plough turns up from the soil. You see a
splinter of stone, half hidden beneath a sod; it looks like nothing
worthy of note; but, if you have faith enough to pick it up, behold a
relic! Thoreau, who has a strange faculty of finding what the Indians
have left behind them, first set me on the search; and I afterwards
enriched myself with some very perfect specimens, so rudely wrought
that it seemed almost as if chance had fashioned them. Their great
charm consists in this rudeness and in the individuality of each
article, so different from the productions of civilized machinery,
which shapes everything on one pattern. There is exquisite delight,
too, in picking up for one’s self an arrow-head that was dropped
centuries ago and has never been handled since, and which we thus
receive directly from the hand of the red hunter, who purposed to shoot
it at his game or at an enemy. Such an incident builds up again the
Indian village and its encircling forest, and recalls to life the
painted chiefs and warriors, the squaws at their household toil, and
the children sporting among the wigwams, while the little wind-rocked
pappose swings from the branch of a tree. It can hardly be told whether
it is a joy or a pain, after such a momentary vision, to gaze around in
the broad daylight of reality and see stone fences, white houses,
potato-fields, and men doggedly hoeing in their shirt-sleeves and
homespun pantaloons. But this is nonsense. The Old Manse is better than
a thousand wigwams.

The Old Manse! We had almost forgotten it, but will return thither
through the orchard. This was set out by the last clergyman, in the
decline of his life, when the neighbors laughed at the hoary-headed man
for planting trees from which he could have no prospect of gathering
fruit. Even had that been the case, there was only so much the better
motive for planting them, in the pure and unselfish hope of benefiting
his successors,—an end so seldom achieved by more ambitious efforts.
But the old minister, before reaching his patriarchal age of ninety,
ate the apples from this orchard during many years, and added silver
and gold to his annual stipend by disposing of the superfluity. It is
pleasant to think of him walking among the trees in the quiet
afternoons of early autumn and picking up here and there a windfall,
while he observes how heavily the branches are weighed down, and
computes the number of empty flour-barrels that will be filled by their
burden. He loved each tree, doubtless, as if it had been his own child.
An orchard has a relation to mankind, and readily connects itself with
matters of the heart. The trees possess a domestic character; they have
lost the wild nature of their forest kindred, and have grown humanized
by receiving the care of man as well as by contributing to his wants.
There, is so much individuality of character, too, among apple trees,
that it gives them all additional claim to be the objects of human
interest. One is harsh and crabbed in its manifestations; another gives
us fruit as mild as charity. One is churlish and illiberal, evidently
grudging the few apples that it bears; another exhausts itself in
free-hearted benevolence. The variety of grotesque shapes into which
apple, trees contort themselves has its effect on those who get
acquainted with them: they stretch out their crooked branches, and take
such hold of the imagination, that we remember them as humorists and
odd fellows. And what is more melancholy than the old apple-trees that
linger about the spot where once stood a homestead, but where there is
now only a ruined chimney rising out of a grassy and weed-grown cellar?
They offer their fruit to every wayfarer,—apples that are bitter sweet
with the moral of Time’s vicissitude.

I have met with no other such pleasant trouble in the world as that of
finding myself, with only the two or three mouths which it was my
privilege to feed, the sole inheritor of the old clergyman’s wealth of
fruits. Throughout the summer there were cherries and currants; and
then came Autumn, with his immense burden of apples, dropping them
continually from his over-laden shoulders as he trudged along. In the
stillest afternoon, if I listened, the thump of a great apple was
audible, falling without a breath of wind, from the mere necessity of
perfect ripeness. And, besides, there were pear-trees, that flung down
bushels upon bushels of heavy pears; and peach-trees, which, in a good
year, tormented me with peaches, neither to be eaten nor kept, nor,
without labor and perplexity, to be given away. The idea of an infinite
generosity and exhaustless bounty on the part of our Mother Nature was
well worth obtaining through such cares as these. That feeling can be
enjoyed in perfection only by the natives of summer islands, where the
bread-fruit, the cocoa, the palm, and the orange grow spontaneously and
hold forth the ever-ready meal; but likewise almost as well by a man
long habituated to city life, who plunges into such a solitude as that
of the Old Manse, where he plucks the fruit of trees that he did not
plant, and which therefore, to my heterodox taste, bear the closest
resemblance to those that grew in Eden. It has been an apothegm these
five thousand years, that toil sweetens the bread it earns. For my part
(speaking from hard experience, acquired while belaboring the rugged
furrows of Brook Farm), I relish best the free gifts of Providence.

Not that it can be disputed that the light toil requisite to cultivate
a moderately sized garden imparts such zest to kitchen vegetables as is
never found in those of the market-gardener. Childless men, if they
would know something of the bliss of paternity, should plant a seed,—be
it squash, bean, Indian corn, or perhaps a mere flower or worthless
weed,—should plant it with their own hands, and nurse it from infancy
to maturity altogether by their own care. If there be not too many of
them, each individual plant becomes an object of separate interest. My
garden, that skirted the avenue of the Manse, was of precisely the
right extent. An hour or two of morning labor was all that it required.
But I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in
deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody
could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of
creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to
observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a row of early
peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.
Later in the season the humming-birds were attracted by the blossoms of
a peculiar variety of bean; and they were a joy to me, those little
spiritual visitants, for deigning to sip airy food out of my
nectar-cups. Multitudes of bees used to bury themselves in the yellow
blossoms of the summer-squashes. This, too, was a deep satisfaction;
although, when they had laden themselves with sweets, they flew away to
some unknown hive, which would give back nothing in requital of what my
garden had contributed. But I was glad thus to fling a benefaction upon
the passing breeze with the certainty that somebody must profit by it
and that there would be a little more honey in the world to allay the
sourness and bitterness which mankind is always complaining of. Yes,
indeed; my life was the sweeter for that honey.

Speaking of summer-squashes, I must say a word of their beautiful and
varied forms. They presented an endless diversity of urns and vases,
shallow or deep, scalloped or plain, moulded in patterns which a
sculptor would do well to copy, since Art has never invented anything
more graceful. A hundred squashes in the garden were worth, in my eyes
at least, of being rendered indestructible in marble. If ever
Providence (but I know it never will) should assign me a superfluity of
gold, part of it shall be expended for a service of plate, or most
delicate porcelain, to be wrought into the shapes of summer-squashes
gathered from vines which I will plant with my own hands. As dishes for
containing vegetables, they would be peculiarly appropriate.

But not merely the squeamish love of the beautiful was gratified by my
toil in the kitchen-garden. There was a hearty enjoyment, likewise, in
observing the growth of the crook-necked winter-squashes from the first
little bulb, with the withered blossom adhering to it, until they lay
strewn upon the soil, big, round fellows, hiding their heads beneath
the leaves, but turning up their great yellow rotundities to the
noontide sun. Gazing at them, I felt that by my agency something worth
living for had been done. A new substance was born into the world. They
were real and tangible existences, which the mind could seize hold of
and rejoice in. A cabbage, too,—especially the early Dutch cabbage,
which swells to a monstrous circumference, until its ambitious heart
often bursts asunder,—is a matter to be proud of when we can claim a
share with the earth and sky in producing it. But, after all, the
hugest pleasure is reserved until these vegetable children of ours are
smoking on the table, and we, like Saturn, make a meal of them.

What with the river, the battle-field, the orchard, and the garden, the
reader begins to despair of finding his way back into the Old Manse.
But, in agreeable weather, it is the truest hospitality to keep him out
of doors. I never grew quite acquainted with my habitation till a long
spell of sulky rain had confined me beneath its roof. There could not
be a more sombre aspect of external nature than as then seen from the
windows of my study. The great willow-tree had caught and retained
among its leaves a whole cataract of water, to be shaken down at
intervals by the frequent gusts of wind. All day long, and for a week
together, the rain was drip-drip-dripping and splash-splash-splashing
from the eaves and bubbling and foaming into the tubs beneath the
spouts. The old, unpainted shingles of the house and outbuildings were
black with moisture; and the mosses of ancient growth upon the walls
looked green and fresh, as if they were the newest things and
afterthought of Time. The usually mirrored surface of the river was
blurred by an infinity of raindrops; the whole landscape had a
completely water-soaked appearance, conveying the impression that the
earth was wet through like a sponge; while the summit of a wooded hill,
about a mile distant, was enveloped in a dense mist, where the demon of
the tempest seemed to have his abiding-place and to be plotting still
direr inclemencies.

Nature has no kindness, no hospitality, during a rain. In the fiercest
beat of sunny days she retains a secret mercy, and welcomes the
wayfarer to shady nooks of the woods whither the sun cannot penetrate;
but she provides no shelter against her storms. It makes us shiver to
think of those deep, umbrageous recesses, those overshadowing banks,
where we found such enjoyment during the sultry afternoons. Not a twig
of foliage there but would dash a little shower into our faces. Looking
reproachfully towards the impenetrable sky,—if sky there be above that
dismal uniformity of cloud,—we are apt to murmur against the whole
system of the universe, since it involves the extinction of so many
summer days in so short a life by the hissing and spluttering rain. In
such spells of weather,—and it is to be supposed such weather
came,—Eve’s bower in paradise must have been but a cheerless and aguish
kind of shelter, nowise comparable to the old parsonage, which had
resources of its own to beguile the week’s imprisonment. The idea of
sleeping on a couch of wet roses!

Happy the man who in a rainy day can betake himself to a huge garret,
stored, like that of the Manse, with lumber that each generation has
left behind it from a period before the Revolution. Our garret was an
arched hall, dimly illuminated through small and dusty windows; it was
but a twilight at the best; and there were nooks, or rather caverns, of
deep obscurity, the secrets of which I never learned, being too
reverent of their dust and cobwebs. The beams and rafters, roughly hewn
and with strips of bark still on them, and the rude masonry of the
chimneys, made the garret look wild and uncivilized, an aspect unlike
what was seen elsewhere in the quiet and decorous old house. But on one
side there was a little whitewashed apartment, which bore the
traditionary title of the Saint’s Chamber, because holy men in their
youth had slept, and studied, and prayed there. With its elevated
retirement, its one window, its small fireplace, and its closet
convenient for an oratory, it was the very spot where a young man might
inspire himself with solemn enthusiasm and cherish saintly dreams. The
occupants, at various epochs, had left brief records and ejaculations
inscribed upon the walls. There, too, hung a tattered and shrivelled
roll of canvas, which on inspection proved to be the forcibly wrought
picture of a clergyman, in wig, band, and gown, holding a Bible in his
hand. As I turned his face towards the light, he eyed me with an air of
authority such as men of his profession seldom assume in our days. The
original had been pastor of the parish more than a century ago, a
friend of Whitefield, and almost his equal in fervid eloquence. I bowed
before the effigy of the dignified divine, and felt as if I had now met
face to face with the ghost by whom, as there was reason to apprehend,
the Manse was haunted.

Houses of any antiquity in New England are so invariably possessed with
spirits that the matter seems hardly worth alluding to. Our ghost used
to heave deep sighs in a particular corner of the parlor, and sometimes
rustled paper, as if he were turning over a sermon in the long upper
entry,—where nevertheless he was invisible, in spite of the bright
moonshine that fell through the eastern window. Not improbably he
wished me to edit and publish a selection from a chest full of
manuscript discourses that stood in the garret. Once, while Hillard and
other friends sat talking with us in the twilight, there came a
rustling noise as of a minister’s silk gown, sweeping through the very
midst of the company, so closely as almost to brush against the chairs.
Still there was nothing visible. A yet stranger business was that of a
ghostly servant-maid, who used to be heard in the kitchen at deepest
midnight, grinding coffee, cooking, ironing,—performing, in short, all
kinds of domestic labor,—although no traces of anything accomplished
could be detected the next morning. Some neglected duty of her
servitude, some ill-starched ministerial band, disturbed the poor
damsel in her grave and kept her at work without any wages.

But to return from this digression. A part of my predecessor’s library
was stored in the garret,—no unfit receptacle indeed for such dreary
trash as comprised the greater number of volumes. The old books would
have been worth nothing at an auction. In this venerable garret,
however, they possessed an interest, quite apart from their literary
value, as heirlooms, many of which had been transmitted down through a
series of consecrated hands from the days of the mighty Puritan
divines. Autographs of famous names were to be seen in faded ink on
some of their fly-leaves; and there were marginal observations or
interpolated pages closely covered with manuscript in illegible
shorthand, perhaps concealing matter of profound truth and wisdom. The
world will never be the better for it. A few of the books were Latin
folios, written by Catholic authors; others demolished Papistry, as
with a sledge-hammer, in plain English. A dissertation on the Book of
Job—which only Job himself could have had patience to read—filled at
least a score of small, thick-set quartos, at the rate of two or three
volumes to a chapter. Then there was a vast folio body of divinity,—too
corpulent a body, it might be feared, to comprehend the spiritual
element of religion. Volumes of this form dated back two hundred years
or more, and were generally bound in black leather, exhibiting
precisely such an appearance as we should attribute to books of
enchantment. Others equally antique were of a size proper to be carried
in the large waistcoat pockets of old times,—diminutive, but as black
as their bulkier brethren, and abundantly interfused with Greek and
Latin quotations. These little old volumes impressed me as if they had
been intended for very large ones, but had been unfortunately blighted
at an early stage of their growth.

The rain pattered upon the roof and the sky gloomed through the dusty
garret-windows while I burrowed among these venerable books in search
of any living thought which should burn like a coal of fire or glow
like an inextinguishable gem beneath the dead trumpery that had long
hidden it. But I found no such treasure; all was dead alike; and I
could not but muse deeply and wonderingly upon the humiliating fact
that the works of man’s intellect decay like those of his hands.
Thought grows mouldy. What was good and nourishing food for the spirits
of one generation affords no sustenance for the next. Books of
religion, however, cannot be considered a fair test of the enduring and
vivacious properties of human thought, because such books so seldom
really touch upon their ostensible subject, and have, therefore, so
little business to be written at all. So long as an unlettered soul can
attain to saving grace there would seem to be no deadly error in
holding theological libraries to be accumulations of, for the most
part, stupendous impertinence.

Many of the books had accrued in the latter years of the last
clergyman’s lifetime. These threatened to be of even less interest than
the elder works a century hence to any curious inquirer who should then
rummage then as I was doing now. Volumes of the Liberal Preacher and
Christian Examiner, occasional sermons, controversial pamphlets,
tracts, and other productions of a like fugitive nature, took the place
of the thick and heavy volumes of past time. In a physical point of
view, there was much the same difference as between a feather and a
lump of lead; but, intellectually regarded, the specific gravity of old
and new was about upon a par. Both also were alike frigid. The elder
books nevertheless seemed to have been earnestly written, and might be
conceived to have possessed warmth at some former period; although,
with the lapse of time, the heated masses had cooled down even to the
freezing-point. The frigidity of the modern productions, on the other
hand, was characteristic and inherent, and evidently had little to do
with the writer’s qualities of mind and heart. In fine, of this whole
dusty heap of literature I tossed aside all the sacred part, and felt
myself none the less a Christian for eschewing it. There appeared no
hope of either mounting to the better world on a Gothic staircase of
ancient folios or of flying thither on the wings of a modern tract.

Nothing, strange to say, retained any sap except what had been written
for the passing day and year, without the remotest pretension or idea
of permanence. There were a few old newspapers, and still older
almanacs, which reproduced to my mental eye the epochs when they had
issued from the press with a distinctness that was altogether
unaccountable. It was as if I had found bits of magic looking-glass
among the books with the images of a vanished century in them. I turned
my eyes towards the tattered picture above mentioned, and asked of the
austere divine wherefore it was that he and his brethren, after the
most painful rummaging and groping into their minds, had been able to
produce nothing half so real as these newspaper scribblers and
almanac-makers had thrown off in the effervescence of a moment. The
portrait responded not; so I sought an answer for myself. It is the age
itself that writes newspapers and almanacs, which therefore have a
distinct purpose and meaning at the time, and a kind of intelligible
truth for all times; whereas most other works—being written by men who,
in the very act, set themselves apart from their age—are likely to
possess little significance when new, and none at all when old. Genius,
indeed, melts many ages into one, and thus effects something permanent,
yet still with a similarity of office to that of the more ephemeral
writer. A work of genius is but the newspaper of a century, or
perchance of a hundred centuries.

Lightly as I have spoken of these old books, there yet lingers with me
a superstitious reverence for literature of all kinds. A bound volume
has a charm in my eyes similar to what scraps of manuscript possess for
the good Mussulman. He imagines that those wind-wafted records are
perhaps hallowed by some sacred verse; and I, that every new book or
antique one may contain the “open sesame,”—the spell to disclose
treasures hidden in some unsuspected cave of Truth. Thus it was not
without sadness that I turned away from the library of the Old Manse.

Blessed was the sunshine when it came again at the close of another
stormy day, beaming from the edge of the western horizon; while the
massive firmament of clouds threw down all the gloom it could, but
served only to kindle the golden light into a more brilliant glow by
the strongly contrasted shadows. Heaven smiled at the earth, so long
unseen, from beneath its heavy eyelid. To-morrow for the hill-tops and
the woodpaths.

Or it might be that Ellery Charming came up the avenue to join me in a
fishing excursion on the river. Strange and happy times were those when
we cast aside all irksome forms and strait-laced habitudes and
delivered ourselves up to the free air, to live like the Indians or any
less conventional race during one bright semicircle of the sun. Rowing
our boat against the current, between wide meadows, we turned aside
into the Assabeth. A more lovely stream than this, for a mile above its
junction with the Concord, has never flowed on earth, nowhere, indeed,
except to lave the interior regions of a poet’s imagination. It is
sheltered from the breeze by woods and a hillside; so that elsewhere
there might be a hurricane, and here scarcely a ripple across the
shaded water. The current lingers along so gently that the mere force
of the boatman’s will seems sufficient to propel his craft against it.
It comes flowing softly through the midmost privacy and deepest heart
of a wood which whispers it to be quiet; while the stream whispers back
again from its sedgy borders, as if river and wood were hushing one
another to sleep. Yes; the river sleeps along its course and dreams of
the sky and of the clustering foliage, amid which fall showers of
broken sunlight, imparting specks of vivid cheerfulness, in contrast
with the quiet depth of the prevailing tint. Of all this scene, the
slumbering river has a dream-picture in its bosom. Which, after all,
was the most real,—the picture, or the original?—the objects palpable
to our grosser senses, or their apotheosis in the stream beneath?
Surely the disembodied images stand in closer relation to the soul. But
both the original and the reflection had here an ideal charm; and, had
it been a thought more wild, I could have fancied that this river had
strayed forth out of the rich scenery of my companion’s inner world;
only the vegetation along its banks should then have had an Oriental
character.

Gentle and unobtrusive as the river is, yet the tranquil woods seem
hardly satisfied to allow it passage. The trees are rooted on the very
verge of the water, and dip their pendent branches into it. At one spot
there is a lofty bank, on the slope of which grow some hemlocks,
declining across the stream with outstretched arms, as if resolute to
take the plunge. In other places the banks are almost on a level with
the water; so that the quiet congregation of trees set their feet in
the flood, and are Fringed with foliage down to the surface.
Cardinal-flowers kindle their spiral flames and illuminate the dark
nooks among the shrubbery. The pond-lily grows abundantly along the
margin,—that delicious flower which, as Thoreau tells me, opens its
virgin bosom to the first sunlight and perfects its being through the
magic of that genial kiss. He has beheld beds of them unfolding in due
succession as the sunrise stole gradually from flower to flower,—a
sight not to be hoped for unless when a poet adjusts his inward eye to
a proper focus with the outward organ. Grapevines here and there twine
themselves around shrub and tree and hang their clusters over the water
within reach of the boatman’s hand. Oftentimes they unite two trees of
alien race in an inextricable twine, marrying the hemlock and the maple
against their will and enriching them with a purple offspring of which
neither is the parent. One of these ambitious parasites has climbed
into the upper branches of a tall white-pine, and is still ascending
from bough to bough, unsatisfied till it shall crown the tree’s airy
summit with a wreath of its broad foliage and a cluster of its grapes.

The winding course of the stream continually shut out the scene behind
us and revealed as calm and lovely a one before. We glided from depth
to depth, and breathed new seclusion at every turn. The shy kingfisher
flew from the withered branch close at hand to another at a distance,
uttering a shrill cry of anger or alarm. Ducks that had been floating
there since the preceding eve were startled at our approach and skimmed
along the glassy river, breaking its dark surface with a bright streak.
The pickerel leaped from among the lilypads. The turtle, sunning itself
upon a rock or at the root of a tree, slid suddenly into the water with
a plunge. The painted Indian who paddled his canoe along the Assabeth
three hundred years ago could hardly have seen a wilder gentleness
displayed upon its banks and reflected in its bosom than we did. Nor
could the same Indian have prepared his noontide meal with more
simplicity. We drew up our skiff at some point where the overarching
shade formed a natural bower, and there kindled a fire with the pine
cones and decayed branches that lay strewn plentifully around. Soon the
smoke ascended among the trees, impregnated with a savory incense, not
heavy, dull, and surfeiting, like the steam of cookery within doors,
but sprightly and piquant. The smell of our feast was akin to the
woodland odors with which it mingled: there was no sacrilege committed
by our intrusion there: the sacred solitude was hospitable, and granted
us free leave to cook and eat in the recess that was at once our
kitchen and banqueting-hall. It is strange what humble offices may be
performed in a beautiful scene without destroying its poetry. Our fire,
red gleaming among the trees, and we beside it, busied with culinary
rites and spreading out our meal on a mossgrown log, all seemed in
unison with the river gliding by and the foliage rustling over us. And,
what was strangest, neither did our mirth seem to disturb the propriety
of the solemn woods; although the hobgoblins of the old wilderness and
the will-of-the-wisps that glimmered in the marshy places might have
come trooping to share our table-talk and have added their shrill
laughter to our merriment. It was the very spot in which to utter the
extremest nonsense or the profoundest wisdom, or that ethereal product
of the mind which partakes of both, and may become one or the other, in
correspondence with the faith and insight of the auditor.

So, amid sunshine and shadow, rustling leaves and sighing waters, up
gushed our talk like the babble of a fountain. The evanescent spray was
Ellery’s; and his, too, the lumps of golden thought that lay glimmering
in the fountain’s bed and brightened both our faces by the reflection.
Could he have drawn out that virgin gold, and stamped it with the
mint-mark that alone gives currency, the world might have had the
profit, and he the fame. My mind was the richer merely by the knowledge
that it was there. But the chief profit of those wild days, to him and
me, lay not in any definite idea, not in any angular or rounded truth,
which we dug out of the shapeless mass of problematical stuff, but in
the freedom which we thereby won from all custom and conventionalism
and fettering influences of man on man. We were so free to-day that it
was impossible to be slaves again to-morrow. When we crossed the
threshold of the house or trod the thronged pavements of a city, still
the leaves of the trees that overhang the Assabeth were whispering to
us, “Be free! be free!” Therefore along that shady river-bank there are
spots, marked with a heap of ashes and half-consumed brands, only less
sacred in my remembrance than the hearth of a household fire.

And yet how sweet, as we floated homeward adown the golden river at
sunset,—how sweet was it to return within the system of human society,
not as to a dungeon and a chain, but as to a stately edifice, whence we
could go forth at will into state—her simplicity! How gently, too, did
the sight of the Old Manse, best seen from the river, overshadowed with
its willow and all environed about with the foliage of its orchard and
avenue,—how gently did its gray, homely aspect rebuke the speculative
extravagances of the day! It had grown sacred in connection with the
artificial life against which we inveighed; it had been a home for many
years, in spite of all; it was my home too; and, with these thoughts,
it seemed to me that all the artifice and conventionalism of life was
but an impalpable thinness upon its surface, and that the depth below
was none the worse for it. Once, as we turned our boat to the bank,
there was a cloud, in the shape of an immensely gigantic figure of a
hound, couched above the house, as if keeping guard over it. Gazing at
this symbol, I prayed that the upper influences might long protect the
institutions that had grown out of the heart of mankind.

If ever my readers should decide to give up civilized life, cities,
houses, and whatever moral or material enormities in addition to these
the perverted ingenuity of our race has contrived, let it be in the
early autumn. Then Nature will love him better than at any other
season, and will take him to her bosom with a more motherly tenderness.
I could scarcely endure the roof of the old house above me in those
first autumnal days. How early in the summer, too, the prophecy of
autumn comes! Earlier in some years than in others; sometimes even in
the first weeks of July. There is no other feeling like what is caused
by this faint, doubtful, yet real perception—if it be not rather a
foreboding—of the year’s decay, so blessedly sweet and sad in the same
breath.

Did I say that there was no feeling like it? Ah, but there is a
half-acknowledged melancholy like to this when we stand in the
perfected vigor of our life and feel that Time has now given us all his
flowers, and that the next work of his never-idle fingers must be to
steal them one by one away.

I have forgotten whether the song of the cricket be not as early a
token of autumn’s approach as any other,—that song which may be called
an audible stillness; for though very loud and heard afar, yet the mind
does not take note of it as a sound, so completely is its individual
existence merged among the accompanying characteristics of the season.
Alas for the pleasant summertime! In August the grass is still verdant
on the hills and in the valleys; the foliage of the trees is as dense
as ever and as green; the flowers gleam forth in richer abundance along
the margin of the river and by the stone walls and deep among the
woods; the days, too, are as fervid now as they were a month ago; and
yet in every breath of wind and in every beam of sunshine we hear the
whispered farewell and behold the parting smile of a dear friend. There
is a coolness amid all the heat, a mildness in the blazing noon. Not a
breeze can stir but it thrills us with the breath of autumn. A pensive
glory is seen in the far, golden gleams, among the shadows of the
trees. The flowers—even the brightest of them, and they are the most
gorgeous of the year—have this gentle sadness wedded to their pomp, and
typify the character of the delicious time each within itself. The
brilliant cardinal-flower has never seemed gay to me.

Still later in the season Nature’s tenderness waxes stronger. It is
impossible not to be fond of our mother now; for she is so fond of us!
At other periods she does not make this impression on me, or only at
rare intervals; but in those genial days of autumn, when she has
perfected her harvests and accomplished every needful thing that was
given her to do, then she overflows with a blessed superfluity of love.
She has leisure to caress her children now. It is good to be alive and
at such times. Thank Heaven for breath—yes, for mere breath—when it is
made up of a heavenly breeze like this! It comes with a real kiss upon
our cheeks; it would linger fondly around us if it might; but, since it
must be gone, it embraces us with its whole kindly heart and passes
onward to embrace likewise the next thing that it meets. A blessing is
flung abroad and scattered far and wide over the earth, to be gathered
up by all who choose. I recline upon the still unwithered grass and
whisper to myself, “O perfect day! O beautiful world! O beneficent
God!” And it is the promise of a blessed eternity; for our Creator
would never have made such lovely days and have given us the deep
hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were
meant to be immortal. This sunshine is the golden pledge thereof. It
beams through the gates of paradise and shows us glimpses far inward.

By and by, in a little time, the outward world puts on a drear
austerity. On some October morning there is a heavy hoarfrost on the
grass and along the tops of the fences; and at sunrise the leaves fall
from the trees of our avenue, without a breath of wind, quietly
descending by their own weight. All summer long they have murmured like
the noise of waters; they have roared loudly while the branches were
wrestling with the thunder-gust; they have made music both glad and
solemn; they have attuned my thoughts by their quiet sound as I paced
to and fro beneath the arch of intermingling boughs. Now they can only
rustle under my feet. Henceforth the gray parsonage begins to assume a
larger importance, and draws to its fireside,—for the abomination of
the air-tight stove is reserved till wintry weather,—draws closer and
closer to its fireside the vagrant impulses that had gone wandering
about through the summer.

When summer was dead and buried the Old Manse became as lonely as a
hermitage. Not that ever—in my time at least—it had been thronged with
company; but, at no rare intervals, we welcomed some friend out of the
dusty glare and tumult of the world, and rejoiced to share with him the
transparent obscurity that was floating over us. In one respect our
precincts were like the Enchanted Ground through which the pilgrim
travelled on his way to the Celestial City. The guests, each and all,
felt a slumberous influence upon them; they fell asleep in chairs, or
took a more deliberate siesta on the sofa, or were seen stretched among
the shadows of the orchard, looking up dreamily through the boughs.
They could not have paid a more acceptable compliment to my abode nor
to my own qualities as a host. I held it as a proof that they left
their cares behind them as they passed between the stone gate-posts at
the entrance of our avenue, and that the so powerful opiate was the
abundance of peace and quiet within and all around us. Others could
give them pleasure and amusement or instruction,—these could be picked
up anywhere; but it was for me to give them rest,—rest in a life of
trouble. What better could be done for those weary and world-worn
spirits?—for him whose career of perpetual action was impeded and
harassed by the rarest of his powers and the richest of his
acquirements?—for another who had thrown his ardent heart from earliest
youth into the strife of politics, and now, perchance, began to suspect
that one lifetime is too brief for the accomplishment of any lofty
aim?—for her oil whose feminine nature had been imposed the heavy gift
of intellectual power, such as a strong man might have staggered under,
and with it the necessity to act upon the world?—in a word, not to
multiply instances, what better could be done for anybody who came
within our magic circle than to throw the spell of a tranquil spirit
over him? And when it had wrought its full effect, then we dismissed
him, with but misty reminiscences, as if he had been dreaming of us.

Were I to adopt a pet idea as so many people do, and fondle it in my
embraces to the exclusion of all others, it would be, that the great
want which mankind labors under at this present period is sleep. The
world should recline its vast head on the first convenient pillow and
take an age-long nap. It has gone distracted through a morbid activity,
and, while preternaturally wide awake, is nevertheless tormented by
visions that seem real to it now, but would assume their true aspect
and character were all things once set right by an interval of sound
repose. This is the only method of getting rid of old delusions and
avoiding new ones; of regenerating our race, so that it might in due
time awake as an infant out of dewy slumber; of restoring to us the
simple perception of what is right and the single-hearted desire to
achieve it, both of which have long been lost in consequence of this
weary activity of brain and torpor or passion of the heart that now
afflict the universe. Stimulants, the only mode of treatment hitherto
attempted, cannot quell the disease; they do but heighten the delirium.

Let not the above paragraph ever be quoted against the author; for,
though tinctured with its modicum of truth, it is the result and
expression of what he knew, while he was writing, to be but a distorted
survey of the state and prospects of mankind. There were circumstances
around me which made it difficult to view the world precisely as it
exists; for, severe and sober as was the Old Manse, it was necessary to
go but a little way beyond its threshold before meeting with stranger
moral shapes of men than might have been encountered elsewhere in a
circuit of a thousand miles.

These hobgoblins of flesh and blood were attracted thither by the
widespreading influence of a great original thinker, who had his
earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village. His mind acted
upon other minds of a certain constitution with wonderful magnetism,
and drew many men upon long pilgrimages to speak with him face to face.
Young visionaries—to whom just so much of insight had been imparted as
to make life all a labyrinth around them—came to seek the clew that
should guide them out of their self-involved bewilderment. Gray-headed
theorists—whose systems, at first air, had finally imprisoned them in
an iron framework—travelled painfully to his door, not to ask
deliverance, but to invite the free spirit into their own thraldom.
People that had lighted on a new thought or a thought that they fancied
new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a
lapidary, to ascertain its quality and value. Uncertain, troubled,
earnest wanderers through the midnight of the moral world beheld his
intellectual fire as a beacon burning on a hill-top, and, climbing the
difficult ascent, looked forth into the surrounding obscurity more
hopefully than hitherto. The light revealed objects unseen
before,—mountains, gleaming lakes, glimpses of a creation among the
chaos; but also, as was unavoidable, it attracted bats and owls and the
whole host of night birds, which flapped their dusky wings against the
gazer’s eyes, and sometimes were mistaken for fowls of angelic feather.
Such delusions always hover nigh whenever a beacon-fire of truth is
kindled.

For myself, there bad been epochs of my life when I, too, might have
asked of this prophet the master word that should solve me the riddle
of the universe; but now, being happy, I felt as if there were no
question to be put, and therefore admired Emerson as a poet, of deep
beauty and austere tenderness, but sought nothing from him as a
philosopher. It was good, nevertheless, to meet him in the woodpaths,
or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure, intellectual gleam diffused
about his presence like the garment of a shining one; and be, so quiet,
so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man alive as if
expecting to receive more than he could impart. And, in truth, the
heart of many an ordinary man had, perchance, inscriptions which he
could not read. But it was impossible to dwell in his vicinity without
inhaling more or less the mountain atmosphere of his lofty thought,
which, in the brains of some people, wrought a singular giddiness,—new
truth being as heady as new wine. Never was a poor little country
village infested with such a variety of queer, strangely dressed, oddly
behaved mortals, most of whom took upon themselves to be important
agents of the world’s destiny, yet were simply bores of a very intense
water. Such, I imagine, is the invariable character of persons who
crowd so closely about an original thinker as to draw in his unuttered
breath and thus become imbued with a false originality. This triteness
of novelty is enough to make any man of common-sense blaspheme at all
ideas of less than a century’s standing, and pray that the world may be
petrified and rendered immovable in precisely the worst moral and
physical state that it ever yet arrived at, rather than be benefited by
such schemes of such philosophers.

And now I begin to feel—and perhaps should have sooner felt—that we
have talked enough of the Old Manse. Mine honored reader, it may be,
will vilify the poor author as an egotist for babbling through so many
pages about a mossgrown country parsonage, and his life within its
walls, and on the river, and in the woods, and the influences that
wrought upon him from all these sources. My conscience, however, does
not reproach me with betraying anything too sacredly individual to be
revealed by a human spirit to its brother or sister spirit. How
narrow-how shallow and scanty too—is the stream of thought that has
been flowing from my pen, compared with the broad tide of dim emotions,
ideas, and associations which swell around me from that portion of my
existence! How little have I told! and of that little, how almost
nothing is even tinctured with any quality that makes it exclusively my
own! Has the reader gone wandering, hand in hand with me, through the
inner passages of my being? and have we groped together into all its
chambers and examined their treasures or their rubbish? Not so. We have
been standing on the greensward, but just within the cavern’s mouth,
where the common sunshine is free to penetrate, and where every
footstep is therefore free to come. I have appealed to no sentiment or
sensibilities save such as are diffused among us all. So far as I am a
man of really individual attributes I veil my face; nor am I, nor have
I ever been, one of those supremely hospitable people who serve up
their own hearts, delicately fried, with brain sauce, as a tidbit for
their beloved public.

Glancing back over what I have written, it seems but the scattered
reminiscences of a single summer. In fairyland there is no measurement
of time; and, in a spot so sheltered from the turmoil of life’s ocean,
three years hastened away with a noiseless flight, as the breezy
sunshine chases the cloud-shadows across the depths of a still valley.
Now came hints, growing more and more distinct, that the owner of the
old house was pining for his native air. Carpenters next, appeared,
making a tremendous racket among the outbuildings, strewing the green
grass with pine shavings and chips of chestnut joists, and vexing the
whole antiquity of the place with their discordant renovations. Soon,
moreover, they divested our abode of the veil of woodbine which had
crept over a large portion of its southern face. All the aged mosses
were cleared unsparingly away; and there were horrible whispers about
brushing up the external walls with a coat of paint,—a purpose as
little to my taste as might be that of rouging the venerable cheeks of
one’s grandmother. But the hand that renovates is always more
sacrilegious than that which destroys. In fine, we gathered up our
household goods, drank a farewell cup of tea in our pleasant little
breakfast-room,—delicately fragrant tea, an unpurchasable luxury, one
of the many angel gifts that had fallen like dew upon us,—and passed
forth between the tall stone gate-posts as uncertain as the wandering
Arabs where our tent might next be pitched. Providence took me by the
hand, and—an oddity of dispensation which, I trust, there is no
irreverence in smiling at—has led me, as the newspapers announce while
I am writing, from the Old Manse into a custom-house. As a
story-teller, I have often contrived strange vicissitudes for my
imaginary personages, but none like this.

The treasure of intellectual gold which I hoped to find in our secluded
dwelling had never come to light. No profound treatise of ethics, no
philosophic history, no novel even, that could stand unsupported on its
edges. All that I had to show, as a man of letters, were these, few
tales and essays, which had blossomed out like flowers in the calm
summer of my heart and mind. Save editing (an easy task) the journal of
my friend of many years, the African Cruiser, I had done nothing else.
With these idle weeds and withering blossoms I have intermixed some
that were produced long ago,—old, faded things, reminding me of flowers
pressed between the leaves of a book,—and now offer the bouquet, such
as it is, to any whom it may please. These fitful sketches, with so
little of external life about them, yet claiming no profundity of
purpose,—so reserved, even while they sometimes seem so frank,—often
but half in earnest, and never, even when most so, expressing
satisfactorily the thoughts which they profess to image,—such trifles,
I truly feel, afford no solid basis for a literary reputation.
Nevertheless, the public—if my limited number of readers, whom I
venture to regard rather as a circle of friends, may be termed a
public—will receive them the more kindly, as the last offering, the
last collection of this nature which it is my purpose ever to put
forth. Unless I could do better, I have done enough in this kind. For
myself the book will always retain one charm,—as reminding me of the
river, with its delightful solitudes, and of the avenue, the garden,
and the orchard, and especially the dear Old Manse, with the little
study on its western side, and the sunshine glimmering through the
willow branches while I wrote.

Let the reader, if he will do me so much honor, imagine himself my
guest, and that, having seen whatever may be worthy of notice within
and about the Old Manse, he has finally been ushered into my study.
There, after seating him in an antique elbow-chair, an heirloom of the
house, I take forth a roll of manuscript and entreat his attention to
the following tales,—an act of personal inhospitality, however, which I
never was guilty of, nor ever will be, even to my worst enemy.




THE BIRTHMARK


In the latter part of the last century there lived a man of science, an
eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy, who not long
before our story opens had made experience of a spiritual affinity more
attractive than any chemical one. He had left his laboratory to the
care of an assistant, cleared his fine countenance from the furnace
smoke, washed the stain of acids from his fingers, and persuaded a
beautiful woman to become his wife. In those days when the
comparatively recent discovery of electricity and other kindred
mysteries of Nature seemed to open paths into the region of miracle, it
was not unusual for the love of science to rival the love of woman in
its depth and absorbing energy. The higher intellect, the imagination,
the spirit, and even the heart might all find their congenial aliment
in pursuits which, as some of their ardent votaries believed, would
ascend from one step of powerful intelligence to another, until the
philosopher should lay his hand on the secret of creative force and
perhaps make new worlds for himself. We know not whether Aylmer
possessed this degree of faith in man’s ultimate control over Nature.
He had devoted himself, however, too unreservedly to scientific studies
ever to be weaned from them by any second passion. His love for his
young wife might prove the stronger of the two; but it could only be by
intertwining itself with his love of science, and uniting the strength
of the latter to his own.

Such a union accordingly took place, and was attended with truly
remarkable consequences and a deeply impressive moral. One day, very
soon after their marriage, Aylmer sat gazing at his wife with a trouble
in his countenance that grew stronger until he spoke.

“Georgiana,” said he, “has it never occurred to you that the mark upon
your cheek might be removed?”

“No, indeed,” said she, smiling; but perceiving the seriousness of his
manner, she blushed deeply. “To tell you the truth it has been so often
called a charm that I was simple enough to imagine it might be so.”

“Ah, upon another face perhaps it might,” replied her husband; “but
never on yours. No, dearest Georgiana, you came so nearly perfect from
the hand of Nature that this slightest possible defect, which we
hesitate whether to term a defect or a beauty, shocks me, as being the
visible mark of earthly imperfection.”

“Shocks you, my husband!” cried Georgiana, deeply hurt; at first
reddening with momentary anger, but then bursting into tears. “Then why
did you take me from my mother’s side? You cannot love what shocks
you!”

To explain this conversation it must be mentioned that in the centre of
Georgiana’s left cheek there was a singular mark, deeply interwoven, as
it were, with the texture and substance of her face. In the usual state
of her complexion—a healthy though delicate bloom—the mark wore a tint
of deeper crimson, which imperfectly defined its shape amid the
surrounding rosiness. When she blushed it gradually became more
indistinct, and finally vanished amid the triumphant rush of blood that
bathed the whole cheek with its brilliant glow. But if any shifting
motion caused her to turn pale there was the mark again, a crimson
stain upon the snow, in what Aylmer sometimes deemed an almost fearful
distinctness. Its shape bore not a little similarity to the human hand,
though of the smallest pygmy size. Georgiana’s lovers were wont to say
that some fairy at her birth hour had laid her tiny hand upon the
infant’s cheek, and left this impress there in token of the magic
endowments that were to give her such sway over all hearts. Many a
desperate swain would have risked life for the privilege of pressing
his lips to the mysterious hand. It must not be concealed, however,
that the impression wrought by this fairy sign manual varied
exceedingly, according to the difference of temperament in the
beholders. Some fastidious persons—but they were exclusively of her own
sex—affirmed that the bloody hand, as they chose to call it, quite
destroyed the effect of Georgiana’s beauty, and rendered her
countenance even hideous. But it would be as reasonable to say that one
of those small blue stains which sometimes occur in the purest statuary
marble would convert the Eve of Powers to a monster. Masculine
observers, if the birthmark did not heighten their admiration,
contented themselves with wishing it away, that the world might possess
one living specimen of ideal loveliness without the semblance of a
flaw. After his marriage,—for he thought little or nothing of the
matter before,—Aylmer discovered that this was the case with himself.

Had she been less beautiful,—if Envy’s self could have found aught else
to sneer at,—he might have felt his affection heightened by the
prettiness of this mimic hand, now vaguely portrayed, now lost, now
stealing forth again and glimmering to and fro with every pulse of
emotion that throbbed within her heart; but seeing her otherwise so
perfect, he found this one defect grow more and more intolerable with
every moment of their united lives. It was the fatal flaw of humanity
which Nature, in one shape or another, stamps ineffaceably on all her
productions, either to imply that they are temporary and finite, or
that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain. The crimson
hand expressed the ineludible gripe in which mortality clutches the
highest and purest of earthly mould, degrading them into kindred with
the lowest, and even with the very brutes, like whom their visible
frames return to dust. In this manner, selecting it as the symbol of
his wife’s liability to sin, sorrow, decay, and death, Aylmer’s sombre
imagination was not long in rendering the birthmark a frightful object,
causing him more trouble and horror than ever Georgiana’s beauty,
whether of soul or sense, had given him delight.

At all the seasons which should have been their happiest, he invariably
and without intending it, nay, in spite of a purpose to the contrary,
reverted to this one disastrous topic. Trifling as it at first
appeared, it so connected itself with innumerable trains of thought and
modes of feeling that it became the central point of all. With the
morning twilight Aylmer opened his eyes upon his wife’s face and
recognized the symbol of imperfection; and when they sat together at
the evening hearth his eyes wandered stealthily to her cheek, and
beheld, flickering with the blaze of the wood fire, the spectral hand
that wrote mortality where he would fain have worshipped. Georgiana
soon learned to shudder at his gaze. It needed but a glance with the
peculiar expression that his face often wore to change the roses of her
cheek into a deathlike paleness, amid which the crimson hand was
brought strongly out, like a bass-relief of ruby on the whitest marble.

Late one night when the lights were growing dim, so as hardly to betray
the stain on the poor wife’s cheek, she herself, for the first time,
voluntarily took up the subject.

“Do you remember, my dear Aylmer,” said she, with a feeble attempt at a
smile, “have you any recollection of a dream last night about this
odious hand?”

“None! none whatever!” replied Aylmer, starting; but then he added, in
a dry, cold tone, affected for the sake of concealing the real depth of
his emotion, “I might well dream of it; for before I fell asleep it had
taken a pretty firm hold of my fancy.”

“And you did dream of it?” continued Georgiana, hastily; for she
dreaded lest a gush of tears should interrupt what she had to say. “A
terrible dream! I wonder that you can forget it. Is it possible to
forget this one expression?—‘It is in her heart now; we must have it
out!’ Reflect, my husband; for by all means I would have you recall
that dream.”

The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot
confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers
them to break forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that
perchance belong to a deeper one. Aylmer now remembered his dream. He
had fancied himself with his servant Aminadab, attempting an operation
for the removal of the birthmark; but the deeper went the knife, the
deeper sank the hand, until at length its tiny grasp appeared to have
caught hold of Georgiana’s heart; whence, however, her husband was
inexorably resolved to cut or wrench it away.

When the dream had shaped itself perfectly in his memory, Aylmer sat in
his wife’s presence with a guilty feeling. Truth often finds its way to
the mind close muffled in robes of sleep, and then speaks with
uncompromising directness of matters in regard to which we practise an
unconscious self-deception during our waking moments. Until now he had
not been aware of the tyrannizing influence acquired by one idea over
his mind, and of the lengths which he might find in his heart to go for
the sake of giving himself peace.

“Aylmer,” resumed Georgiana, solemnly, “I know not what may be the cost
to both of us to rid me of this fatal birthmark. Perhaps its removal
may cause cureless deformity; or it may be the stain goes as deep as
life itself. Again: do we know that there is a possibility, on any
terms, of unclasping the firm gripe of this little hand which was laid
upon me before I came into the world?”

“Dearest Georgiana, I have spent much thought upon the subject,”
hastily interrupted Aylmer. “I am convinced of the perfect
practicability of its removal.”

“If there be the remotest possibility of it,” continued Georgiana, “let
the attempt be made at whatever risk. Danger is nothing to me; for
life, while this hateful mark makes me the object of your horror and
disgust,—life is a burden which I would fling down with joy. Either
remove this dreadful hand, or take my wretched life! You have deep
science. All the world bears witness of it. You have achieved great
wonders. Cannot you remove this little, little mark, which I cover with
the tips of two small fingers? Is this beyond your power, for the sake
of your own peace, and to save your poor wife from madness?”

“Noblest, dearest, tenderest wife,” cried Aylmer, rapturously, “doubt
not my power. I have already given this matter the deepest
thought—thought which might almost have enlightened me to create a
being less perfect than yourself. Georgiana, you have led me deeper
than ever into the heart of science. I feel myself fully competent to
render this dear cheek as faultless as its fellow; and then, most
beloved, what will be my triumph when I shall have corrected what
Nature left imperfect in her fairest work! Even Pygmalion, when his
sculptured woman assumed life, felt not greater ecstasy than mine will
be.”

“It is resolved, then,” said Georgiana, faintly smiling. “And, Aylmer,
spare me not, though you should find the birthmark take refuge in my
heart at last.”

Her husband tenderly kissed her cheek—her right cheek—not that which
bore the impress of the crimson hand.

The next day Aylmer apprised his wife of a plan that he had formed
whereby he might have opportunity for the intense thought and constant
watchfulness which the proposed operation would require; while
Georgiana, likewise, would enjoy the perfect repose essential to its
success. They were to seclude themselves in the extensive apartments
occupied by Aylmer as a laboratory, and where, during his toilsome
youth, he had made discoveries in the elemental powers of Nature that
had roused the admiration of all the learned societies in Europe.
Seated calmly in this laboratory, the pale philosopher had investigated
the secrets of the highest cloud region and of the profoundest mines;
he had satisfied himself of the causes that kindled and kept alive the
fires of the volcano; and had explained the mystery of fountains, and
how it is that they gush forth, some so bright and pure, and others
with such rich medicinal virtues, from the dark bosom of the earth.
Here, too, at an earlier period, he had studied the wonders of the
human frame, and attempted to fathom the very process by which Nature
assimilates all her precious influences from earth and air, and from
the spiritual world, to create and foster man, her masterpiece. The
latter pursuit, however, Aylmer had long laid aside in unwilling
recognition of the truth—against which all seekers sooner or later
stumble—that our great creative Mother, while she amuses us with
apparently working in the broadest sunshine, is yet severely careful to
keep her own secrets, and, in spite of her pretended openness, shows us
nothing but results. She permits us, indeed, to mar, but seldom to
mend, and, like a jealous patentee, on no account to make. Now,
however, Aylmer resumed these half-forgotten investigations; not, of
course, with such hopes or wishes as first suggested them; but because
they involved much physiological truth and lay in the path of his
proposed scheme for the treatment of Georgiana.

As he led her over the threshold of the laboratory, Georgiana was cold
and tremulous. Aylmer looked cheerfully into her face, with intent to
reassure her, but was so startled with the intense glow of the
birthmark upon the whiteness of her cheek that he could not restrain a
strong convulsive shudder. His wife fainted.

“Aminadab! Aminadab!” shouted Aylmer, stamping violently on the floor.

Forthwith there issued from an inner apartment a man of low stature,
but bulky frame, with shaggy hair hanging about his visage, which was
grimed with the vapors of the furnace. This personage had been Aylmer’s
underworker during his whole scientific career, and was admirably
fitted for that office by his great mechanical readiness, and the skill
with which, while incapable of comprehending a single principle, he
executed all the details of his master’s experiments. With his vast
strength, his shaggy hair, his smoky aspect, and the indescribable
earthiness that incrusted him, he seemed to represent man’s physical
nature; while Aylmer’s slender figure, and pale, intellectual face,
were no less apt a type of the spiritual element.

“Throw open the door of the boudoir, Aminadab,” said Aylmer, “and burn
a pastil.”

“Yes, master,” answered Aminadab, looking intently at the lifeless form
of Georgiana; and then he muttered to himself, “If she were my wife,
I’d never part with that birthmark.”

When Georgiana recovered consciousness she found herself breathing an
atmosphere of penetrating fragrance, the gentle potency of which had
recalled her from her deathlike faintness. The scene around her looked
like enchantment. Aylmer had converted those smoky, dingy, sombre
rooms, where he had spent his brightest years in recondite pursuits,
into a series of beautiful apartments not unfit to be the secluded
abode of a lovely woman. The walls were hung with gorgeous curtains,
which imparted the combination of grandeur and grace that no other
species of adornment can achieve; and as they fell from the ceiling to
the floor, their rich and ponderous folds, concealing all angles and
straight lines, appeared to shut in the scene from infinite space. For
aught Georgiana knew, it might be a pavilion among the clouds. And
Aylmer, excluding the sunshine, which would have interfered with his
chemical processes, had supplied its place with perfumed lamps,
emitting flames of various hue, but all uniting in a soft, impurpled
radiance. He now knelt by his wife’s side, watching her earnestly, but
without alarm; for he was confident in his science, and felt that he
could draw a magic circle round her within which no evil might intrude.

“Where am I? Ah, I remember,” said Georgiana, faintly; and she placed
her hand over her cheek to hide the terrible mark from her husband’s
eyes.

“Fear not, dearest!” exclaimed he. “Do not shrink from me! Believe me,
Georgiana, I even rejoice in this single imperfection, since it will be
such a rapture to remove it.”

“Oh, spare me!” sadly replied his wife. “Pray do not look at it again.
I never can forget that convulsive shudder.”

In order to soothe Georgiana, and, as it were, to release her mind from
the burden of actual things, Aylmer now put in practice some of the
light and playful secrets which science had taught him among its
profounder lore. Airy figures, absolutely bodiless ideas, and forms of
unsubstantial beauty came and danced before her, imprinting their
momentary footsteps on beams of light. Though she had some indistinct
idea of the method of these optical phenomena, still the illusion was
almost perfect enough to warrant the belief that her husband possessed
sway over the spiritual world. Then again, when she felt a wish to look
forth from her seclusion, immediately, as if her thoughts were
answered, the procession of external existence flitted across a screen.
The scenery and the figures of actual life were perfectly represented,
but with that bewitching, yet indescribable difference which always
makes a picture, an image, or a shadow so much more attractive than the
original. When wearied of this, Aylmer bade her cast her eyes upon a
vessel containing a quantity of earth. She did so, with little interest
at first; but was soon startled to perceive the germ of a plant
shooting upward from the soil. Then came the slender stalk; the leaves
gradually unfolded themselves; and amid them was a perfect and lovely
flower.

“It is magical!” cried Georgiana. “I dare not touch it.”

“Nay, pluck it,” answered Aylmer,—“pluck it, and inhale its brief
perfume while you may. The flower will wither in a few moments and
leave nothing save its brown seed vessels; but thence may be
perpetuated a race as ephemeral as itself.”

But Georgiana had no sooner touched the flower than the whole plant
suffered a blight, its leaves turning coal-black as if by the agency of
fire.

“There was too powerful a stimulus,” said Aylmer, thoughtfully.

To make up for this abortive experiment, he proposed to take her
portrait by a scientific process of his own invention. It was to be
effected by rays of light striking upon a polished plate of metal.
Georgiana assented; but, on looking at the result, was affrighted to
find the features of the portrait blurred and indefinable; while the
minute figure of a hand appeared where the cheek should have been.
Aylmer snatched the metallic plate and threw it into a jar of corrosive
acid.

Soon, however, he forgot these mortifying failures. In the intervals of
study and chemical experiment he came to her flushed and exhausted, but
seemed invigorated by her presence, and spoke in glowing language of
the resources of his art. He gave a history of the long dynasty of the
alchemists, who spent so many ages in quest of the universal solvent by
which the golden principle might be elicited from all things vile and
base. Aylmer appeared to believe that, by the plainest scientific
logic, it was altogether within the limits of possibility to discover
this long-sought medium; “but,” he added, “a philosopher who should go
deep enough to acquire the power would attain too lofty a wisdom to
stoop to the exercise of it.” Not less singular were his opinions in
regard to the elixir vitae. He more than intimated that it was at his
option to concoct a liquid that should prolong life for years, perhaps
interminably; but that it would produce a discord in Nature which all
the world, and chiefly the quaffer of the immortal nostrum, would find
cause to curse.

“Aylmer, are you in earnest?” asked Georgiana, looking at him with
amazement and fear. “It is terrible to possess such power, or even to
dream of possessing it.”

“Oh, do not tremble, my love,” said her husband. “I would not wrong
either you or myself by working such inharmonious effects upon our
lives; but I would have you consider how trifling, in comparison, is
the skill requisite to remove this little hand.”

At the mention of the birthmark, Georgiana, as usual, shrank as if a
redhot iron had touched her cheek.

Again Aylmer applied himself to his labors. She could hear his voice in
the distant furnace room giving directions to Aminadab, whose harsh,
uncouth, misshapen tones were audible in response, more like the grunt
or growl of a brute than human speech. After hours of absence, Aylmer
reappeared and proposed that she should now examine his cabinet of
chemical products and natural treasures of the earth. Among the former
he showed her a small vial, in which, he remarked, was contained a
gentle yet most powerful fragrance, capable of impregnating all the
breezes that blow across a kingdom. They were of inestimable value, the
contents of that little vial; and, as he said so, he threw some of the
perfume into the air and filled the room with piercing and invigorating
delight.

“And what is this?” asked Georgiana, pointing to a small crystal globe
containing a gold-colored liquid. “It is so beautiful to the eye that I
could imagine it the elixir of life.”

“In one sense it is,” replied Aylmer; “or, rather, the elixir of
immortality. It is the most precious poison that ever was concocted in
this world. By its aid I could apportion the lifetime of any mortal at
whom you might point your finger. The strength of the dose would
determine whether he were to linger out years, or drop dead in the
midst of a breath. No king on his guarded throne could keep his life if
I, in my private station, should deem that the welfare of millions
justified me in depriving him of it.”

“Why do you keep such a terrific drug?” inquired Georgiana in horror.

“Do not mistrust me, dearest,” said her husband, smiling; “its virtuous
potency is yet greater than its harmful one. But see! here is a
powerful cosmetic. With a few drops of this in a vase of water,
freckles may be washed away as easily as the hands are cleansed. A
stronger infusion would take the blood out of the cheek, and leave the
rosiest beauty a pale ghost.”

“Is it with this lotion that you intend to bathe my cheek?” asked
Georgiana, anxiously.

“Oh, no,” hastily replied her husband; “this is merely superficial.
Your case demands a remedy that shall go deeper.”

In his interviews with Georgiana, Aylmer generally made minute
inquiries as to her sensations and whether the confinement of the rooms
and the temperature of the atmosphere agreed with her. These questions
had such a particular drift that Georgiana began to conjecture that she
was already subjected to certain physical influences, either breathed
in with the fragrant air or taken with her food. She fancied likewise,
but it might be altogether fancy, that there was a stirring up of her
system—a strange, indefinite sensation creeping through her veins, and
tingling, half painfully, half pleasurably, at her heart. Still,
whenever she dared to look into the mirror, there she beheld herself
pale as a white rose and with the crimson birthmark stamped upon her
cheek. Not even Aylmer now hated it so much as she.

To dispel the tedium of the hours which her husband found it necessary
to devote to the processes of combination and analysis, Georgiana
turned over the volumes of his scientific library. In many dark old
tomes she met with chapters full of romance and poetry. They were the
works of philosophers of the middle ages, such as Albertus Magnus,
Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and the famous friar who created the
prophetic Brazen Head. All these antique naturalists stood in advance
of their centuries, yet were imbued with some of their credulity, and
therefore were believed, and perhaps imagined themselves to have
acquired from the investigation of Nature a power above Nature, and
from physics a sway over the spiritual world. Hardly less curious and
imaginative were the early volumes of the Transactions of the Royal
Society, in which the members, knowing little of the limits of natural
possibility, were continually recording wonders or proposing methods
whereby wonders might be wrought.

But to Georgiana the most engrossing volume was a large folio from her
husband’s own hand, in which he had recorded every experiment of his
scientific career, its original aim, the methods adopted for its
development, and its final success or failure, with the circumstances
to which either event was attributable. The book, in truth, was both
the history and emblem of his ardent, ambitious, imaginative, yet
practical and laborious life. He handled physical details as if there
were nothing beyond them; yet spiritualized them all, and redeemed
himself from materialism by his strong and eager aspiration towards the
infinite. In his grasp the veriest clod of earth assumed a soul.
Georgiana, as she read, reverenced Aylmer and loved him more profoundly
than ever, but with a less entire dependence on his judgment than
heretofore. Much as he had accomplished, she could not but observe that
his most splendid successes were almost invariably failures, if
compared with the ideal at which he aimed. His brightest diamonds were
the merest pebbles, and felt to be so by himself, in comparison with
the inestimable gems which lay hidden beyond his reach. The volume,
rich with achievements that had won renown for its author, was yet as
melancholy a record as ever mortal hand had penned. It was the sad
confession and continual exemplification of the shortcomings of the
composite man, the spirit burdened with clay and working in matter, and
of the despair that assails the higher nature at finding itself so
miserably thwarted by the earthly part. Perhaps every man of genius in
whatever sphere might recognize the image of his own experience in
Aylmer’s journal.

So deeply did these reflections affect Georgiana that she laid her face
upon the open volume and burst into tears. In this situation she was
found by her husband.

“It is dangerous to read in a sorcerer’s books,” said he with a smile,
though his countenance was uneasy and displeased. “Georgiana, there are
pages in that volume which I can scarcely glance over and keep my
senses. Take heed lest it prove as detrimental to you.”

“It has made me worship you more than ever,” said she.

“Ah, wait for this one success,” rejoined he, “then worship me if you
will. I shall deem myself hardly unworthy of it. But come, I have
sought you for the luxury of your voice. Sing to me, dearest.”

So she poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of
his spirit. He then took his leave with a boyish exuberance of gayety,
assuring her that her seclusion would endure but a little longer, and
that the result was already certain. Scarcely had he departed when
Georgiana felt irresistibly impelled to follow him. She had forgotten
to inform Aylmer of a symptom which for two or three hours past had
begun to excite her attention. It was a sensation in the fatal
birthmark, not painful, but which induced a restlessness throughout her
system. Hastening after her husband, she intruded for the first time
into the laboratory.

The first thing that struck her eye was the furnace, that hot and
feverish worker, with the intense glow of its fire, which by the
quantities of soot clustered above it seemed to have been burning for
ages. There was a distilling apparatus in full operation. Around the
room were retorts, tubes, cylinders, crucibles, and other apparatus of
chemical research. An electrical machine stood ready for immediate use.
The atmosphere felt oppressively close, and was tainted with gaseous
odors which had been tormented forth by the processes of science. The
severe and homely simplicity of the apartment, with its naked walls and
brick pavement, looked strange, accustomed as Georgiana had become to
the fantastic elegance of her boudoir. But what chiefly, indeed almost
solely, drew her attention, was the aspect of Aylmer himself.

He was pale as death, anxious and absorbed, and hung over the furnace
as if it depended upon his utmost watchfulness whether the liquid which
it was distilling should be the draught of immortal happiness or
misery. How different from the sanguine and joyous mien that he had
assumed for Georgiana’s encouragement!

“Carefully now, Aminadab; carefully, thou human machine; carefully,
thou man of clay!” muttered Aylmer, more to himself than his assistant.
“Now, if there be a thought too much or too little, it is all over.”

“Ho! ho!” mumbled Aminadab. “Look, master! look!”

Aylmer raised his eyes hastily, and at first reddened, then grew paler
than ever, on beholding Georgiana. He rushed towards her and seized her
arm with a gripe that left the print of his fingers upon it.

“Why do you come hither? Have you no trust in your husband?” cried he,
impetuously. “Would you throw the blight of that fatal birthmark over
my labors? It is not well done. Go, prying woman, go!”

“Nay, Aylmer,” said Georgiana with the firmness of which she possessed
no stinted endowment, “it is not you that have a right to complain. You
mistrust your wife; you have concealed the anxiety with which you watch
the development of this experiment. Think not so unworthily of me, my
husband. Tell me all the risk we run, and fear not that I shall shrink;
for my share in it is far less than your own.”

“No, no, Georgiana!” said Aylmer, impatiently; “it must not be.”

“I submit,” replied she calmly. “And, Aylmer, I shall quaff whatever
draught you bring me; but it will be on the same principle that would
induce me to take a dose of poison if offered by your hand.”

“My noble wife,” said Aylmer, deeply moved, “I knew not the height and
depth of your nature until now. Nothing shall be concealed. Know, then,
that this crimson hand, superficial as it seems, has clutched its grasp
into your being with a strength of which I had no previous conception.
I have already administered agents powerful enough to do aught except
to change your entire physical system. Only one thing remains to be
tried. If that fail us we are ruined.”

“Why did you hesitate to tell me this?” asked she.

“Because, Georgiana,” said Aylmer, in a low voice, “there is danger.”

“Danger? There is but one danger—that this horrible stigma shall be
left upon my cheek!” cried Georgiana. “Remove it, remove it, whatever
be the cost, or we shall both go mad!”

“Heaven knows your words are too true,” said Aylmer, sadly. “And now,
dearest, return to your boudoir. In a little while all will be tested.”

He conducted her back and took leave of her with a solemn tenderness
which spoke far more than his words how much was now at stake. After
his departure Georgiana became rapt in musings. She considered the
character of Aylmer, and did it completer justice than at any previous
moment. Her heart exulted, while it trembled, at his honorable love—so
pure and lofty that it would accept nothing less than perfection nor
miserably make itself contented with an earthlier nature than he had
dreamed of. She felt how much more precious was such a sentiment than
that meaner kind which would have borne with the imperfection for her
sake, and have been guilty of treason to holy love by degrading its
perfect idea to the level of the actual; and with her whole spirit she
prayed that, for a single moment, she might satisfy his highest and
deepest conception. Longer than one moment she well knew it could not
be; for his spirit was ever on the march, ever ascending, and each
instant required something that was beyond the scope of the instant
before.

The sound of her husband’s footsteps aroused her. He bore a crystal
goblet containing a liquor colorless as water, but bright enough to be
the draught of immortality. Aylmer was pale; but it seemed rather the
consequence of a highly-wrought state of mind and tension of spirit
than of fear or doubt.

“The concoction of the draught has been perfect,” said he, in answer to
Georgiana’s look. “Unless all my science have deceived me, it cannot
fail.”

“Save on your account, my dearest Aylmer,” observed his wife, “I might
wish to put off this birthmark of mortality by relinquishing mortality
itself in preference to any other mode. Life is but a sad possession to
those who have attained precisely the degree of moral advancement at
which I stand. Were I weaker and blinder it might be happiness. Were I
stronger, it might be endured hopefully. But, being what I find myself,
methinks I am of all mortals the most fit to die.”

“You are fit for heaven without tasting death!” replied her husband
“But why do we speak of dying? The draught cannot fail. Behold its
effect upon this plant.”

On the window seat there stood a geranium diseased with yellow
blotches, which had overspread all its leaves. Aylmer poured a small
quantity of the liquid upon the soil in which it grew. In a little
time, when the roots of the plant had taken up the moisture, the
unsightly blotches began to be extinguished in a living verdure.

“There needed no proof,” said Georgiana, quietly. “Give me the goblet I
joyfully stake all upon your word.”

“Drink, then, thou lofty creature!” exclaimed Aylmer, with fervid
admiration. “There is no taint of imperfection on thy spirit. Thy
sensible frame, too, shall soon be all perfect.”

She quaffed the liquid and returned the goblet to his hand.

“It is grateful,” said she with a placid smile. “Methinks it is like
water from a heavenly fountain; for it contains I know not what of
unobtrusive fragrance and deliciousness. It allays a feverish thirst
that had parched me for many days. Now, dearest, let me sleep. My
earthly senses are closing over my spirit like the leaves around the
heart of a rose at sunset.”

She spoke the last words with a gentle reluctance, as if it required
almost more energy than she could command to pronounce the faint and
lingering syllables. Scarcely had they loitered through her lips ere
she was lost in slumber. Aylmer sat by her side, watching her aspect
with the emotions proper to a man the whole value of whose existence
was involved in the process now to be tested. Mingled with this mood,
however, was the philosophic investigation characteristic of the man of
science. Not the minutest symptom escaped him. A heightened flush of
the cheek, a slight irregularity of breath, a quiver of the eyelid, a
hardly perceptible tremor through the frame,—such were the details
which, as the moments passed, he wrote down in his folio volume.
Intense thought had set its stamp upon every previous page of that
volume, but the thoughts of years were all concentrated upon the last.

While thus employed, he failed not to gaze often at the fatal hand, and
not without a shudder. Yet once, by a strange and unaccountable impulse
he pressed it with his lips. His spirit recoiled, however, in the very
act, and Georgiana, out of the midst of her deep sleep, moved uneasily
and murmured as if in remonstrance. Again Aylmer resumed his watch. Nor
was it without avail. The crimson hand, which at first had been
strongly visible upon the marble paleness of Georgiana’s cheek, now
grew more faintly outlined. She remained not less pale than ever; but
the birthmark with every breath that came and went, lost somewhat of
its former distinctness. Its presence had been awful; its departure was
more awful still. Watch the stain of the rainbow fading out the sky,
and you will know how that mysterious symbol passed away.

“By Heaven! it is well-nigh gone!” said Aylmer to himself, in almost
irrepressible ecstasy. “I can scarcely trace it now. Success! success!
And now it is like the faintest rose color. The lightest flush of blood
across her cheek would overcome it. But she is so pale!”

He drew aside the window curtain and suffered the light of natural day
to fall into the room and rest upon her cheek. At the same time he
heard a gross, hoarse chuckle, which he had long known as his servant
Aminadab’s expression of delight.

“Ah, clod! ah, earthly mass!” cried Aylmer, laughing in a sort of
frenzy, “you have served me well! Matter and spirit—earth and
heaven—have both done their part in this! Laugh, thing of the senses!
You have earned the right to laugh.”

These exclamations broke Georgiana’s sleep. She slowly unclosed her
eyes and gazed into the mirror which her husband had arranged for that
purpose. A faint smile flitted over her lips when she recognized how
barely perceptible was now that crimson hand which had once blazed
forth with such disastrous brilliancy as to scare away all their
happiness. But then her eyes sought Aylmer’s face with a trouble and
anxiety that he could by no means account for.

“My poor Aylmer!” murmured she.

“Poor? Nay, richest, happiest, most favored!” exclaimed he. “My
peerless bride, it is successful! You are perfect!”

“My poor Aylmer,” she repeated, with a more than human tenderness, “you
have aimed loftily; you have done nobly. Do not repent that with so
high and pure a feeling, you have rejected the best the earth could
offer. Aylmer, dearest Aylmer, I am dying!”

Alas! it was too true! The fatal hand had grappled with the mystery of
life, and was the bond by which an angelic spirit kept itself in union
with a mortal frame. As the last crimson tint of the birthmark—that
sole token of human imperfection—faded from her cheek, the parting
breath of the now perfect woman passed into the atmosphere, and her
soul, lingering a moment near her husband, took its heavenward flight.
Then a hoarse, chuckling laugh was heard again! Thus ever does the
gross fatality of earth exult in its invariable triumph over the
immortal essence which, in this dim sphere of half development, demands
the completeness of a higher state. Yet, had Alymer reached a
profounder wisdom, he need not thus have flung away the happiness which
would have woven his mortal life of the selfsame texture with the
celestial. The momentary circumstance was too strong for him; he failed
to look beyond the shadowy scope of time, and, living once for all in
eternity, to find the perfect future in the present.




A SELECT PARTY


The man of fancy made an entertainment at one of his castles in the
air, and invited a select number of distinguished personages to favor
him with their presence. The mansion, though less splendid than many
that have been situated in the same region, was nevertheless of a
magnificence such as is seldom witnessed by those acquainted only with
terrestrial architecture. Its strong foundations and massive walls were
quarried out of a ledge of heavy and sombre clouds which had hung
brooding over the earth, apparently as dense and ponderous as its own
granite, throughout a whole autumnal day. Perceiving that the general
effect was gloomy,—so that the airy castle looked like a feudal
fortress, or a monastery of the Middle Ages, or a state prison of our
own times, rather than the home of pleasure and repose which he
intended it to be,—the owner, regardless of expense, resolved to gild
the exterior from top to bottom. Fortunately, there was just then a
flood of evening sunshine in the air. This being gathered up and poured
abundantly upon the roof and walls, imbued them with a kind of solemn
cheerfulness; while the cupolas and pinnacles were made to glitter with
the purest gold, and all the hundred windows gleamed with a glad light,
as if the edifice itself were rejoicing in its heart.

And now, if the people of the lower world chanced to be looking upward
out of the turmoil of their petty perplexities, they probably mistook
the castle in the air for a heap of sunset clouds, to which the magic
of light and shade had imparted the aspect of a fantastically
constructed mansion. To such beholders it was unreal, because they
lacked the imaginative faith. Had they been worthy to pass within its
portal, they would have recognized the truth, that the dominions which
the spirit conquers for itself among unrealities become a thousand
times more real than the earth whereon they stamp their feet, saying,
“This is solid and substantial; this may be called a fact.”

At the appointed hour, the host stood in his great saloon to receive
the company. It was a vast and noble room, the vaulted ceiling of which
was supported by double rows of gigantic pillars that had been hewn
entire out of masses of variegated clouds. So brilliantly were they
polished, and so exquisitely wrought by the sculptor’s skill, as to
resemble the finest specimens of emerald, porphyry, opal, and
chrysolite, thus producing a delicate richness of effect which their
immense size rendered not incompatible with grandeur. To each of these
pillars a meteor was suspended. Thousands of these ethereal lustres are
continually wandering about the firmament, burning out to waste, yet
capable of imparting a useful radiance to any person who has the art of
converting them to domestic purposes. As managed in the saloon, they
are far more economical than ordinary lamplight. Such, however, was the
intensity of their blaze that it had been found expedient to cover each
meteor with a globe of evening mist, thereby muffling the too potent
glow and soothing it into a mild and comfortable splendor. It was like
the brilliancy of a powerful yet chastened imagination,—a light which
seemed to hide whatever was unworthy to be noticed and give effect to
every beautiful and noble attribute. The guests, therefore, as they
advanced up the centre of the saloon, appeared to better advantage than
ever before in their lives.

The first that entered, with old-fashioned punctuality, was a venerable
figure in the costume of bygone days, with his white hair flowing down
over his shoulders and a reverend beard upon his breast. He leaned upon
a staff, the tremulous stroke of which, as he set it carefully upon the
floor, re-echoed through the saloon at every footstep. Recognizing at
once this celebrated personage, whom it had cost him a vast deal of
trouble and research to discover, the host advanced nearly three
fourths of the distance down between the pillars to meet and welcome
him.

“Venerable sir,” said the Man of Fancy, bending to the floor, “the
honor of this visit would never be forgotten were my term of existence
to be as happily prolonged as your own.”

The old gentleman received the compliment with gracious condescension.
He then thrust up his spectacles over his forehead and appeared to take
a critical survey of the saloon.

“Never within my recollection,” observed he, “have I entered a more
spacious and noble hall. But are you sure that it is built of solid
materials and that the structure will be permanent?”

“O, never fear, my venerable friend,” replied the host. “In reference
to a lifetime like your own, it is true my castle may well be called a
temporary edifice. But it will endure long enough to answer all the
purposes for which it was erected.”

But we forget that the reader has not yet been made acquainted with the
guest. It was no other than that universally accredited character so
constantly referred to in all seasons of intense cold or heat; he that,
remembers the hot Sunday and the cold Friday; the witness of a past age
whose negative reminiscences find their way into every newspaper, yet
whose antiquated and dusky abode is so overshadowed by accumulated
years and crowded back by modern edifices that none but the Man of
Fancy could have discovered it; it was, in short, that twin brother of
Time, and great-grandsire of mankind, and hand-and-glove associate of
all forgotten men and things,—the Oldest Inhabitant. The host would
willingly have drawn him into conversation, but succeeded only in
eliciting a few remarks as to the oppressive atmosphere of this present
summer evening compared with one which the guest had experienced about
fourscore years ago. The old gentleman, in fact, was a good deal
overcome by his journey among the clouds, which, to a frame so
earth-incrusted by long continuance in a lower region, was unavoidably
more fatiguing than to younger spirits. He was therefore conducted to
an easy-chair, well cushioned and stuffed with vaporous softness, and
left to take a little repose.

The Man of Fancy now discerned another guest, who stood so quietly in
the shadow of one of the pillars that he might easily have been
overlooked.

“My dear sir,” exclaimed the host, grasping him warmly by the hand,
“allow me to greet you as the hero of the evening. Pray do not take it
as an empty compliment; for, if there were not another guest in my
castle, it would be entirely pervaded with your presence.”

“I thank you,” answered the unpretending stranger; “but, though you
happened to overlook me, I have not just arrived. I came very early;
and, with your permission, shall remain after the rest of the company
have retired.”

And who does the reader imagine was this unobtrusive guest? It was the
famous performer of acknowledged impossibilities,—a character of
superhuman capacity and virtue, and, if his enemies are to be credited,
of no less remarkable weaknesses and defects. With a generosity with
which he alone sets us an example, we will glance merely at his nobler
attributes. He it is, then, who prefers the interests of others to his
own and a humble station to an exalted one. Careless of fashion,
custom, the opinions of men, and the influence of the press, he
assimilates his life to the standard of ideal rectitude, and thus
proves himself the one independent citizen of our free country. In
point of ability, many people declare him to be the only mathematician
capable of squaring the circle; the only mechanic acquainted with the
principle of perpetual motion; the only scientific philosopher who can
compel water to run up hill; the only writer of the age whose genius is
equal to the production of an epic poem; and, finally, so various are
his accomplishments, the only professor of gymnastics who has succeeded
in jumping down his own throat. With all these talents, however, he is
so far from being considered a member of good society, that it is the
severest censure of any fashionable assemblage to affirm that this
remarkable individual was present. Public orators, lecturers, and
theatrical performers particularly eschew his company. For especial
reasons, we are not at liberty to disclose his name, and shall mention
only one other trait,—a most singular phenomenon in natural
philosophy,—that, when he happens to cast his eyes upon a
looking-glass, he beholds Nobody reflected there!

Several other guests now made their appearance; and among them,
chattering with immense volubility, a brisk little gentleman of
universal vogue in private society, and not unknown in the public
journals under the title of Monsieur On-Dit. The name would seem to
indicate a Frenchman; but, whatever be his country, he is thoroughly
versed in all the languages of the day, and can express himself quite
as much to the purpose in English as in any other tongue. No sooner
were the ceremonies of salutation over than this talkative little
person put his mouth to the host’s ear and whispered three secrets of
state, an important piece of commercial intelligence, and a rich item
of fashionable scandal. He then assured the Man of Fancy that he would
not fail to circulate in the society of the lower world a minute
description of this magnificent castle in the air and of the
festivities at which he had the honor to be a guest. So saying,
Monsieur On-Dit made his bow and hurried from one to another of the
company, with all of whom he seemed to be acquainted and to possess
some topic of interest or amusement for every individual. Coming at
last to the Oldest Inhabitant, who was slumbering comfortably in the
easy-chair, he applied his mouth to that venerable ear.

“What do you say?” cried the old gentleman, starting from his nap and
putting up his hand to serve the purpose of an ear-trumpet.

Monsieur On-Dit bent forward again and repeated his communication.

“Never within my memory,” exclaimed the Oldest Inhabitant, lifting his
hands in astonishment, “has so remarkable an incident been heard of.”

Now came in the Clerk of the Weather, who had been invited out of
deference to his official station, although the host was well aware
that his conversation was likely to contribute but little to the
general enjoyment. He soon, indeed, got into a corner with his
acquaintance of long ago, the Oldest Inhabitant, and began to compare
notes with him in reference to the great storms, gales of wind, and
other atmospherical facts that had occurred during a century past. It
rejoiced the Man of Fancy that his venerable and much-respected guest
had met with so congenial an associate. Entreating them both to make
themselves perfectly at home, he now turned to receive the Wandering
Jew. This personage, however, had latterly grown so common, by mingling
in all sorts of society and appearing at the beck of every entertainer,
that he could hardly be deemed a proper guest in a very exclusive
circle. Besides, being covered with dust from his continual wanderings
along the highways of the world, he really looked out of place in a
dress party; so that the host felt relieved of an incommodity when the
restless individual in question, after a brief stay, took his departure
on a ramble towards Oregon.

The portal was now thronged by a crowd of shadowy people with whom the
Man of Fancy had been acquainted in his visionary youth. He had invited
them hither for the sake of observing how they would compare, whether
advantageously or otherwise, with the real characters to whom his
maturer life had introduced him. They were beings of crude imagination,
such as glide before a young man’s eye and pretend to be actual
inhabitants of the earth; the wise and witty with whom he would
hereafter hold intercourse; the generous and heroic friends whose
devotion would be requited with his own; the beautiful dream-woman who
would become the helpmate of his human toils and sorrows and at once
the source and partaker of his happiness. Alas! it is not good for the
full-grown man to look too closely at these old acquaintances, but
rather to reverence them at a distance through the medium of years that
have gathered duskily between. There was something laughably untrue in
their pompous stride and exaggerated sentiment; they were neither human
nor tolerable likenesses of humanity, but fantastic maskers, rendering
heroism and nature alike ridiculous by the grave absurdity of their
pretensions to such attributes; and as for the peerless dream-lady,
behold! there advanced up the saloon, with a movement like a jointed
doll, a sort of wax-figure of an angel, a creature as cold as
moonshine, an artifice in petticoats, with an intellect of pretty
phrases and only the semblance of a heart, yet in all these particulars
the true type of a young man’s imaginary mistress. Hardly could the
host’s punctilious courtesy restrain a smile as he paid his respects to
this unreality and met the sentimental glance with which the Dream
sought to remind him of their former love passages.

“No, no, fair lady,” murmured he betwixt sighing and smiling; “my taste
is changed; I have learned to love what Nature makes better than my own
creations in the guise of womanhood.”

“Ah, false one,” shrieked the dream-lady, pretending to faint, but
dissolving into thin air, out of which came the deplorable murmur of
her voice, “your inconstancy has annihilated me.”

“So be it,” said the cruel Man of Fancy to himself; “and a good
riddance too.”

Together with these shadows, and from the same region, there came an
uninvited multitude of shapes which at any time during his life had
tormented the Man of Fancy in his moods of morbid melancholy or had
haunted him in the delirium of fever. The walls of his castle in the
air were not dense enough to keep them out, nor would the strongest of
earthly architecture have availed to their exclusion. Here were those
forms of dim terror which had beset him at the entrance of life, waging
warfare with his hopes; here were strange uglinesses of earlier date,
such as haunt children in the night-time. He was particularly startled
by the vision of a deformed old black woman whom he imagined as lurking
in the garret of his native home, and who, when he was an infant, had
once come to his bedside and grinned at him in the crisis of a scarlet
fever. This same black shadow, with others almost as hideous, now
glided among the pillars of the magnificent saloon, grinning
recognition, until the man shuddered anew at the forgotten terrors of
his childhood. It amused him, however, to observe the black woman, with
the mischievous caprice peculiar to such beings, steal up to the chair
of the Oldest Inhabitant and peep into his half-dreamy mind.

“Never within my memory,” muttered that venerable personage, aghast,
“did I see such a face.”

Almost immediately after the unrealities just described, arrived a
number of guests whom incredulous readers may be inclined to rank
equally among creatures of imagination. The most noteworthy were an
incorruptible Patriot; a Scholar without pedantry; a Priest without
worldly ambition; and a Beautiful Woman without pride or coquetry; a
Married Pair whose life had never been disturbed by incongruity of
feeling; a Reformer untrammelled by his theory; and a Poet who felt no
jealousy towards other votaries of the lyre. In truth, however, the
host was not one of the cynics who consider these patterns of
excellence, without the fatal flaw, such rarities in the world; and he
had invited them to his select party chiefly out of humble deference to
the judgment of society, which pronounces them almost impossible to be
met with.

“In my younger days,” observed the Oldest Inhabitant, “such characters
might be seen at the corner of every street.”

Be that as it might, these specimens of perfection proved to be not
half so entertaining companions as people with the ordinary allowance
of faults.

But now appeared a stranger, whom the host had no sooner recognized
than, with an abundance of courtesy unlavished on any other, he
hastened down the whole length of the saloon in order to pay him
emphatic honor. Yet he was a young man in poor attire, with no insignia
of rank or acknowledged eminence, nor anything to distinguish him among
the crowd except a high, white forehead, beneath which a pair of
deep-set eyes were glowing with warm light. It was such a light as
never illuminates the earth save when a great heart burns as the
household fire of a grand intellect. And who was he?—who but the Master
Genius for whom our country is looking anxiously into the mist of Time,
as destined to fulfil the great mission of creating an American
literature, hewing it, as it were, out of the unwrought granite of our
intellectual quarries? From him, whether moulded in the form of an epic
poem or assuming a guise altogether new as the spirit itself may
determine, we are to receive our first great original work, which shall
do all that remains to be achieved for our glory among the nations. How
this child of a mighty destiny had been discovered by the Man of Fancy
it is of little consequence to mention. Suffice it that he dwells as
yet unhonored among men, unrecognized by those who have known him from
his cradle; the noble countenance which should be distinguished by a
halo diffused around it passes daily amid the throng of people toiling
and troubling themselves about the trifles of a moment, and none pay
reverence to the worker of immortality. Nor does it matter much to him,
in his triumph over all the ages, though a generation or two of his own
times shall do themselves the wrong to disregard him.

By this time Monsieur On-Dit had caught up the stranger’s name and
destiny and was busily whispering the intelligence among the other
guests.

“Pshaw!” said one. “There can never be an American genius.”

“Pish!” cried another. “We have already as good poets as any in the
world. For my part, I desire to see no better.”

And the Oldest Inhabitant, when it was proposed to introduce him to the
Master Genius, begged to be excused, observing that a man who had been
honored with the acquaintance of Dwight, and Freneau, and Joel Barlow,
might be allowed a little austerity of taste.

The saloon was now fast filling up by the arrival of other remarkable
characters, among whom were noticed Davy Jones, the distinguished
nautical personage, and a rude, carelessly dressed, harum-scarum sort
of elderly fellow, known by the nickname of Old Harry. The latter,
however, after being shown to a dressing-room, reappeared with his gray
hair nicely combed, his clothes brushed, a clean dicky on his neck, and
altogether so changed in aspect as to merit the more respectful
appellation of Venerable Henry. Joel Doe and Richard Roe came arm in
arm, accompanied by a Man of Straw, a fictitious indorser, and several
persons who had no existence except as voters in closely contested
elections. The celebrated Seatsfield, who now entered, was at first
supposed to belong to the same brotherhood, until he made it apparent
that he was a real man of flesh and blood and had his earthly domicile
in Germany. Among the latest comers, as might reasonably be expected,
arrived a guest from the far future.

“Do you know him? do you know him?” whispered Monsieur On-Dit, who
seemed to be acquainted with everybody. “He is the representative of
Posterity,—the man of an age to come.”

“And how came he here?” asked a figure who was evidently the prototype
of the fashion-plate in a magazine, and might be taken to represent the
vanities of the passing moment. “The fellow infringes upon our rights
by coming before his time.”

“But you forget where we are,” answered the Man of Fancy, who overheard
the remark. “The lower earth, it is true, will be forbidden ground to
him for many long years hence; but a castle in the air is a sort of
no-man’s-land, where Posterity may make acquaintance with us on equal
terms.”

No sooner was his identity known than a throng of guests gathered about
Posterity, all expressing the most generous interest in his welfare,
and many boasting of the sacrifices which they had made, or were
willing to make, in his behalf. Some, with as much secrecy as possible,
desired his judgment upon certain copies of verses or great manuscript
rolls of prose; others accosted him with the familiarity of old
friends, taking it for granted that he was perfectly cognizant of their
names and characters. At length, finding himself thus beset, Posterity
was put quite beside his patience.

“Gentlemen, my good friends,” cried he, breaking loose from a misty
poet who strove to hold him by the button, “I pray you to attend to
your own business, and leave me to take care of mine! I expect to owe
you nothing, unless it be certain national debts, and other
encumbrances and impediments, physical and moral, which I shall find it
troublesome enough to remove from my path. As to your verses, pray read
them to your contemporaries. Your names are as strange to me as your
faces; and even were it otherwise,—let me whisper you a secret,—the
cold, icy memory which one generation may retain of another is but a
poor recompense to barter life for. Yet, if your heart is set on being
known to me, the surest, the only method is, to live truly and wisely
for your own age, whereby, if the native force be in you, you may
likewise live for posterity.”

“It is nonsense,” murmured the Oldest Inhabitant, who, as a man of the
past, felt jealous that all notice should be withdrawn from himself to
be lavished on the future, “sheer nonsense, to waste so much thought on
what only is to be.”

To divert the minds of his guests, who were considerably abashed by
this little incident, the Man of Fancy led them through several
apartments of the castle, receiving their compliments upon the taste
and varied magnificence that were displayed in each. One of these rooms
was filled with moonlight, which did not enter through the window, but
was the aggregate of all the moonshine that is scattered around the
earth on a summer night while no eyes are awake to enjoy its beauty.
Airy spirits had gathered it up, wherever they found it gleaming on the
broad bosom of a lake, or silvering the meanders of a stream, or
glimmering among the wind-stirred boughs of a wood, and had garnered it
in this one spacious hall. Along the walls, illuminated by the mild
intensity of the moonshine, stood a multitude of ideal statues, the
original conceptions of the great works of ancient or modern art, which
the sculptors did but imperfectly succeed in putting into marble; for
it is not to be supposed that the pure idea of an immortal creation
ceases to exist; it is only necessary to know where they are deposited
in order to obtain possession of them.—In the alcoves of another vast
apartment was arranged a splendid library, the volumes of which were
inestimable, because they consisted, not of actual performances, but of
the works which the authors only planned, without ever finding the
happy season to achieve them. To take familiar instances, here were the
untold tales of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims; the unwritten cantos of
the Fairy Queen; the conclusion of Coleridge’s Christabel; and the
whole of Dryden’s projected epic on the subject of King Arthur. The
shelves were crowded; for it would not be too much to affirm that every
author has imagined and shaped out in his thought more and far better
works than those which actually proceeded from his pen. And here,
likewise, where the unrealized conceptions of youthful poets who died
of the very strength of their own genius before the world had caught
one inspired murmur from their lips.

When the peculiarities of the library and statue-gallery were explained
to the Oldest Inhabitant, he appeared infinitely perplexed, and
exclaimed, with more energy than usual, that he had never heard of such
a thing within his memory, and, moreover, did not at all understand how
it could be.

“But my brain, I think,” said the good old gentleman, “is getting not
so clear as it used to be. You young folks, I suppose, can see your way
through these strange matters. For my part, I give it up.”

“And so do I,” muttered the Old Harry. “It is enough to puzzle
the—Ahem!”

Making as little reply as possible to these observations, the Man of
Fancy preceded the company to another noble saloon, the pillars of
which were solid golden sunbeams taken out of the sky in the first hour
in the morning. Thus, as they retained all their living lustre, the
room was filled with the most cheerful radiance imaginable, yet not too
dazzling to be borne with comfort and delight. The windows were
beautifully adorned with curtains made of the many-colored clouds of
sunrise, all imbued with virgin light, and hanging in magnificent
festoons from the ceiling to the floor. Moreover, there were fragments
of rainbows scattered through the room; so that the guests, astonished
at one another, reciprocally saw their heads made glorious by the seven
primary hues; or, if they chose,—as who would not?—they could grasp a
rainbow in the air and convert it to their own apparel and adornment.
But the morning light and scattered rainbows were only a type and
symbol of the real wonders of the apartment. By an influence akin to
magic, yet perfectly natural, whatever means and opportunities of joy
are neglected in the lower world had been carefully gathered up and
deposited in the saloon of morning sunshine. As may well be conceived,
therefore, there was material enough to supply, not merely a joyous
evening, but also a happy lifetime, to more than as many people as that
spacious apartment could contain. The company seemed to renew their
youth; while that pattern and proverbial standard of innocence, the
Child Unborn, frolicked to and fro among them, communicating his own
unwrinkled gayety to all who had the good fortune to witness his
gambols.

“My honored friends,” said the Man of Fancy, after they had enjoyed
themselves awhile, “I am now to request your presence in the
banqueting-hall, where a slight collation is awaiting you.”

“Ah, well said!” ejaculated a cadaverous figure, who had been invited
for no other reason than that he was pretty constantly in the habit of
dining with Duke Humphrey. “I was beginning to wonder whether a castle
in the air were provided with a kitchen.”

It was curious, in truth, to see how instantaneously the guests were
diverted from the high moral enjoyments which they had been tasting
with so much apparent zest by a suggestion of the more solid as well as
liquid delights of the festive board. They thronged eagerly in the rear
of the host, who now ushered them into a lofty and extensive hall, from
end to end of which was arranged a table, glittering all over with
innumerable dishes and drinking-vessels of gold. It is an uncertain
point whether these rich articles of plate were made for the occasion
out of molten sunbeams, or recovered from the wrecks of Spanish
galleons that had lain for ages at the bottom of the sea. The upper end
of the table was overshadowed by a canopy, beneath which was placed a
chair of elaborate magnificence, which the host himself declined to
occupy, and besought his guests to assign it to the worthiest among
them. As a suitable homage to his incalculable antiquity and eminent
distinction, the post of honor was at first tendered to the Oldest
Inhabitant. He, however, eschewed it, and requested the favor of a bowl
of gruel at a side table, where he could refresh himself with a quiet
nap. There was some little hesitation as to the next candidate, until
Posterity took the Master Genius of our country by the hand and led him
to the chair of state beneath the princely canopy. When once they
beheld him in his true place, the company acknowledged the justice of
the selection by a long thunder-roll of vehement applause.

Then was served up a banquet, combining, if not all the delicacies of
the season, yet all the rarities which careful purveyors had met with
in the flesh, fish, and vegetable markets of the land of Nowhere. The
bill of fare being unfortunately lost, we can only mention a phoenix,
roasted in its own flames, cold potted birds of paradise, ice-creams
from the Milky-Way, and whip syllabubs and flummery from the Paradise
of Fools, whereof there was a very great consumption. As for
drinkables, the temperance people contented themselves with water as
usual; but it was the water of the Fountain of Youth; the ladies sipped
Nepenthe; the lovelorn, the careworn, and the sorrow-stricken were
supplied with brimming goblets of Lethe; and it was shrewdly
conjectured that a certain golden vase, from which only the more
distinguished guests were invited to partake, contained nectar that had
been mellowing ever since the days of classical mythology. The cloth
being removed, the company, as usual, grew eloquent over their liquor
and delivered themselves of a succession of brilliant speeches,—the
task of reporting which we resign to the more adequate ability of
Counsellor Gill, whose indispensable co-operation the Man of Fancy had
taken the precaution to secure.

When the festivity of the banquet was at its most ethereal point, the
Clerk of the Weather was observed to steal from the table and thrust
his head between the purple and golden curtains of one of the windows.

“My fellow-guests,” he remarked aloud, after carefully noting the signs
of the night, “I advise such of you as live at a distance to be going
as soon as possible; for a thunder-storm is certainly at hand.”

“Mercy on me!” cried Mother Carey, who had left her brood of chickens
and come hither in gossamer drapery, with pink silk stockings. “How
shall I ever get home?”

All now was confusion and hasty departure, with but little superfluous
leave-taking. The Oldest Inhabitant, however, true to the rule of those
long past days in which his courtesy had been studied, paused on the
threshold of the meteor-lighted hall to express his vast satisfaction
at the entertainment.

“Never, within my memory,” observed the gracious old gentleman, “has it
been my good fortune to spend a pleasanter evening or in more select
society.”

The wind here took his breath away, whirled his three-cornered hat into
infinite space, and drowned what further compliments it had been his
purpose to bestow. Many of the company had bespoken will-o’-the-wisps
to convoy them home; and the host, in his general beneficence, had
engaged the Man in the Moon, with an immense horn-lantern, to be the
guide of such desolate spinsters as could do no better for themselves.
But a blast of the rising tempest blew out all their lights in the
twinkling of an eye. How, in the darkness that ensued, the guests
contrived to get back to earth, or whether the greater part of them
contrived to get back at all, or are still wandering among clouds,
mists, and puffs of tempestuous wind, bruised by the beams and rafters
of the overthrown castle in the air, and deluded by all sorts of
unrealities, are points that concern themselves much more than the
writer or the public. People should think of these matters before they
trust themselves on a pleasure-party into the realm of Nowhere.




YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN


Young Goodman Brown came forth at sunset into the street at Salem
village; but put his head back, after crossing the threshold, to
exchange a parting kiss with his young wife. And Faith, as the wife was
aptly named, thrust her own pretty head into the street, letting the
wind play with the pink ribbons of her cap while she called to Goodman
Brown.

“Dearest heart,” whispered she, softly and rather sadly, when her lips
were close to his ear, “prithee put off your journey until sunrise and
sleep in your own bed to-night. A lone woman is troubled with such
dreams and such thoughts that she’s afeard of herself sometimes. Pray
tarry with me this night, dear husband, of all nights in the year.”

“My love and my Faith,” replied young Goodman Brown, “of all nights in
the year, this one night must I tarry away from thee. My journey, as
thou callest it, forth and back again, must needs be done ’twixt now
and sunrise. What, my sweet, pretty wife, dost thou doubt me already,
and we but three months married?”

“Then God bless you!” said Faith, with the pink ribbons; “and may you
find all well when you come back.”

“Amen!” cried Goodman Brown. “Say thy prayers, dear Faith, and go to
bed at dusk, and no harm will come to thee.”

So they parted; and the young man pursued his way until, being about to
turn the corner by the meeting-house, he looked back and saw the head
of Faith still peeping after him with a melancholy air, in spite of her
pink ribbons.

“Poor little Faith!” thought he, for his heart smote him. “What a
wretch am I to leave her on such an errand! She talks of dreams, too.
Methought as she spoke there was trouble in her face, as if a dream had
warned her what work is to be done tonight. But no, no; ’twould kill
her to think it. Well, she’s a blessed angel on earth; and after this
one night I’ll cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven.”

With this excellent resolve for the future, Goodman Brown felt himself
justified in making more haste on his present evil purpose. He had
taken a dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest,
which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep through, and
closed immediately behind. It was all as lonely as could be; and there
is this peculiarity in such a solitude, that the traveller knows not
who may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and the thick boughs
overhead; so that with lonely footsteps he may yet be passing through
an unseen multitude.

“There may be a devilish Indian behind every tree,” said Goodman Brown
to himself; and he glanced fearfully behind him as he added, “What if
the devil himself should be at my very elbow!”

His head being turned back, he passed a crook of the road, and, looking
forward again, beheld the figure of a man, in grave and decent attire,
seated at the foot of an old tree. He arose at Goodman Brown’s approach
and walked onward side by side with him.

“You are late, Goodman Brown,” said he. “The clock of the Old South was
striking as I came through Boston, and that is full fifteen minutes
agone.”

“Faith kept me back a while,” replied the young man, with a tremor in
his voice, caused by the sudden appearance of his companion, though not
wholly unexpected.

It was now deep dusk in the forest, and deepest in that part of it
where these two were journeying. As nearly as could be discerned, the
second traveller was about fifty years old, apparently in the same rank
of life as Goodman Brown, and bearing a considerable resemblance to
him, though perhaps more in expression than features. Still they might
have been taken for father and son. And yet, though the elder person
was as simply clad as the younger, and as simple in manner too, he had
an indescribable air of one who knew the world, and who would not have
felt abashed at the governor’s dinner table or in King William’s court,
were it possible that his affairs should call him thither. But the only
thing about him that could be fixed upon as remarkable was his staff,
which bore the likeness of a great black snake, so curiously wrought
that it might almost be seen to twist and wriggle itself like a living
serpent. This, of course, must have been an ocular deception, assisted
by the uncertain light.

“Come, Goodman Brown,” cried his fellow-traveller, “this is a dull pace
for the beginning of a journey. Take my staff, if you are so soon
weary.”

“Friend,” said the other, exchanging his slow pace for a full stop,
“having kept covenant by meeting thee here, it is my purpose now to
return whence I came. I have scruples touching the matter thou wot’st
of.”

“Sayest thou so?” replied he of the serpent, smiling apart. “Let us
walk on, nevertheless, reasoning as we go; and if I convince thee not
thou shalt turn back. We are but a little way in the forest yet.”

“Too far! too far!” exclaimed the goodman, unconsciously resuming his
walk. “My father never went into the woods on such an errand, nor his
father before him. We have been a race of honest men and good
Christians since the days of the martyrs; and shall I be the first of
the name of Brown that ever took this path and kept—”

“Such company, thou wouldst say,” observed the elder person,
interpreting his pause. “Well said, Goodman Brown! I have been as well
acquainted with your family as with ever a one among the Puritans; and
that’s no trifle to say. I helped your grandfather, the constable, when
he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem; and
it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own
hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip’s war. They
were my good friends, both; and many a pleasant walk have we had along
this path, and returned merrily after midnight. I would fain be friends
with you for their sake.”

“If it be as thou sayest,” replied Goodman Brown, “I marvel they never
spoke of these matters; or, verily, I marvel not, seeing that the least
rumor of the sort would have driven them from New England. We are a
people of prayer, and good works to boot, and abide no such
wickedness.”

“Wickedness or not,” said the traveller with the twisted staff, “I have
a very general acquaintance here in New England. The deacons of many a
church have drunk the communion wine with me; the selectmen of divers
towns make me their chairman; and a majority of the Great and General
Court are firm supporters of my interest. The governor and I, too—But
these are state secrets.”

“Can this be so?” cried Goodman Brown, with a stare of amazement at his
undisturbed companion. “Howbeit, I have nothing to do with the governor
and council; they have their own ways, and are no rule for a simple
husbandman like me. But, were I to go on with thee, how should I meet
the eye of that good old man, our minister, at Salem village? Oh, his
voice would make me tremble both Sabbath day and lecture day.”

Thus far the elder traveller had listened with due gravity; but now
burst into a fit of irrepressible mirth, shaking himself so violently
that his snake-like staff actually seemed to wriggle in sympathy.

“Ha! ha! ha!” shouted he again and again; then composing himself,
“Well, go on, Goodman Brown, go on; but, prithee, don’t kill me with
laughing.”

“Well, then, to end the matter at once,” said Goodman Brown,
considerably nettled, “there is my wife, Faith. It would break her dear
little heart; and I’d rather break my own.”

“Nay, if that be the case,” answered the other, “e’en go thy ways,
Goodman Brown. I would not for twenty old women like the one hobbling
before us that Faith should come to any harm.”

As he spoke he pointed his staff at a female figure on the path, in
whom Goodman Brown recognized a very pious and exemplary dame, who had
taught him his catechism in youth, and was still his moral and
spiritual adviser, jointly with the minister and Deacon Gookin.

“A marvel, truly, that Goody Cloyse should be so far in the wilderness
at nightfall,” said he. “But with your leave, friend, I shall take a
cut through the woods until we have left this Christian woman behind.
Being a stranger to you, she might ask whom I was consorting with and
whither I was going.”

“Be it so,” said his fellow-traveller. “Betake you to the woods, and
let me keep the path.”

Accordingly the young man turned aside, but took care to watch his
companion, who advanced softly along the road until he had come within
a staff’s length of the old dame. She, meanwhile, was making the best
of her way, with singular speed for so aged a woman, and mumbling some
indistinct words—a prayer, doubtless—as she went. The traveller put
forth his staff and touched her withered neck with what seemed the
serpent’s tail.

“The devil!” screamed the pious old lady.

“Then Goody Cloyse knows her old friend?” observed the traveller,
confronting her and leaning on his writhing stick.

“Ah, forsooth, and is it your worship indeed?” cried the good dame.
“Yea, truly is it, and in the very image of my old gossip, Goodman
Brown, the grandfather of the silly fellow that now is. But—would your
worship believe it?—my broomstick hath strangely disappeared, stolen,
as I suspect, by that unhanged witch, Goody Cory, and that, too, when I
was all anointed with the juice of smallage, and cinquefoil, and wolf’s
bane.”

“Mingled with fine wheat and the fat of a new-born babe,” said the
shape of old Goodman Brown.

“Ah, your worship knows the recipe,” cried the old lady, cackling
aloud. “So, as I was saying, being all ready for the meeting, and no
horse to ride on, I made up my mind to foot it; for they tell me there
is a nice young man to be taken into communion to-night. But now your
good worship will lend me your arm, and we shall be there in a
twinkling.”

“That can hardly be,” answered her friend. “I may not spare you my arm,
Goody Cloyse; but here is my staff, if you will.”

So saying, he threw it down at her feet, where, perhaps, it assumed
life, being one of the rods which its owner had formerly lent to the
Egyptian magi. Of this fact, however, Goodman Brown could not take
cognizance. He had cast up his eyes in astonishment, and, looking down
again, beheld neither Goody Cloyse nor the serpentine staff, but his
fellow-traveller alone, who waited for him as calmly as if nothing had
happened.

“That old woman taught me my catechism,” said the young man; and there
was a world of meaning in this simple comment.

They continued to walk onward, while the elder traveller exhorted his
companion to make good speed and persevere in the path, discoursing so
aptly that his arguments seemed rather to spring up in the bosom of his
auditor than to be suggested by himself. As they went, he plucked a
branch of maple to serve for a walking stick, and began to strip it of
the twigs and little boughs, which were wet with evening dew. The
moment his fingers touched them they became strangely withered and
dried up as with a week’s sunshine. Thus the pair proceeded, at a good
free pace, until suddenly, in a gloomy hollow of the road, Goodman
Brown sat himself down on the stump of a tree and refused to go any
farther.

“Friend,” said he, stubbornly, “my mind is made up. Not another step
will I budge on this errand. What if a wretched old woman do choose to
go to the devil when I thought she was going to heaven: is that any
reason why I should quit my dear Faith and go after her?”

“You will think better of this by and by,” said his acquaintance,
composedly. “Sit here and rest yourself a while; and when you feel like
moving again, there is my staff to help you along.”

Without more words, he threw his companion the maple stick, and was as
speedily out of sight as if he had vanished into the deepening gloom.
The young man sat a few moments by the roadside, applauding himself
greatly, and thinking with how clear a conscience he should meet the
minister in his morning walk, nor shrink from the eye of good old
Deacon Gookin. And what calm sleep would be his that very night, which
was to have been spent so wickedly, but so purely and sweetly now, in
the arms of Faith! Amidst these pleasant and praiseworthy meditations,
Goodman Brown heard the tramp of horses along the road, and deemed it
advisable to conceal himself within the verge of the forest, conscious
of the guilty purpose that had brought him thither, though now so
happily turned from it.

On came the hoof tramps and the voices of the riders, two grave old
voices, conversing soberly as they drew near. These mingled sounds
appeared to pass along the road, within a few yards of the young man’s
hiding-place; but, owing doubtless to the depth of the gloom at that
particular spot, neither the travellers nor their steeds were visible.
Though their figures brushed the small boughs by the wayside, it could
not be seen that they intercepted, even for a moment, the faint gleam
from the strip of bright sky athwart which they must have passed.
Goodman Brown alternately crouched and stood on tiptoe, pulling aside
the branches and thrusting forth his head as far as he durst without
discerning so much as a shadow. It vexed him the more, because he could
have sworn, were such a thing possible, that he recognized the voices
of the minister and Deacon Gookin, jogging along quietly, as they were
wont to do, when bound to some ordination or ecclesiastical council.
While yet within hearing, one of the riders stopped to pluck a switch.

“Of the two, reverend sir,” said the voice like the deacon’s, “I had
rather miss an ordination dinner than to-night’s meeting. They tell me
that some of our community are to be here from Falmouth and beyond, and
others from Connecticut and Rhode Island, besides several of the Indian
powwows, who, after their fashion, know almost as much deviltry as the
best of us. Moreover, there is a goodly young woman to be taken into
communion.”

“Mighty well, Deacon Gookin!” replied the solemn old tones of the
minister. “Spur up, or we shall be late. Nothing can be done, you know,
until I get on the ground.”

The hoofs clattered again; and the voices, talking so strangely in the
empty air, passed on through the forest, where no church had ever been
gathered or solitary Christian prayed. Whither, then, could these holy
men be journeying so deep into the heathen wilderness? Young Goodman
Brown caught hold of a tree for support, being ready to sink down on
the ground, faint and overburdened with the heavy sickness of his
heart. He looked up to the sky, doubting whether there really was a
heaven above him. Yet there was the blue arch, and the stars
brightening in it.

“With heaven above and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the
devil!” cried Goodman Brown.

While he still gazed upward into the deep arch of the firmament and had
lifted his hands to pray, a cloud, though no wind was stirring, hurried
across the zenith and hid the brightening stars. The blue sky was still
visible, except directly overhead, where this black mass of cloud was
sweeping swiftly northward. Aloft in the air, as if from the depths of
the cloud, came a confused and doubtful sound of voices. Once the
listener fancied that he could distinguish the accents of towns-people
of his own, men and women, both pious and ungodly, many of whom he had
met at the communion table, and had seen others rioting at the tavern.
The next moment, so indistinct were the sounds, he doubted whether he
had heard aught but the murmur of the old forest, whispering without a
wind. Then came a stronger swell of those familiar tones, heard daily
in the sunshine at Salem village, but never until now from a cloud of
night There was one voice of a young woman, uttering lamentations, yet
with an uncertain sorrow, and entreating for some favor, which,
perhaps, it would grieve her to obtain; and all the unseen multitude,
both saints and sinners, seemed to encourage her onward.

“Faith!” shouted Goodman Brown, in a voice of agony and desperation;
and the echoes of the forest mocked him, crying, “Faith! Faith!” as if
bewildered wretches were seeking her all through the wilderness.

The cry of grief, rage, and terror was yet piercing the night, when the
unhappy husband held his breath for a response. There was a scream,
drowned immediately in a louder murmur of voices, fading into far-off
laughter, as the dark cloud swept away, leaving the clear and silent
sky above Goodman Brown. But something fluttered lightly down through
the air and caught on the branch of a tree. The young man seized it,
and beheld a pink ribbon.

“My Faith is gone!” cried he, after one stupefied moment. “There is no
good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil; for to thee is this
world given.”

And, maddened with despair, so that he laughed loud and long, did
Goodman Brown grasp his staff and set forth again, at such a rate that
he seemed to fly along the forest path rather than to walk or run. The
road grew wilder and drearier and more faintly traced, and vanished at
length, leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing
onward with the instinct that guides mortal man to evil. The whole
forest was peopled with frightful sounds—the creaking of the trees, the
howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the
wind tolled like a distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar
around the traveller, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But
he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its
other horrors.

“Ha! ha! ha!” roared Goodman Brown when the wind laughed at him.

“Let us hear which will laugh loudest. Think not to frighten me with
your deviltry. Come witch, come wizard, come Indian powwow, come devil
himself, and here comes Goodman Brown. You may as well fear him as he
fear you.”

In truth, all through the haunted forest there could be nothing more
frightful than the figure of Goodman Brown. On he flew among the black
pines, brandishing his staff with frenzied gestures, now giving vent to
an inspiration of horrid blasphemy, and now shouting forth such
laughter as set all the echoes of the forest laughing like demons
around him. The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he
rages in the breast of man. Thus sped the demoniac on his course,
until, quivering among the trees, he saw a red light before him, as
when the felled trunks and branches of a clearing have been set on
fire, and throw up their lurid blaze against the sky, at the hour of
midnight. He paused, in a lull of the tempest that had driven him
onward, and heard the swell of what seemed a hymn, rolling solemnly
from a distance with the weight of many voices. He knew the tune; it
was a familiar one in the choir of the village meeting-house. The verse
died heavily away, and was lengthened by a chorus, not of human voices,
but of all the sounds of the benighted wilderness pealing in awful
harmony together. Goodman Brown cried out, and his cry was lost to his
own ear by its unison with the cry of the desert.

In the interval of silence he stole forward until the light glared full
upon his eyes. At one extremity of an open space, hemmed in by the dark
wall of the forest, arose a rock, bearing some rude, natural
resemblance either to an altar or a pulpit, and surrounded by four
blazing pines, their tops aflame, their stems untouched, like candles
at an evening meeting. The mass of foliage that had overgrown the
summit of the rock was all on fire, blazing high into the night and
fitfully illuminating the whole field. Each pendent twig and leafy
festoon was in a blaze. As the red light arose and fell, a numerous
congregation alternately shone forth, then disappeared in shadow, and
again grew, as it were, out of the darkness, peopling the heart of the
solitary woods at once.

“A grave and dark-clad company,” quoth Goodman Brown.

In truth they were such. Among them, quivering to and fro between gloom
and splendor, appeared faces that would be seen next day at the council
board of the province, and others which, Sabbath after Sabbath, looked
devoutly heavenward, and benignantly over the crowded pews, from the
holiest pulpits in the land. Some affirm that the lady of the governor
was there. At least there were high dames well known to her, and wives
of honored husbands, and widows, a great multitude, and ancient
maidens, all of excellent repute, and fair young girls, who trembled
lest their mothers should espy them. Either the sudden gleams of light
flashing over the obscure field bedazzled Goodman Brown, or he
recognized a score of the church members of Salem village famous for
their especial sanctity. Good old Deacon Gookin had arrived, and waited
at the skirts of that venerable saint, his revered pastor. But,
irreverently consorting with these grave, reputable, and pious people,
these elders of the church, these chaste dames and dewy virgins, there
were men of dissolute lives and women of spotted fame, wretches given
over to all mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes.
It was strange to see that the good shrank not from the wicked, nor
were the sinners abashed by the saints. Scattered also among their
pale-faced enemies were the Indian priests, or powwows, who had often
scared their native forest with more hideous incantations than any
known to English witchcraft.

“But where is Faith?” thought Goodman Brown; and, as hope came into his
heart, he trembled.

Another verse of the hymn arose, a slow and mournful strain, such as
the pious love, but joined to words which expressed all that our nature
can conceive of sin, and darkly hinted at far more. Unfathomable to
mere mortals is the lore of fiends. Verse after verse was sung; and
still the chorus of the desert swelled between like the deepest tone of
a mighty organ; and with the final peal of that dreadful anthem there
came a sound, as if the roaring wind, the rushing streams, the howling
beasts, and every other voice of the unconcerted wilderness were
mingling and according with the voice of guilty man in homage to the
prince of all. The four blazing pines threw up a loftier flame, and
obscurely discovered shapes and visages of horror on the smoke wreaths
above the impious assembly. At the same moment the fire on the rock
shot redly forth and formed a glowing arch above its base, where now
appeared a figure. With reverence be it spoken, the figure bore no
slight similitude, both in garb and manner, to some grave divine of the
New England churches.

“Bring forth the converts!” cried a voice that echoed through the field
and rolled into the forest.

At the word, Goodman Brown stepped forth from the shadow of the trees
and approached the congregation, with whom he felt a loathful
brotherhood by the sympathy of all that was wicked in his heart. He
could have well-nigh sworn that the shape of his own dead father
beckoned him to advance, looking downward from a smoke wreath, while a
woman, with dim features of despair, threw out her hand to warn him
back. Was it his mother? But he had no power to retreat one step, nor
to resist, even in thought, when the minister and good old Deacon
Gookin seized his arms and led him to the blazing rock. Thither came
also the slender form of a veiled female, led between Goody Cloyse,
that pious teacher of the catechism, and Martha Carrier, who had
received the devil’s promise to be queen of hell. A rampant hag was
she. And there stood the proselytes beneath the canopy of fire.

“Welcome, my children,” said the dark figure, “to the communion of your
race. Ye have found thus young your nature and your destiny. My
children, look behind you!”

They turned; and flashing forth, as it were, in a sheet of flame, the
fiend worshippers were seen; the smile of welcome gleamed darkly on
every visage.

“There,” resumed the sable form, “are all whom ye have reverenced from
youth. Ye deemed them holier than yourselves, and shrank from your own
sin, contrasting it with their lives of righteousness and prayerful
aspirations heavenward. Yet here are they all in my worshipping
assembly. This night it shall be granted you to know their secret
deeds: how hoary-bearded elders of the church have whispered wanton
words to the young maids of their households; how many a woman, eager
for widows’ weeds, has given her husband a drink at bedtime and let him
sleep his last sleep in her bosom; how beardless youths have made haste
to inherit their fathers’ wealth; and how fair damsels—blush not, sweet
ones—have dug little graves in the garden, and bidden me, the sole
guest to an infant’s funeral. By the sympathy of your human hearts for
sin ye shall scent out all the places—whether in church, bedchamber,
street, field, or forest—where crime has been committed, and shall
exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood
spot. Far more than this. It shall be yours to penetrate, in every
bosom, the deep mystery of sin, the fountain of all wicked arts, and
which inexhaustibly supplies more evil impulses than human power—than
my power at its utmost—can make manifest in deeds. And now, my
children, look upon each other.”

They did so; and, by the blaze of the hell-kindled torches, the
wretched man beheld his Faith, and the wife her husband, trembling
before that unhallowed altar.

“Lo, there ye stand, my children,” said the figure, in a deep and
solemn tone, almost sad with its despairing awfulness, as if his once
angelic nature could yet mourn for our miserable race. “Depending upon
one another’s hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a
dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must
be your only happiness. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of
your race.”

“Welcome,” repeated the fiend worshippers, in one cry of despair and
triumph.

And there they stood, the only pair, as it seemed, who were yet
hesitating on the verge of wickedness in this dark world. A basin was
hollowed, naturally, in the rock. Did it contain water, reddened by the
lurid light? or was it blood? or, perchance, a liquid flame? Herein did
the shape of evil dip his hand and prepare to lay the mark of baptism
upon their foreheads, that they might be partakers of the mystery of
sin, more conscious of the secret guilt of others, both in deed and
thought, than they could now be of their own. The husband cast one look
at his pale wife, and Faith at him. What polluted wretches would the
next glance show them to each other, shuddering alike at what they
disclosed and what they saw!

“Faith! Faith!” cried the husband, “look up to heaven, and resist the
wicked one.”

Whether Faith obeyed he knew not. Hardly had he spoken when he found
himself amid calm night and solitude, listening to a roar of the wind
which died heavily away through the forest. He staggered against the
rock, and felt it chill and damp; while a hanging twig, that had been
all on fire, besprinkled his cheek with the coldest dew.

The next morning young Goodman Brown came slowly into the street of
Salem village, staring around him like a bewildered man. The good old
minister was taking a walk along the graveyard to get an appetite for
breakfast and meditate his sermon, and bestowed a blessing, as he
passed, on Goodman Brown. He shrank from the venerable saint as if to
avoid an anathema. Old Deacon Gookin was at domestic worship, and the
holy words of his prayer were heard through the open window. “What God
doth the wizard pray to?” quoth Goodman Brown. Goody Cloyse, that
excellent old Christian, stood in the early sunshine at her own
lattice, catechizing a little girl who had brought her a pint of
morning’s milk. Goodman Brown snatched away the child as from the grasp
of the fiend himself. Turning the corner by the meeting-house, he spied
the head of Faith, with the pink ribbons, gazing anxiously forth, and
bursting into such joy at sight of him that she skipped along the
street and almost kissed her husband before the whole village. But
Goodman Brown looked sternly and sadly into her face, and passed on
without a greeting.

Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild
dream of a witch-meeting?

Be it so if you will; but, alas! it was a dream of evil omen for young
Goodman Brown. A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if
not a desperate man did he become from the night of that fearful dream.
On the Sabbath day, when the congregation were singing a holy psalm, he
could not listen because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear
and drowned all the blessed strain. When the minister spoke from the
pulpit with power and fervid eloquence, and, with his hand on the open
Bible, of the sacred truths of our religion, and of saint-like lives
and triumphant deaths, and of future bliss or misery unutterable, then
did Goodman Brown turn pale, dreading lest the roof should thunder down
upon the gray blasphemer and his hearers. Often, waking suddenly at
midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning or
eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered
to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away. And when he
had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by
Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly
procession, besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse
upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.




RAPPACCINI’S DAUGHTER


A young man, named Giovanni Guasconti, came, very long ago, from the
more southern region of Italy, to pursue his studies at the University
of Padua. Giovanni, who had but a scanty supply of gold ducats in his
pocket, took lodgings in a high and gloomy chamber of an old edifice
which looked not unworthy to have been the palace of a Paduan noble,
and which, in fact, exhibited over its entrance the armorial bearings
of a family long since extinct. The young stranger, who was not
unstudied in the great poem of his country, recollected that one of the
ancestors of this family, and perhaps an occupant of this very mansion,
had been pictured by Dante as a partaker of the immortal agonies of his
Inferno. These reminiscences and associations, together with the
tendency to heartbreak natural to a young man for the first time out of
his native sphere, caused Giovanni to sigh heavily as he looked around
the desolate and ill-furnished apartment.

“Holy Virgin, signor!” cried old Dame Lisabetta, who, won by the
youth’s remarkable beauty of person, was kindly endeavoring to give the
chamber a habitable air, “what a sigh was that to come out of a young
man’s heart! Do you find this old mansion gloomy? For the love of
Heaven, then, put your head out of the window, and you will see as
bright sunshine as you have left in Naples.”

Guasconti mechanically did as the old woman advised, but could not
quite agree with her that the Paduan sunshine was as cheerful as that
of southern Italy. Such as it was, however, it fell upon a garden
beneath the window and expended its fostering influences on a variety
of plants, which seemed to have been cultivated with exceeding care.

“Does this garden belong to the house?” asked Giovanni.

“Heaven forbid, signor, unless it were fruitful of better pot herbs
than any that grow there now,” answered old Lisabetta. “No; that garden
is cultivated by the own hands of Signor Giacomo Rappaccini, the famous
doctor, who, I warrant him, has been heard of as far as Naples. It is
said that he distils these plants into medicines that are as potent as
a charm. Oftentimes you may see the signor doctor at work, and
perchance the signora, his daughter, too, gathering the strange flowers
that grow in the garden.”

The old woman had now done what she could for the aspect of the
chamber; and, commending the young man to the protection of the saints,
took her departure.

Giovanni still found no better occupation than to look down into the
garden beneath his window. From its appearance, he judged it to be one
of those botanic gardens which were of earlier date in Padua than
elsewhere in Italy or in the world. Or, not improbably, it might once
have been the pleasure-place of an opulent family; for there was the
ruin of a marble fountain in the centre, sculptured with rare art, but
so wofully shattered that it was impossible to trace the original
design from the chaos of remaining fragments. The water, however,
continued to gush and sparkle into the sunbeams as cheerfully as ever.
A little gurgling sound ascended to the young man’s window, and made
him feel as if the fountain were an immortal spirit that sung its song
unceasingly and without heeding the vicissitudes around it, while one
century imbodied it in marble and another scattered the perishable
garniture on the soil. All about the pool into which the water subsided
grew various plants, that seemed to require a plentiful supply of
moisture for the nourishment of gigantic leaves, and in some instances,
flowers gorgeously magnificent. There was one shrub in particular, set
in a marble vase in the midst of the pool, that bore a profusion of
purple blossoms, each of which had the lustre and richness of a gem;
and the whole together made a show so resplendent that it seemed enough
to illuminate the garden, even had there been no sunshine. Every
portion of the soil was peopled with plants and herbs, which, if less
beautiful, still bore tokens of assiduous care, as if all had their
individual virtues, known to the scientific mind that fostered them.
Some were placed in urns, rich with old carving, and others in common
garden pots; some crept serpent-like along the ground or climbed on
high, using whatever means of ascent was offered them. One plant had
wreathed itself round a statue of Vertumnus, which was thus quite
veiled and shrouded in a drapery of hanging foliage, so happily
arranged that it might have served a sculptor for a study.

While Giovanni stood at the window he heard a rustling behind a screen
of leaves, and became aware that a person was at work in the garden.
His figure soon emerged into view, and showed itself to be that of no
common laborer, but a tall, emaciated, sallow, and sickly-looking man,
dressed in a scholar’s garb of black. He was beyond the middle term of
life, with gray hair, a thin, gray beard, and a face singularly marked
with intellect and cultivation, but which could never, even in his more
youthful days, have expressed much warmth of heart.

Nothing could exceed the intentness with which this scientific gardener
examined every shrub which grew in his path: it seemed as if he was
looking into their inmost nature, making observations in regard to
their creative essence, and discovering why one leaf grew in this shape
and another in that, and wherefore such and such flowers differed among
themselves in hue and perfume. Nevertheless, in spite of this deep
intelligence on his part, there was no approach to intimacy between
himself and these vegetable existences. On the contrary, he avoided
their actual touch or the direct inhaling of their odors with a caution
that impressed Giovanni most disagreeably; for the man’s demeanor was
that of one walking among malignant influences, such as savage beasts,
or deadly snakes, or evil spirits, which, should he allow them one
moment of license, would wreak upon him some terrible fatality. It was
strangely frightful to the young man’s imagination to see this air of
insecurity in a person cultivating a garden, that most simple and
innocent of human toils, and which had been alike the joy and labor of
the unfallen parents of the race. Was this garden, then, the Eden of
the present world? And this man, with such a perception of harm in what
his own hands caused to grow,—was he the Adam?

The distrustful gardener, while plucking away the dead leaves or
pruning the too luxuriant growth of the shrubs, defended his hands with
a pair of thick gloves. Nor were these his only armor. When, in his
walk through the garden, he came to the magnificent plant that hung its
purple gems beside the marble fountain, he placed a kind of mask over
his mouth and nostrils, as if all this beauty did but conceal a
deadlier malice; but, finding his task still too dangerous, he drew
back, removed the mask, and called loudly, but in the infirm voice of a
person affected with inward disease, “Beatrice! Beatrice!”

“Here am I, my father. What would you?” cried a rich and youthful voice
from the window of the opposite house—a voice as rich as a tropical
sunset, and which made Giovanni, though he knew not why, think of deep
hues of purple or crimson and of perfumes heavily delectable. “Are you
in the garden?”

“Yes, Beatrice,” answered the gardener, “and I need your help.”

Soon there emerged from under a sculptured portal the figure of a young
girl, arrayed with as much richness of taste as the most splendid of
the flowers, beautiful as the day, and with a bloom so deep and vivid
that one shade more would have been too much. She looked redundant with
life, health, and energy; all of which attributes were bound down and
compressed, as it were and girdled tensely, in their luxuriance, by her
virgin zone. Yet Giovanni’s fancy must have grown morbid while he
looked down into the garden; for the impression which the fair stranger
made upon him was as if here were another flower, the human sister of
those vegetable ones, as beautiful as they, more beautiful than the
richest of them, but still to be touched only with a glove, nor to be
approached without a mask. As Beatrice came down the garden path, it
was observable that she handled and inhaled the odor of several of the
plants which her father had most sedulously avoided.

“Here, Beatrice,” said the latter, “see how many needful offices
require to be done to our chief treasure. Yet, shattered as I am, my
life might pay the penalty of approaching it so closely as
circumstances demand. Henceforth, I fear, this plant must be consigned
to your sole charge.”

“And gladly will I undertake it,” cried again the rich tones of the
young lady, as she bent towards the magnificent plant and opened her
arms as if to embrace it. “Yes, my sister, my splendour, it shall be
Beatrice’s task to nurse and serve thee; and thou shalt reward her with
thy kisses and perfumed breath, which to her is as the breath of life.”

Then, with all the tenderness in her manner that was so strikingly
expressed in her words, she busied herself with such attentions as the
plant seemed to require; and Giovanni, at his lofty window, rubbed his
eyes and almost doubted whether it were a girl tending her favorite
flower, or one sister performing the duties of affection to another.
The scene soon terminated. Whether Dr. Rappaccini had finished his
labors in the garden, or that his watchful eye had caught the
stranger’s face, he now took his daughter’s arm and retired. Night was
already closing in; oppressive exhalations seemed to proceed from the
plants and steal upward past the open window; and Giovanni, closing the
lattice, went to his couch and dreamed of a rich flower and beautiful
girl. Flower and maiden were different, and yet the same, and fraught
with some strange peril in either shape.

But there is an influence in the light of morning that tends to rectify
whatever errors of fancy, or even of judgment, we may have incurred
during the sun’s decline, or among the shadows of the night, or in the
less wholesome glow of moonshine. Giovanni’s first movement, on
starting from sleep, was to throw open the window and gaze down into
the garden which his dreams had made so fertile of mysteries. He was
surprised and a little ashamed to find how real and matter-of-fact an
affair it proved to be, in the first rays of the sun which gilded the
dew-drops that hung upon leaf and blossom, and, while giving a brighter
beauty to each rare flower, brought everything within the limits of
ordinary experience. The young man rejoiced that, in the heart of the
barren city, he had the privilege of overlooking this spot of lovely
and luxuriant vegetation. It would serve, he said to himself, as a
symbolic language to keep him in communion with Nature. Neither the
sickly and thoughtworn Dr. Giacomo Rappaccini, it is true, nor his
brilliant daughter, were now visible; so that Giovanni could not
determine how much of the singularity which he attributed to both was
due to their own qualities and how much to his wonder-working fancy;
but he was inclined to take a most rational view of the whole matter.

In the course of the day he paid his respects to Signor Pietro
Baglioni, professor of medicine in the university, a physician of
eminent repute to whom Giovanni had brought a letter of introduction.
The professor was an elderly personage, apparently of genial nature,
and habits that might almost be called jovial. He kept the young man to
dinner, and made himself very agreeable by the freedom and liveliness
of his conversation, especially when warmed by a flask or two of Tuscan
wine. Giovanni, conceiving that men of science, inhabitants of the same
city, must needs be on familiar terms with one another, took an
opportunity to mention the name of Dr. Rappaccini. But the professor
did not respond with so much cordiality as he had anticipated.

“Ill would it become a teacher of the divine art of medicine,” said
Professor Pietro Baglioni, in answer to a question of Giovanni, “to
withhold due and well-considered praise of a physician so eminently
skilled as Rappaccini; but, on the other hand, I should answer it but
scantily to my conscience were I to permit a worthy youth like
yourself, Signor Giovanni, the son of an ancient friend, to imbibe
erroneous ideas respecting a man who might hereafter chance to hold
your life and death in his hands. The truth is, our worshipful Dr.
Rappaccini has as much science as any member of the faculty—with
perhaps one single exception—in Padua, or all Italy; but there are
certain grave objections to his professional character.”

“And what are they?” asked the young man.

“Has my friend Giovanni any disease of body or heart, that he is so
inquisitive about physicians?” said the professor, with a smile. “But
as for Rappaccini, it is said of him—and I, who know the man well, can
answer for its truth—that he cares infinitely more for science than for
mankind. His patients are interesting to him only as subjects for some
new experiment. He would sacrifice human life, his own among the rest,
or whatever else was dearest to him, for the sake of adding so much as
a grain of mustard seed to the great heap of his accumulated
knowledge.”

“Methinks he is an awful man indeed,” remarked Guasconti, mentally
recalling the cold and purely intellectual aspect of Rappaccini. “And
yet, worshipful professor, is it not a noble spirit? Are there many men
capable of so spiritual a love of science?”

“God forbid,” answered the professor, somewhat testily; “at least,
unless they take sounder views of the healing art than those adopted by
Rappaccini. It is his theory that all medicinal virtues are comprised
within those substances which we term vegetable poisons. These he
cultivates with his own hands, and is said even to have produced new
varieties of poison, more horribly deleterious than Nature, without the
assistance of this learned person, would ever have plagued the world
withal. That the signor doctor does less mischief than might be
expected with such dangerous substances is undeniable. Now and then, it
must be owned, he has effected, or seemed to effect, a marvellous cure;
but, to tell you my private mind, Signor Giovanni, he should receive
little credit for such instances of success,—they being probably the
work of chance,—but should be held strictly accountable for his
failures, which may justly be considered his own work.”

The youth might have taken Baglioni’s opinions with many grains of
allowance had he known that there was a professional warfare of long
continuance between him and Dr. Rappaccini, in which the latter was
generally thought to have gained the advantage. If the reader be
inclined to judge for himself, we refer him to certain black-letter
tracts on both sides, preserved in the medical department of the
University of Padua.

“I know not, most learned professor,” returned Giovanni, after musing
on what had been said of Rappaccini’s exclusive zeal for science,—“I
know not how dearly this physician may love his art; but surely there
is one object more dear to him. He has a daughter.”

“Aha!” cried the professor, with a laugh. “So now our friend Giovanni’s
secret is out. You have heard of this daughter, whom all the young men
in Padua are wild about, though not half a dozen have ever had the good
hap to see her face. I know little of the Signora Beatrice save that
Rappaccini is said to have instructed her deeply in his science, and
that, young and beautiful as fame reports her, she is already qualified
to fill a professor’s chair. Perchance her father destines her for
mine! Other absurd rumors there be, not worth talking about or
listening to. So now, Signor Giovanni, drink off your glass of
lachryma.”

Guasconti returned to his lodgings somewhat heated with the wine he had
quaffed, and which caused his brain to swim with strange fantasies in
reference to Dr. Rappaccini and the beautiful Beatrice. On his way,
happening to pass by a florist’s, he bought a fresh bouquet of flowers.

Ascending to his chamber, he seated himself near the window, but within
the shadow thrown by the depth of the wall, so that he could look down
into the garden with little risk of being discovered. All beneath his
eye was a solitude. The strange plants were basking in the sunshine,
and now and then nodding gently to one another, as if in acknowledgment
of sympathy and kindred. In the midst, by the shattered fountain, grew
the magnificent shrub, with its purple gems clustering all over it;
they glowed in the air, and gleamed back again out of the depths of the
pool, which thus seemed to overflow with colored radiance from the rich
reflection that was steeped in it. At first, as we have said, the
garden was a solitude. Soon, however,—as Giovanni had half hoped, half
feared, would be the case,—a figure appeared beneath the antique
sculptured portal, and came down between the rows of plants, inhaling
their various perfumes as if she were one of those beings of old
classic fable that lived upon sweet odors. On again beholding Beatrice,
the young man was even startled to perceive how much her beauty
exceeded his recollection of it; so brilliant, so vivid, was its
character, that she glowed amid the sunlight, and, as Giovanni
whispered to himself, positively illuminated the more shadowy intervals
of the garden path. Her face being now more revealed than on the former
occasion, he was struck by its expression of simplicity and
sweetness,—qualities that had not entered into his idea of her
character, and which made him ask anew what manner of mortal she might
be. Nor did he fail again to observe, or imagine, an analogy between
the beautiful girl and the gorgeous shrub that hung its gemlike flowers
over the fountain,—a resemblance which Beatrice seemed to have indulged
a fantastic humor in heightening, both by the arrangement of her dress
and the selection of its hues.

Approaching the shrub, she threw open her arms, as with a passionate
ardor, and drew its branches into an intimate embrace—so intimate that
her features were hidden in its leafy bosom and her glistening ringlets
all intermingled with the flowers.

“Give me thy breath, my sister,” exclaimed Beatrice; “for I am faint
with common air. And give me this flower of thine, which I separate
with gentlest fingers from the stem and place it close beside my
heart.”

With these words the beautiful daughter of Rappaccini plucked one of
the richest blossoms of the shrub, and was about to fasten it in her
bosom. But now, unless Giovanni’s draughts of wine had bewildered his
senses, a singular incident occurred. A small orange-colored reptile,
of the lizard or chameleon species, chanced to be creeping along the
path, just at the feet of Beatrice. It appeared to Giovanni,—but, at
the distance from which he gazed, he could scarcely have seen anything
so minute,—it appeared to him, however, that a drop or two of moisture
from the broken stem of the flower descended upon the lizard’s head.
For an instant the reptile contorted itself violently, and then lay
motionless in the sunshine. Beatrice observed this remarkable
phenomenon and crossed herself, sadly, but without surprise; nor did
she therefore hesitate to arrange the fatal flower in her bosom. There
it blushed, and almost glimmered with the dazzling effect of a precious
stone, adding to her dress and aspect the one appropriate charm which
nothing else in the world could have supplied. But Giovanni, out of the
shadow of his window, bent forward and shrank back, and murmured and
trembled.

“Am I awake? Have I my senses?” said he to himself. “What is this
being? Beautiful shall I call her, or inexpressibly terrible?”

Beatrice now strayed carelessly through the garden, approaching closer
beneath Giovanni’s window, so that he was compelled to thrust his head
quite out of its concealment in order to gratify the intense and
painful curiosity which she excited. At this moment there came a
beautiful insect over the garden wall; it had, perhaps, wandered
through the city, and found no flowers or verdure among those antique
haunts of men until the heavy perfumes of Dr. Rappaccini’s shrubs had
lured it from afar. Without alighting on the flowers, this winged
brightness seemed to be attracted by Beatrice, and lingered in the air
and fluttered about her head. Now, here it could not be but that
Giovanni Guasconti’s eyes deceived him. Be that as it might, he fancied
that, while Beatrice was gazing at the insect with childish delight, it
grew faint and fell at her feet; its bright wings shivered; it was
dead—from no cause that he could discern, unless it were the atmosphere
of her breath. Again Beatrice crossed herself and sighed heavily as she
bent over the dead insect.

An impulsive movement of Giovanni drew her eyes to the window. There
she beheld the beautiful head of the young man—rather a Grecian than an
Italian head, with fair, regular features, and a glistening of gold
among his ringlets—gazing down upon her like a being that hovered in
mid air. Scarcely knowing what he did, Giovanni threw down the bouquet
which he had hitherto held in his hand.

“Signora,” said he, “there are pure and healthful flowers. Wear them
for the sake of Giovanni Guasconti.”

“Thanks, signor,” replied Beatrice, with her rich voice, that came
forth as it were like a gush of music, and with a mirthful expression
half childish and half woman-like. “I accept your gift, and would fain
recompense it with this precious purple flower; but if I toss it into
the air it will not reach you. So Signor Guasconti must even content
himself with my thanks.”

She lifted the bouquet from the ground, and then, as if inwardly
ashamed at having stepped aside from her maidenly reserve to respond to
a stranger’s greeting, passed swiftly homeward through the garden. But
few as the moments were, it seemed to Giovanni, when she was on the
point of vanishing beneath the sculptured portal, that his beautiful
bouquet was already beginning to wither in her grasp. It was an idle
thought; there could be no possibility of distinguishing a faded flower
from a fresh one at so great a distance.

For many days after this incident the young man avoided the window that
looked into Dr. Rappaccini’s garden, as if something ugly and monstrous
would have blasted his eyesight had he been betrayed into a glance. He
felt conscious of having put himself, to a certain extent, within the
influence of an unintelligible power by the communication which he had
opened with Beatrice. The wisest course would have been, if his heart
were in any real danger, to quit his lodgings and Padua itself at once;
the next wiser, to have accustomed himself, as far as possible, to the
familiar and daylight view of Beatrice—thus bringing her rigidly and
systematically within the limits of ordinary experience. Least of all,
while avoiding her sight, ought Giovanni to have remained so near this
extraordinary being that the proximity and possibility even of
intercourse should give a kind of substance and reality to the wild
vagaries which his imagination ran riot continually in producing.
Guasconti had not a deep heart—or, at all events, its depths were not
sounded now; but he had a quick fancy, and an ardent southern
temperament, which rose every instant to a higher fever pitch. Whether
or no Beatrice possessed those terrible attributes, that fatal breath,
the affinity with those so beautiful and deadly flowers which were
indicated by what Giovanni had witnessed, she had at least instilled a
fierce and subtle poison into his system. It was not love, although her
rich beauty was a madness to him; nor horror, even while he fancied her
spirit to be imbued with the same baneful essence that seemed to
pervade her physical frame; but a wild offspring of both love and
horror that had each parent in it, and burned like one and shivered
like the other. Giovanni knew not what to dread; still less did he know
what to hope; yet hope and dread kept a continual warfare in his
breast, alternately vanquishing one another and starting up afresh to
renew the contest. Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or
bright! It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the
illuminating blaze of the infernal regions.

Sometimes he endeavored to assuage the fever of his spirit by a rapid
walk through the streets of Padua or beyond its gates: his footsteps
kept time with the throbbings of his brain, so that the walk was apt to
accelerate itself to a race. One day he found himself arrested; his arm
was seized by a portly personage, who had turned back on recognizing
the young man and expended much breath in overtaking him.

“Signor Giovanni! Stay, my young friend!” cried he. “Have you forgotten
me? That might well be the case if I were as much altered as yourself.”

It was Baglioni, whom Giovanni had avoided ever since their first
meeting, from a doubt that the professor’s sagacity would look too
deeply into his secrets. Endeavoring to recover himself, he stared
forth wildly from his inner world into the outer one and spoke like a
man in a dream.

“Yes; I am Giovanni Guasconti. You are Professor Pietro Baglioni. Now
let me pass!”

“Not yet, not yet, Signor Giovanni Guasconti,” said the professor,
smiling, but at the same time scrutinizing the youth with an earnest
glance. “What! did I grow up side by side with your father? and shall
his son pass me like a stranger in these old streets of Padua? Stand
still, Signor Giovanni; for we must have a word or two before we part.”

“Speedily, then, most worshipful professor, speedily,” said Giovanni,
with feverish impatience. “Does not your worship see that I am in
haste?”

Now, while he was speaking there came a man in black along the street,
stooping and moving feebly like a person in inferior health. His face
was all overspread with a most sickly and sallow hue, but yet so
pervaded with an expression of piercing and active intellect that an
observer might easily have overlooked the merely physical attributes
and have seen only this wonderful energy. As he passed, this person
exchanged a cold and distant salutation with Baglioni, but fixed his
eyes upon Giovanni with an intentness that seemed to bring out whatever
was within him worthy of notice. Nevertheless, there was a peculiar
quietness in the look, as if taking merely a speculative, not a human
interest, in the young man.

“It is Dr. Rappaccini!” whispered the professor when the stranger had
passed. “Has he ever seen your face before?”

“Not that I know,” answered Giovanni, starting at the name.

“He HAS seen you! he must have seen you!” said Baglioni, hastily. “For
some purpose or other, this man of science is making a study of you. I
know that look of his! It is the same that coldly illuminates his face
as he bends over a bird, a mouse, or a butterfly, which, in pursuance
of some experiment, he has killed by the perfume of a flower; a look as
deep as Nature itself, but without Nature’s warmth of love. Signor
Giovanni, I will stake my life upon it, you are the subject of one of
Rappaccini’s experiments!”

“Will you make a fool of me?” cried Giovanni, passionately. “THAT,
signor professor, were an untoward experiment.”

“Patience! patience!” replied the imperturbable professor. “I tell
thee, my poor Giovanni, that Rappaccini has a scientific interest in
thee. Thou hast fallen into fearful hands! And the Signora
Beatrice,—what part does she act in this mystery?”

But Guasconti, finding Baglioni’s pertinacity intolerable, here broke
away, and was gone before the professor could again seize his arm. He
looked after the young man intently and shook his head.

“This must not be,” said Baglioni to himself. “The youth is the son of
my old friend, and shall not come to any harm from which the arcana of
medical science can preserve him. Besides, it is too insufferable an
impertinence in Rappaccini, thus to snatch the lad out of my own hands,
as I may say, and make use of him for his infernal experiments. This
daughter of his! It shall be looked to. Perchance, most learned
Rappaccini, I may foil you where you little dream of it!”

Meanwhile Giovanni had pursued a circuitous route, and at length found
himself at the door of his lodgings. As he crossed the threshold he was
met by old Lisabetta, who smirked and smiled, and was evidently
desirous to attract his attention; vainly, however, as the ebullition
of his feelings had momentarily subsided into a cold and dull vacuity.
He turned his eyes full upon the withered face that was puckering
itself into a smile, but seemed to behold it not. The old dame,
therefore, laid her grasp upon his cloak.

“Signor! signor!” whispered she, still with a smile over the whole
breadth of her visage, so that it looked not unlike a grotesque carving
in wood, darkened by centuries. “Listen, signor! There is a private
entrance into the garden!”

“What do you say?” exclaimed Giovanni, turning quickly about, as if an
inanimate thing should start into feverish life. “A private entrance
into Dr. Rappaccini’s garden?”

“Hush! hush! not so loud!” whispered Lisabetta, putting her hand over
his mouth. “Yes; into the worshipful doctor’s garden, where you may see
all his fine shrubbery. Many a young man in Padua would give gold to be
admitted among those flowers.”

Giovanni put a piece of gold into her hand.

“Show me the way,” said he.

A surmise, probably excited by his conversation with Baglioni, crossed
his mind, that this interposition of old Lisabetta might perchance be
connected with the intrigue, whatever were its nature, in which the
professor seemed to suppose that Dr. Rappaccini was involving him. But
such a suspicion, though it disturbed Giovanni, was inadequate to
restrain him. The instant that he was aware of the possibility of
approaching Beatrice, it seemed an absolute necessity of his existence
to do so. It mattered not whether she were angel or demon; he was
irrevocably within her sphere, and must obey the law that whirled him
onward, in ever-lessening circles, towards a result which he did not
attempt to foreshadow; and yet, strange to say, there came across him a
sudden doubt whether this intense interest on his part were not
delusory; whether it were really of so deep and positive a nature as to
justify him in now thrusting himself into an incalculable position;
whether it were not merely the fantasy of a young man’s brain, only
slightly or not at all connected with his heart.

He paused, hesitated, turned half about, but again went on. His
withered guide led him along several obscure passages, and finally
undid a door, through which, as it was opened, there came the sight and
sound of rustling leaves, with the broken sunshine glimmering among
them. Giovanni stepped forth, and, forcing himself through the
entanglement of a shrub that wreathed its tendrils over the hidden
entrance, stood beneath his own window in the open area of Dr.
Rappaccini’s garden.

How often is it the case that, when impossibilities have come to pass
and dreams have condensed their misty substance into tangible
realities, we find ourselves calm, and even coldly self-possessed, amid
circumstances which it would have been a delirium of joy or agony to
anticipate! Fate delights to thwart us thus. Passion will choose his
own time to rush upon the scene, and lingers sluggishly behind when an
appropriate adjustment of events would seem to summon his appearance.
So was it now with Giovanni. Day after day his pulses had throbbed with
feverish blood at the improbable idea of an interview with Beatrice,
and of standing with her, face to face, in this very garden, basking in
the Oriental sunshine of her beauty, and snatching from her full gaze
the mystery which he deemed the riddle of his own existence. But now
there was a singular and untimely equanimity within his breast. He
threw a glance around the garden to discover if Beatrice or her father
were present, and, perceiving that he was alone, began a critical
observation of the plants.

The aspect of one and all of them dissatisfied him; their gorgeousness
seemed fierce, passionate, and even unnatural. There was hardly an
individual shrub which a wanderer, straying by himself through a
forest, would not have been startled to find growing wild, as if an
unearthly face had glared at him out of the thicket. Several also would
have shocked a delicate instinct by an appearance of artificialness
indicating that there had been such commixture, and, as it were,
adultery, of various vegetable species, that the production was no
longer of God’s making, but the monstrous offspring of man’s depraved
fancy, glowing with only an evil mockery of beauty. They were probably
the result of experiment, which in one or two cases had succeeded in
mingling plants individually lovely into a compound possessing the
questionable and ominous character that distinguished the whole growth
of the garden. In fine, Giovanni recognized but two or three plants in
the collection, and those of a kind that he well knew to be poisonous.
While busy with these contemplations he heard the rustling of a silken
garment, and, turning, beheld Beatrice emerging from beneath the
sculptured portal.

Giovanni had not considered with himself what should be his deportment;
whether he should apologize for his intrusion into the garden, or
assume that he was there with the privity at least, if not by the
desire, of Dr. Rappaccini or his daughter; but Beatrice’s manner placed
him at his ease, though leaving him still in doubt by what agency he
had gained admittance. She came lightly along the path and met him near
the broken fountain. There was surprise in her face, but brightened by
a simple and kind expression of pleasure.

“You are a connoisseur in flowers, signor,” said Beatrice, with a
smile, alluding to the bouquet which he had flung her from the window.
“It is no marvel, therefore, if the sight of my father’s rare
collection has tempted you to take a nearer view. If he were here, he
could tell you many strange and interesting facts as to the nature and
habits of these shrubs; for he has spent a lifetime in such studies,
and this garden is his world.”

“And yourself, lady,” observed Giovanni, “if fame says true,—you
likewise are deeply skilled in the virtues indicated by these rich
blossoms and these spicy perfumes. Would you deign to be my
instructress, I should prove an apter scholar than if taught by Signor
Rappaccini himself.”

“Are there such idle rumors?” asked Beatrice, with the music of a
pleasant laugh. “Do people say that I am skilled in my father’s science
of plants? What a jest is there! No; though I have grown up among these
flowers, I know no more of them than their hues and perfume; and
sometimes methinks I would fain rid myself of even that small
knowledge. There are many flowers here, and those not the least
brilliant, that shock and offend me when they meet my eye. But pray,
signor, do not believe these stories about my science. Believe nothing
of me save what you see with your own eyes.”

“And must I believe all that I have seen with my own eyes?” asked
Giovanni, pointedly, while the recollection of former scenes made him
shrink. “No, signora; you demand too little of me. Bid me believe
nothing save what comes from your own lips.”

It would appear that Beatrice understood him. There came a deep flush
to her cheek; but she looked full into Giovanni’s eyes, and responded
to his gaze of uneasy suspicion with a queenlike haughtiness.

“I do so bid you, signor,” she replied. “Forget whatever you may have
fancied in regard to me. If true to the outward senses, still it may be
false in its essence; but the words of Beatrice Rappaccini’s lips are
true from the depths of the heart outward. Those you may believe.”

A fervor glowed in her whole aspect and beamed upon Giovanni’s
consciousness like the light of truth itself; but while she spoke there
was a fragrance in the atmosphere around her, rich and delightful,
though evanescent, yet which the young man, from an indefinable
reluctance, scarcely dared to draw into his lungs. It might be the odor
of the flowers. Could it be Beatrice’s breath which thus embalmed her
words with a strange richness, as if by steeping them in her heart? A
faintness passed like a shadow over Giovanni and flitted away; he
seemed to gaze through the beautiful girl’s eyes into her transparent
soul, and felt no more doubt or fear.

The tinge of passion that had colored Beatrice’s manner vanished; she
became gay, and appeared to derive a pure delight from her communion
with the youth not unlike what the maiden of a lonely island might have
felt conversing with a voyager from the civilized world. Evidently her
experience of life had been confined within the limits of that garden.
She talked now about matters as simple as the daylight or summer
clouds, and now asked questions in reference to the city, or Giovanni’s
distant home, his friends, his mother, and his sisters—questions
indicating such seclusion, and such lack of familiarity with modes and
forms, that Giovanni responded as if to an infant. Her spirit gushed
out before him like a fresh rill that was just catching its first
glimpse of the sunlight and wondering at the reflections of earth and
sky which were flung into its bosom. There came thoughts, too, from a
deep source, and fantasies of a gemlike brilliancy, as if diamonds and
rubies sparkled upward among the bubbles of the fountain. Ever and anon
there gleamed across the young man’s mind a sense of wonder that he
should be walking side by side with the being who had so wrought upon
his imagination, whom he had idealized in such hues of terror, in whom
he had positively witnessed such manifestations of dreadful
attributes,—that he should be conversing with Beatrice like a brother,
and should find her so human and so maidenlike. But such reflections
were only momentary; the effect of her character was too real not to
make itself familiar at once.

In this free intercourse they had strayed through the garden, and now,
after many turns among its avenues, were come to the shattered
fountain, beside which grew the magnificent shrub, with its treasury of
glowing blossoms. A fragrance was diffused from it which Giovanni
recognized as identical with that which he had attributed to Beatrice’s
breath, but incomparably more powerful. As her eyes fell upon it,
Giovanni beheld her press her hand to her bosom as if her heart were
throbbing suddenly and painfull

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