Chapter 11

There is no known metal, and perhaps no substance whatever, which demands so high a temperature to fuse it as does the element carbon. A filament of carbon, and a filament of carbon alone, will remain unfused and unbroken when heated by the electric current to the dazzling brilliance necessary for effective illumination. This is the reason why this particular element is so indispensable for our incandescent electric lamps. Modern research has now taught us that, just as the electrician has to employ carbon as the immediate agent in producing the brightest of artificial lights down here, so the sun in heaven uses precisely the same element as the immediate agent in the production of its transcendent light and heat. Owing to the extraordinary fervor which prevails in the interior parts of the sun, all substances there present, no matter how difficult we may find their fusion, would have to submit to be melted, nay, even to be driven off into vapor. If submitted to the heat of this appalling solar furnace, an iron poker, for instance, would vanish into invisible vapor. In the presence of the intense heat of the inner parts of the sun, even carbon itself is unable to remain solid. It would seem that it must assume a gaseous form under such circumstances, just as the copper and the iron and all the other substances do which yield more readily than it to the fierce heat of their surroundings.

The buoyancy of carbon vapor is one of its most remarkable characteristics. Accordingly immense volumes of the carbon steam in the sun soar at a higher level than do the vapors of the other elements. Thus carbon becomes a very large and important constituent of the more elevated regions of the solar atmosphere. We can understand what happens to these carbon vapors by the analogous case of the familiar clouds in our own skies. It is true, no doubt, that our terrestrial clouds are composed of a material totally different from that which constitutes the solar clouds. The sun evaporates the water from the great oceans which cover so large a proportion of our earth. The vapor thus produced ascends in the form of invisible gas through our atmosphere, until it reaches an altitude thousands of feet above the surface of the earth. The chill that the watery vapor experiences up there is so great that the vapor collects into little liquid beads, and it is, of course, these liquid beads, associated in countless myriads, which form the clouds we know so well.

We can now understand what happens as the buoyant carbon vapors soar upwards through the sun's atmosphere. They attain at last to an elevation where the fearful intensity of the solar heat has so far abated that, though nearly all other elements may still remain entirely gaseous, yet the exceptionally refractory carbon begins to return to the liquid state. At the first stage in this return, the carbon vapor conducts itself just as does the ascending watery vapor from the earth when about to be transformed into a visible cloud. Under the influence of a chill the carbon vapor collects into a myriad host of little beads of liquid. Each of these drops of liquid carbon in the glorious solar clouds has a temperature and a corresponding radiance vastly exceeding that with which the filament glows in the incandescent electric lamp. When we remember further that the entire surface of our luminary is coated with these clouds, every particle of which is thus intensely luminous, we need no longer wonder at that dazzling brilliance which, even across the awful gulf of ninety-three millions of miles, produces for us the indescribable glory of daylight.

_Sir Robert Ball will contribute a series of articles on "The Marvels of the Universe." Six or eight of these articles may be expected during the coming year_.

CHAPTERS FROM A LIFE.

BY ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS,

AUTHOR OF "THE GATES AJAR," "THE MADONNA OF THE TUBS," ETC.

LIFE IN ANDOVER BEFORE THE WAR.

Andover is--or Andover was--like the lady to whom Steele gave immortality in the finest and most famous epigram ever offered to woman.

To have loved Andover; to have been born in Andover--I am brought up short, in these notes, by the sudden recollection that I was _not_ born in Andover. It has always been so difficult to believe it, that I am liable any day to forget it; but the facts compel me to infer that I was born within a mile of the State House. I must have become a citizen of Andover at the age of three, when my father resigned his Boston pulpit for the professorship of Rhetoric in Andover Seminary. I remember distinctly our arrival at the white mansion with the large, handsome grounds, the distant and mysterious grove, the rotund horse-chestnut trees, venerable and solemn, nearly a century old--to this day a horse-chestnut always seems to me like a theological trustee--and the sweep of playground so vast, so soft, so green, so fragrant, so clean, that the baby cockney ran imperiously to her father and demanded that he go build her a brick sidewalk to play upon.

What, I wonder, may be the earliest act of memory on record? Mine is not at all unusual--dating only to two and a half years; at which time I clearly remember being knocked down by my dog, in my father's area in Boston, and being crowed over by a rooster of abnormal proportions who towered between me and the sky, a dragon in size and capabilities.

My father always maintained that he distinctly remembered hearing the death of Napoleon announced in his presence when he was one year and a half old.

Is the humiliating difference between the instinctive selection of Napoleon and that of the rooster, one of temperament or sex? In either case, it is significant enough to lead one to drop the subject.

Next to having been born in a university town, comes the advantage--if it be an advantage--of having spent one's youth there. Mr. Howells says that he must be a dull fellow who does not, at some time or other, hate his native village; and I must confess that I have not, at all stages of my life, held my present opinion of Andover. There have been times when her gentle indifference to the preoccupations of the world has stung me, as all serenity stings restlessness. There have been times when the inevitable limitations of her horizon have seemed as familiar as the coffin-lid to the dead.

There was an epoch when her theology--But, nevertheless, I certainly look back upon Andover Hill with a very gentle pleasure and heartfelt sense of debt.

It has been particularly asked of me to give some form to my recollections of a phase of local life which is now so obviously passing away that it has a certain historical interest.

That Andover remains upon the map of Massachusetts yet, one does not dispute; but the Andover of New England theology--the Andover of a peculiar people, the Andover that held herself apart from the world and all that was therein--will soon become an interesting wraith.

The life of a professor's daughter in a university town is always a little different from the lives of other girls; but the difference seems to me--unless she be by nature entirely alien to it--in favor of the girl. Were I to sum in one word my impressions of the influences of Andover life upon a robust young mind and heart, I should call them _gentle_.

As soon as we began to think, we saw a community engaged in studying thought. As soon as we began to feel, we were aware of a neighborhood that did not feel superficially; at least, in certain higher directions. When we began to ask the "questions of life," which all intelligent young people ask sooner or later, we found ourselves in a village of three institutions and their dependencies committed to the pursuit of an ideal of education for which no amount of later, or what we call broader, training ever gives us any better word than Christian.

Such things tell. Andover girls did not waltz, or suffer summer engagements at Bar Harbor, a new one every year; neither did they read Ibsen, or yellow novels; nor did they handle the French stories that are hidden from parents; though they were excellent French scholars in their day.

I do not even know that one can call them more "serious" than their city sisters--for we were a merry lot; at least, _my_ lot were. But they were, I believe, especially open-hearted, gentle-minded girls.

If they were "out of the world" to a certain extent, they were, to another, out of the evil of it. As I look back upon the little drama between twelve and twenty--I might rather say, between two and twenty--Andover young people seem to me to have been as truly and naturally innocent as one may meet anywhere in the world. Some of these private records of girl-history were so white, so clear, so sweet, that to read them would be like watching a morning-glory open. The world is full, thank Heaven, of lovely girls; but though other forms or phases of gentle society claim their full quota, I never saw a lovelier than those I knew on Andover Hill.

One terrible tragedy, indeed, befell our little "set;" for we had our sets in Andover, as well as they of Newport or New York.

A high-bred girl of exceptional beauty was furtively kissed one evening by a daring boy (not a native of Andover, I hasten to explain), and the furore which followed this unprecedented enormity it would be impossible to describe to a member of more complicated circles of society. Fancy the reception given such a commonplace at any of our fashionable summer resorts to-day!

On Andover Hill the event was a moral cataclysm. Andover girls were country girls, but not of rustic (any more than of metropolitan) social training. Which of them would have suffered an Academy boy, walking home with her from a lecture or a prayer-meeting, any little privilege which he might not have taken in her father's house, and with her mother's knowledge? I never knew one. The case of which I speak was historic, and as far as I ever knew, unique, and was that of a victim, not an offender.

The little beauty to whom this atrocity happened cried all night and all the next day; she was reported not to have stopped crying for twenty-six hours. Her pretty face grew wan and haggard. She was too ill to go to her lessons.

The teachers--to whom she had promptly related the circumstance--condoled with her; the entire school vowed to avenge her; we were a score of as disturbed and indignant girls as ever wept over woman's wrongs, or scorned a man's depravity.

Yet, for aught I know to the contrary, this abandoned young man may have grown up to become a virtuous member of society; possibly even an exemplary husband and father. I have never been able to trace his history; probably the moral repulsion was too great.

Yet they were no prigs, for their innocence! Andover girls, in the best and brightest sense of the word, led a gay life.

The preponderance of young men on the Hill gave more than ample opportunity for well-mannered good times; and we made the most of them.

Legends of the feminine triumphs of past generations were handed breathlessly down to us, and cherished with awe. A lady of the village, said to have been once very handsome, was credibly reported to have refused nineteen offers of marriage. Another, still plainly beautiful, was known to have received and declined the suits of nine theologues in one winter. Neither of these ladies married. We watched their whitening hairs and serene faces with a certain pride of sex, not easily to be understood by a man. When we began to think how many times they _might_ have married, the subject assumed sensational proportions. In fact, the maiden ladies of Andover always, I fancied, regarded each other with a peculiar sense of peace. Each knew--and knew that the rest knew--that it was (to use the Andover phraseology) not of predestination or foreordination, but of free will absolute, that an Andover girl passed through life alone. This little social fact, which is undoubtedly true of most, if not all, university towns, had mingled effects upon impressionable girls. For the proportion of masculine society was almost Western in its munificence.

Perhaps it is my duty to say just here that, if honestly put to the question, I should admit that this proportion was almost too munificent for the methods of education then--and still to an extent now--in vogue.

A large Academy for boys, and a flourishing Seminary for young men, set across the village streets from two lively girls' schools, gave to one observer of this little scholastic world her first argument for co-education.

I am confident that if the boys who serenaded (right manfully) under the windows of Abbott Academy or of "The Nunnery," or who tied their lady's colors to the bouquets that they tossed on balconies of professors' houses, had been put, class to class, in competition with us, they would have wasted less time upon us; and I could not deny that if the girls who cut little holes in their fans through which one could look, undetected and unreproved, at one's favorite Academy boy, on some public occasion, had been preparing to meet or pass that boy at Euclid or Xenophon recitation next morning, he would have occupied less of their fancy. Intellectual competition is simpler, severer, and more wholesome than the unmitigated social plane; and a mingling of the two may be found calculated to produce the happiest results.

"Poor souls!" said a Boston lady once to me, upon my alluding to a certain literary club which was at that time occupying the enthusiasm of the Hill. "Poor souls! I suppose they are so starved for society!" We can fancy the amusement with which this comment would have been received if it had been repeated--but it never was repeated till this moment--in Andover.

For Andover had her social life, and knew no better, for the most part, than to enjoy it. It is true that many of her diversions took on that religious or academic character natural to the place. Of village parish life we knew nothing, for our chapel was, like others of its kind, rather an exclusive little place of worship. We were ignorant of pastoral visits, deacons, parochial gossip, church fairs, and what Professor Park used to call "the doughnut business;" and, though we cultivated a weekly prayer-meeting in the lecture-room, I think its chief influence was as a training-school for theological students whose early efforts at public exhortation (poor fellows!) quaveringly besought their Professors to grow in grace, and admonished the families of the Faculty circle to repent.

But we had our lectures and our concerts--quite distinct, as orthodox circles will understand, from those missionary festivals which went, I never discovered why, by the name of Monthly Concerts--and our Porter Rhets. I believe this cipher stood for Porter Rhetorical; and research, if pushed far enough, would develop the fact that Porter indicated a dead professor who once founded a chair and a debating society for young men. Then we had our anniversaries and our exhibitions, when we got ourselves into our organdie muslins or best coats, and listened to the boys spouting Greek and Latin orations in the old, red brick Academy, and heard the theological students--but here this reporter is forced to pause. I suppose I ought to be ashamed of it, but the fact is, that I never attended an anniversary exercise of the Seminary in my life. It would be difficult to say why. I think my reluctance consisted in an abnormal objection to Trustees. So far as I know, they were an innocent set of men, of good reputations and quite harmless. But I certainly acquired, at a very early age, an antipathy to this class of Americans from which I have never recovered.

Our anniversaries occurred, according to the barbaric custom of the times, in the hottest heat of August; and if there be a hotter place in Massachusetts than Andover was, I have yet to simmer in it. Our houses were, of course, thrown open, and crowded to the shingles.

I remember once sharing my tiny room with a little guest who would not have the window open, though the thermometer had stood above ninety, day and night, for a week; and because she was a trustee's daughter, I must not complain. Perhaps this experience emphasized a natural lack of sympathy with her father.

At all events, I cherished a hidden antagonism to these excellent and useful men, of which I make this late and public confession. It seemed to me that everybody in Andover was afraid of them. I "took it out" in the cordial defiance of a born rebel.

Then we had our tea-parties--theological, of course--when the students came to tea in alphabetical order; and the Professor told his best stories; and the ladies of the family were expected to keep more or less quiet while the gentlemen talked. But this, I should say, was of the earlier time.

And, of course, we had the occasional supply; and as for the clerical guest, in some shape he was always with us.

I remember the shocked expression on the face of a not very eminent minister, because I joined in the conversation when, in the absence of my father's wife, the new mother, it fell to me to take the head of the table. It was truly a stimulating conversation, intellectual, and, like all clerical conversations, vivaciously amusing; and it swept me in, unconsciously. I think this occurred after I had written "The Gates Ajar."

This good man has since become an earnest anti-suffragist and opposer of the movement for the higher education of women. I can only hope he does not owe his dismal convictions to the moral jar received on that occasion; and I regret to learn that his daughter has been forbidden to go to college.

We had, too, our levees--that was the word; by it one meant what is now called a reception. I have been told that my mother, who was a woman of marked social tastes and gifts, oppressed by the lack of variety in Andover life, originated this innocent form of dissipation.

These festivities, like others in academic towns, were democratic to a degree amusing or inspiring, according to the temperament of the spectator.

The professors' brilliantly-lighted drawing-rooms were thrown open to the students and families of the Hill. Distinguished men jostled the Academy boy who built the furnace fire to pay for his education, and who might be found on the faculty some day, in his turn, or might himself acquire an enviable and well-earned celebrity.

Eminent guests from out of town stood elbow to elbow with poor theologues destined to the missionary field, and pathetically observing the Andover levee as one of the last occasions of civilized gayety in which it might be theirs to share. Ladies from Beacon Street or from New York might be seen chatting with some gentle figure in black, one of those widowed and brave women whose struggles to sustain life and educate their children by boarding students form so large a part of the pathos of academic towns.

One such I knew who met on one of these occasions a member of the club for which she provided. The lady was charming, well-dressed, well-mannered.

The young man, innocent of linen, had appeared at the levee in a gray flannel shirt. Introductions passed. The lady bowed.

"I am happy," stammered the poor fellow, "I am happy to meet the woman who cooks our victuals."

If it be asked, Why educate a man like that for the Christian ministry?--but it was _not_ asked. Like all monstrosities, he grew without permission.

Let us hasten to call him the exception that he was to what, on the whole, was (in those days) a fair, wholesome rule of theological selection. The Professor's eyes flashed when he heard the story.

"I have never approved," I think he said, "of the Special Course."

For the Professor believed in no short-cut to the pulpit; but pleaded for all the education, all the opportunity, all the culture, all the gifts, all the graces, possible to a man's privilege or energy, whereby to fit him to preach the Christian religion. But, like other professors, he could not always have his way.

It ought to be said, perhaps, that, beside the self-made or self-making man, there always sat upon the old benches in the lecture-room a certain proportion of gentlemen born and bred to ease and affluence, who had chosen their life's work from motives which were, at least, as much to be respected as the struggles of the converted newsboy or the penitent expressman.

Take her at her dullest, I think we were very fond of Andover; and though we dutifully improved our opportunities to present ourselves in other circles of society, yet, like fisher-folk or mountain-folk, we were always uneasy away from home. I remember on my first visit to New York or Boston--and this although my father was with me--quietly crying my eyes out behind the tall, embroidered screen which the hostess moved before the grate, because the fire-light made me so homesick. Who forgets his first attack of nostalgia? Alas! so far as this recorder is concerned, the first was too far from the last. For I am cursed (or blessed) with a love of home so inevitable and so passionate as to be nothing less than ridiculous to my day and generation--a day of rovers, a generation of shawl-straps and valises.

"Do you never want to _stay_?" I once asked a distinguished author whose domestic uprootings were so frequent as to cause remark even in America.

"I am the most homesick man who ever lived," he responded sadly. "If I only pass a night in a sleeping-car, I hate to leave my berth."

"You must have cultivated society in Andover," an eminent Cambridge writer once said to me, with more sincerity of tone than was to be expected of the Cambridge accent as addressed to the Andover fact. I was young then, and I remember to have answered, honestly enough, but with what must have struck this superior man as unpardonable flippancy:

"Oh, but one gets tired of seeing only cultivated people!"

I have thought of it sometimes since, when, in other surroundings, the memory of that peaceful, scholarly life has returned poignantly to me.

When one can "run in" any day to homes like those on that quiet and conscientious Hill, one may not do it; but when one cannot, one appreciates their high and gentle influence.

One of the historic figures of my day in Andover was Professor Park. Equally eminent both as a preacher and as a theologian, his fame was great in Zion; and "the world" itself had knowledge of him, and did him honor.

He was a striking figure in the days which were the best of Andover. He was unquestionably a genius; the fact that it was a kind of genius for which the temper of our times is soon likely to find declining uses gives some especial interest to his name.

The appearances are that he will be the last of his type, once so powerful and still so venerable in New England history. He wears (for he is yet living) the dignity of a closing cycle; there is something sad and grand about his individualism, as there is about the last great chief of a tribe, or the last king of a dynasty.