Part 4
The dreadful civility of our Western woodsmen, the popular dissentient voice alike of the theatre and of the political meeting: the casting of eggs wherefrom the elements of youth and jucundity are wholly eliminated, affords a speculation on heredity, and appears as a faint echo of some traditional squabble in the morning of the world, among disagreeing kinswomen, the very primordial Battle of Eggs! where reloading was superfluous, where every shell told; whose blackest spite was spent in a golden rain and hail! What havoc over the face of young creation; what coloring of pools, and of errant butterflies! What distress amid the cleanly pixies and dryads, whose shady haunts trickled unwelcome moisture! terror not unshared even in the recesses of the coast:--
"Intus aquae dulcis, vivoque sedilia saxo, Nympharum domus!"
One can fancy the younglings of the vast human family, the success of whose lesson to their elders was thus over-well demonstrated, marking the ebb and flow of hostilities, like the spirits of Richelieu and of the superb fourteenth Louis eying the great Revolution. What marvel if, struck with remorse at the senile strife of them whom old Fuller would name "she-citizens," they vowed never, never, to teach another grandmother to suck eggs. So was it, maybe, that the abused art was lost from the earth.
Nay, more, its remembrance is perverted into a taunt more scorching than lightning, more silencing than the bolt of Jove. "Teach your grandmother to suck eggs!" Is not the phrase the "scorn of scorn," the catchword of insubordination, the blazing defiance of tongues unbroken as a two-years' colt? It grated strangely on our ear. We grieved over the transformation of a favorite saw, innocuous once, and conveying a meek educational suggestion. We came to admit that the Academe where the old sat at the feet of their descendants, to be ingratiated into the most amiable of professions, was nothing better in memory than an impertinence. And we sadly avowed, in the underground chamber of our private heart, that, as for worldly prospects, it would be fairly suicidal, all things considered, to aspire to the chair of that professorship.
Let some reformer who cherishes his ancestress, and who is not averse to break his fast on an omelet, dissuade either object of his regard from longer lending name and countenance to a vulgar sneer. Shall such be thy mission, reader? We would wish thee extended acquaintance with that mysterious small cosmos which suggests to the liberal palate broiled wing and giblets _in posse_; and joy for many a year of thy parent's parent, who is in some sort thy reference and means of identification, the hub of thy far-reaching and more active life; but, prithee, wrench apart their sorry association in our English speech. Purists shall forgive thee if thou shalt, meanwhile, smile in thy sleeve at the fantastic text which brought them together.
OLD HAUNTS.
I SOMETIMES whimsically liken myself to that pursued bird, who, according to naturalists, spends her fine speed and strength in racing in a circle about her nest, until overtaken and overborne. She may be said to travel a great deal, yet her steps tend nowhere, and despite her coming and going, she is indubitably at home.
I betake me, with all the exhilaration of a tourist, into an adjacent county, and after experiencing the forlornness proper to a forty-years' exile, board the railway train, and throw myself into the arms of my native town. My wildest perambulations are but twenty miles away. I set out, with vehement desires to behold the world, and threading the narrow highways known of mine infancy,--
----"downwards to the sea Or landwards to the west,"
return to look the stoutest navigators and explorers in the eye. My change of scene is mainly from Bromfield Street (what a green-and-golden westerly prospect it has!) to the Ridge Path of the Common; my perilous adventures are on side-walks; my discoveries, in omnibuses and the windows of shops.
Through sheer liberality and open-mindedness, when the first stirrings of spring are in the blood, or when a hearty October morning tempts idle feet afar, myself and one other seize on a map of the adjacent country, and push over hill and dale into some unexplored solitude. We make heroic efforts to appreciate a landscape. Was it not yesterday, thou best Bostonian! that we accomplished our showery pilgrimage across the Middlesex Fells, now drenched, now dried, by fickle skies, to sniff the young violet, and to pluck the silvern willow-tufts ere they had paled? or marched nigh six leagues of an Arcadian afternoon to front the gleaming waters at Ponkapog, the purple crests of Milton Hill? Vainly! Never saw we a Nereid along a pebbly margin, nor caught the cadence of a Hamadryad's footfall, as she hurried back to her old woods. The curse is upon us, as saith the problematical Lady of Shalott. What business have we in the country? Where is the plant that will teach us its name? Not green fields, but bricks and mortar are our affinity; and the ears that delight in the familiar roar of a crowd barely attend by courtesy to the madrigals of thrushes.
Rivers I can put up with. I can keep pace with Charles from Hopkinton to the sea. Neponset is a dear good prattler. Musketaquid, with his two exquisite parental streams, is mine old familiar. So with a pine grove, where one can watch the tardiest star arise, and the earliest daybeam break over its dark summits. But these everlasting downs and scrubby wildernesses, these formal, vacant pastures, with little white houses at chilling distances! it is not in me, by nature or by grace, to take kindly to the things. The spirit moveth me to look down on cows, hens, and cabbages, and to question the beauty of that manner of life where there is scarce a ratio of one fellow-creature to an acre. How shall your country folk learn to jostle and be jostled? Do they know a pick-pocket when they see him? Are they easy in their minds when street-bands are due? Have their unhappy progeny never spelled out a circus-bill's gorgeous charactery of blue and red, nor leaped into the jaws of a watering-cart, nor licked a lamp-post for a wager on a frosty night?
No, my masters: let Damætas and Daphnis sing at each other, over the heads of their woolly cohorts; I yearn for the whoop of the contemporaneous newsboy, and for the soul-satisfying thunder of wagons. I hasten back to the knee of mine illustrious mother-city, as a Peri to Paradise, or as a convict (we must have comparisons to suit all tastes) to that agreeable castle in which the State formerly entertained him. I am let loose anew on her historic thoroughfares. For her sake, I subsist, in no gastronomical sense, on dates, and pay court to hoary tombs and spectres of long-supplanted buildings. Her story is the kaleidoscope to charm my idle hours. Her ancient magistrates I behold in their portentous wigs. Her little maids rustle by in stomacher and kirtle. Jovial laughter floats out from the unlatched door of the Green Dragon; the aroma of venison betrays itself at the Cromwell's Head. I look upon sorrowful Quakers boarding the transportation ships, or at the beacon-light flaring out upon the bay; at Paddock, planting his memorial trees; at Mather Byles jesting among a crowd, under the Province House eaves; at Philemon Pormort shaking the birch at little Ben Franklin on the sunny side of School Street; at the chivalry of France riding twenty deep behind the drawn sword in thy gallant hand, Vioménil! Over all the shifting and confused panorama the great bells of Christ's--"Abel Rudhall cast them all"--are ringing the remembered chimes of home.
"The things to be seen and observed," said Bacon, "are the courts of princes, the courts of justice, consistories ecclesiastic, churches, monasteries, monuments; walls and fortifications, havens, harbors, antiquities, ruins, libraries, colleges, shipping, gardens, arsenals, burses." Rather than sigh for Cisalpine revelations, shall I not gloriously disport myself in following the fortunes of a local Punch and Judy show, such as our kind civic nurse hath provided for us? Perhaps elsewhere I should miss the white-bearded orange-vender dozing in the sun, and the sparrows fighting on the sombre steps of St. Paul's, and seedy students migrating from stack to stack of Elizabethan books in the tranquil lane that Uriah Cotting built. Dearer than coffers of gold are the old cherished places from which my rooted affections cannot stray. Their inviolate memories and their hopes are mine; and the city of my content is the loop-hole through which I gaze and wonder at the universe.
I wear out my restlessness circling round about her shining height, and breaking ever and anon momentarily from her fostering hand, to cling to it again with laughter, and so move on. Is it a braver sentiment to fret after reported continents? I would follow the moon around the untried earth, for the asking; and yet, and yet, O "three-hilled rebel town"! hate my own free spirit did it not thirst for thee on a ship that sailed against the Golden Horn, between Caucasus and the pinnacles of Greece.
FREE THOUGHTS ON BOOKS.
THE passion for collecting books, beginning with the Greeks, passed to the Roman senators and patriots, and thence to every corner of the civilized earth. A philosopher might sigh, like Omar at Alexandria, over the thousand thousand superfluities, whose survival embitters the thought of the lost volumes of Varro and Livy, the wellnigh inaccessible tomes of Al Farabi of Farab ("who knew or wrote so much as he?"), of Berni, of Martorell; or of those princely libraries instanced by Irish antiquarians, which were swept away by Noah's flood!
A line of shelves, throne by throne, filled with illustrious figures, what else is that but a presence-chamber kinglier than a king's, the Temple of Wisdom, more reverend than the altars of Pallas? Men have lived and died, like motes of the air, hovering about this hoarded preciousness of ages, and forgetful ever of the awakened world, with its exquisite outlook into the future. In the pathetic companionship of books lived Southey, long after their beauty was shut out from him, passing his trembling hand up and down their ranks, and taking comfort in the certainty that they had not forsaken him.
Remembering a bibliopole's sincere care in gathering his treasures, the taste and tenderness he spends upon them, the actual individuality of the owner of which they partake, and which they proclaim with startling fidelity so long as they are together, an auctioneer's sale of a private library seems one of the cruelest things in the daily annals of a city. Yet if not transferred, in numbers or in the mass, to some benign shelter, the darlings of bygone hours are sure to be launched friendless on the rough chances of trade. A second-hand book is verily a pitiful thing. It is broken down by adversity, and ready to meet your advances half-way. It appreciates care of any sort, poor waif that it is! lacking attention so long in the dingy precincts of a shop. Nothing is more gratifying to the eye searching for tokens of humanity, like a shipwrecked sailor along the sands of a lonely island, than its curled edges, "bethumbed horribly," especially if the author thereof be dear to you. What a precious, homely tribute! What delicater flattery, than to catch sight of a modest volume, supposing you take some parental interest in it, in a condition which, _à posteriori_, does _not_ suggest soap and water?
Certain books, which we handle for the first time, we cannot for the life of us lay down again, without vehement infringements on that edict forbidding envy and covetousness. We yearn for such a bit of property. Our pocket seems predestined to filch it. We love it much better than its proprietor, who never had the spirit to give it cordial abuse. We would not endure that paper cover veiling its genial face. We would scorn to divorce it from any dusty nook it chose to frequent. If we abduct it, it would be a great deal happier. On the same principle, it requires an impulse of Spartan righteousness to return a book to the civic library with the proper dispositions. It is heart-rending to make over a used and shaken veteran to the custody of the public, anew. We know well enough that it shall collapse utterly ere we shall have the virtue to borrow it a second time. Or we speculate on an inestimable octavo, readerless on the shelf for scores of years, till our mark is set over against it, and doomed to deeper than Abyssinian solitude when we loosen its clinging hold; and wonder if what a townsman and a wit called "bookaneering" would not be a chivalric pursuit for us to follow.
Uniform sets of any author, save a historian, are terrors to the discriminating eye. When we buy the Works even of one C. Dickens, we shall stipulate that the "Tale of Two Cities" (never to be named without reverence) shall get its just due of difference in size and hue, from any of its admirable kindred. Who wants Beaumont and Fletcher in sombre cloth, or in anything out of folio, or Jeremy Taylor in red morocco and gilt? Prefaces are not ill things in their places; but what has a preface got to do with jolly, self-explanatory Pepys; or a table of notes with Walton the Angler; or a glossary--fancy the pert thing!--with Philip Sidney's sonnets? Illustrations to some tales are insufferable. Picture a menagerie let loose on the seventh or eighth page of Rasselas, to bear out the diverting Johnsonian description of the sprightly kid bounding on the rocks, the subtle monkey frolicking among the trees, the solemn elephant reposing in the shade!
"A big book," said Myles Davis, "is a scarecrow to the head and pocket of author, student, buyer, and seller." That depends. The virile poets, like Burns, cannot be got into sylph-like draperies. Nobody could abide a prose Milton less than three and a half inches thick. Froissart, even, must be taken solid. We own up to loving our stumpy Don Quixote, with its print of beauteous Dorothea laving her impossible feet, although it be egregiously fat, and elbow its comelier neighbors right and left.
The fashion of including the productions of two or three contemporaneous writers in one volume is happily past, and may not revive. What dreary comradeship! like that of the ghosts driven together on the blast, in Dante's wonderful fifth canto. Why should Coleridge the dreamer, and Campbell the planner, be lashed so, wrist to wrist; or Waller's sweet dallying verse classed with Denham's sagacious strophes? What joint mundane sin warranted this posthumous halving of their immortal fortunes? If the trade must economize, and readers must needs get their literature in bunches, let the coupling be done on a saner basis, and arise from the affiliations, not of time or place, but of genius solely. We confess we should like to see Sheridan and Farquhar amicably sharing applause, within the compass of one lively-colored quarto; some of the singing-birds of the second and third Stuart courts caged with Gay, Matt Prior, and a few modern bardlings; Keats close to his loved Spenser; and Irving familiarly fixed by Addison and Goldsmith, the barriers of centuries between them broken down.
Family traits, like murder, will out. Nature has but so many moulds; and however unique and quaint a writer may be to his own circle, look up his intellectual pedigree, and you shall recognize the ancestral quality astray in him, on an altered world; the voice of Jacob, indeed, appealing through all disguises. What should Poe be like,--Poe the one and only,--but a blended brief echo of Marlowe and of Dryden? Whence came Charles Lamb, even, in great part (and Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt besides, in the collateral line), but from golden-hearted Sidney and Sir Thomas Browne? Pages and pages of his that recall them! every tone of their old sedater voices prophetic of his sweet laughter, his fine, grave reasonings to be!
My young lord is spirited, but unlike his father or mother in feature, as in character: ah! go to the remotest corner of the portrait-gallery, and brush away the damp from the dark face of that Henry who fell at Crécy, and you shall read the mystery of transmission. A poet tries his morning lay, to a continent's delight, and after years of joy and triumph it shall be revealed to him how the self-same music fell from long-silent lips in a land across the sea. The unaltered radiance of an inspiration streams yesterday on one, to-morrow on another, as moving sunshine visits the hundred panes of a cathedral window; and that elusive thing which we name the originality of any artist resembles little else but the kaleidoscopic newness of color thrown hourly along the aisles.
So much have books wrought, to the confusion of the proud. The child's early, unconscious preference for authors of his choosing, urges itself upon him when he, too, shall write, and softly hoodwinks his imagination. Has he a sensitive pen, jealous of its rectitude, true as the magnet-lured steel to what he believes to be his frank, unshared fancies? How shall that affect the immutable law? For the very blood in his veins is not all his own; and though, for honor's sake, he would change the erect port, the persuasive speech, the innermost personal charm which was called his, and which he finds, later, to have been but a legacy,--yet, in places where his detecting conscience cannot follow, the hereditary principle will grow to blossom, and bespeak him, blamelessly, to be what the centuries have made him.
It was feelingly said by one of the gentle English essayists last named: "How pleasant is the thought that such lovers of books have themselves become books!" and do so become evermore, beginning and ending with a secluded library shelf, planting the seed of kindly influences close to the noble shade which sheltered them in youth, and under which they slumbered many a summer's day.
A NOVEMBER FESTIVAL.
HERE it is, the old bright day, the day fragrant of home, brought about once again by the whirligig of time. The New England snows are deep beneath the windows in the house where I was born, and iridescent icicles hang over the door; the city that is beyond is given up to joy and plenty,
"And all that mighty heart is lying still."
I sit quite solitary among you in a far-away corner, forgetfully turning the pages of a book, and letting my thoughts take wing for other scenes and other years. In memory there arises a succession of Thanksgivings, long gone into dust and ashes, so different from this, so careless and kind and merry, that it seems like wronging them to be sad for them even at this distance. Then all the world was golden, and our wilful, loving lives were jewels set in the heart of it. Then the air tingled, and the sun was jolly as Harlequin. Then there was a little brook in those familiar fields, delicately sheathed in ice every Thanksgiving morning, and lending itself to a childish holiday frolic just in the nick of time; and a stone, squirted along its surface, made the daintiest bird-like sound imaginable, and died into silence so delightfully that you sent innumerable pebbles after it, to see if they could sing as sweetly as the first. Then everybody was so considerate and tender that poor people could not want or suffer on that day, if they tried; then grown people were indulgent, and wee people docile and frisky as lambs. Then we used to have pop-corn and ginger-snaps and chestnuts and ruddy apples--and turkey! Well, we can have turkey yet, on any Thanksgiving, a sort of _in memoriam_ turkey, eaten in foreign lands, and made melancholy with recollections and vain wishes; so, of course, it is not the same turkey at all.
What a hospitable, social old festival it was! How gentle we tried to be, that not one harsh word should spoil it! We were taught to make out of the severely pious Thanksgiving of the Puritans, their dismal, unpicturesque opposition-Christmas, a day lovely and blithe and helpful beyond any in the calendar. There was a great halloo going on the whole time in the cheerful rambling old house, quartering an army of children: merry-making in the pantry, in the corridors, in the porches, where hungry sparrows gathered to squabble over hundreds of crumbs; and in the lively fire that winked and sputtered, and tossed the pans and kettles, and nearly burst a-laughing over the fat plum-pudding. As for the other Lords and Ladies of Misrule, you could not swing your arm anywhere without brushing a little boy or a little girl. You heard the patter of their tireless feet, the noise of their drums and doll-carriages, and the echo of their shrill voices upstairs and down,--some of them rolling about on the rugs in the sunny room, where the bare elms, with their battered nests, rattled against the pane on windy days; some strumming on the venerable piano in the hall, just at the balustrade's foot, and singing a little Tyrolese catch they had learned together; some grouped in the shadowy and quiet library (where the ceiling shone blue with its myriad stars, like a real summer's sky), telling over how good a king King Arthur was, or how queer was the Old Man of the Sea, or how sad and strange were the adventures of dear Sintram, ever and ever so long ago. Now other children fill those neglected places, and beautify the hours with associations fresh and fair as ours,--
"And year by year our memory fades From all the circle of the hills!"
I must not forget the races, and the games, and ninepins on the frosty balcony; the ice-forts, puny for lack of material, and the Trojan war, re-fought in snow-balls; and the dinner! The table-cloth was very pretty, with sprays of evergreen festooning it here and there. Silver mugs looked particularly shiny. I can see yet, beyond the great steaming dishes, the celery towering with its delicate green; cider sparkling; grapes and oranges crowding one another over the rim; olives floating in colored bottles; jelly clearer than crystal; funny little crackers in funnier shapes, and the ring of hearty faces framing the picture in. Near the end, the majestic pudding made his appearance, crowned with blue flame; and blazed away so pompously for a minute that the youngest baby cried, and the boys clapped their hands, and curly-haired Helen leaned over against Bessy to get out of its way. Then came the final jingling of the water-glasses, when the household drank Grandmother Drapow's health, amid enthusiasm and tears and laughter and rustle of words. It was quite in order to wear your tissue-paper cap, which fell out of the candy-packet, whether it was quaint and odd as could be, or conventional as a beaver. When presently, with all conceivable glee, the whole twenty-six rose to their feet, the chairs and stools made volcanic noises, and the scene looked precisely like the Carnival. Then a sudden hush fell; and one of the several tall gentlemen who answered to the name of Papa, glanced at a certain child at the other end of the table. So the child dropped its bonbons, and gravely took off its gay cocked hat, and folded its brown hands, and lisped the words of the grace, while Eugene and little Georgie bobbed their innocent heads in cadence at its shoulder. Everybody answered "Amen!" very loud and clear. And everybody slipped forthwith through the door, like the tide, and left the sunny dining-room deserted.