idi^yMic CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY GIFT OF Estate of Charles Brown Digitized by Microsoft® Cornell University Library PS 2300.E90d V.1 The works of James Russell Lowell.lllus. 3 1924 021 153 378 Digitized by Microsoft® PS 0.300 V.I Digitized by Microsoft® This book was digitized by Microsoft Corporation in cooperation with Corneii University Libraries, 2007. You may use and print this copy in iimited quantity for your personai purposes, but may not distribute or provide access to it (or modified or partiai versions of it) for revenue-generating or other commerciai purposes. Digitized by Microsoft® B Cornell University B Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924021153378 ^ Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® Mr. Lowell in 1842 Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® LITERARY ESSAYS AMONG MY BOOKS, MY STUDY WINDOWS, FIRESIDE TRAVELS BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL IN FOUR VOLUMES VOLUME I. M 1^ -^H^P*- m ^^^K m m &i BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY Digitized by Microsoft® Copyright, 1864, 1871, 1876, 1890, By JAMES RTJSSBLL LOWKLIi. Copyright, 1892, By MABEL LOWELL BUBNETX. AM rights reserved. ^ff3^^f The Riverside FresSy Cambridge, Mass., V, S. A. Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Company. Digitized by Microsoft® CONTENTS a moosehead jouknal 1 Cambridge Thirty Years Ago 43 Leaves from my Journal in Italy and Elsewhere. I. At Sea 100 II. In the Mediterranean 113 III. Italy 120 IV. A Few Bits op Roman Mosaic . . . 189 Keats 218 Library of Old Authors 247 Emerson the Lecturer 349 Thoreau 361 Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® PEEFATORY NOTE TO THE ESSAYS The greater part of the literary and critical essays here collected was originally written as lectures for an audience consisting not only of my own classes but also of such other members of the University as might choose to attend them. This wiU account for, if it do not excuse, a more rhe- torical tone in them here and there than I should have allowed myself had I been writing for the eye and not for the ear. They were meant to be suggestive of certain broader principles of criti- cism based on the comparative study of literature in its large meaning, rather than methodically ped- agogic, to stimulate rather than to supply the place of individual study. This was my deliberate in- tention, but I am sensible that it may have been in a manner forced upon me by my own limitations ; for, though capable of whatever drudgery in ac- quisition, I am by temperament impatient of de- tail in communicating what I have acquired, and too often put into a parenthesis or a note conclu- sions arrived at by long study and reflection when perhaps it had been wiser to expand them, not to Digitized by Microsoft® vi PREFATORY NOTE TO THE ESSAYS mention that much of my illustration was extern^ poraneous and is now lost to me. I am apt also to fancy that what has long been familiar to my own mind must be equally so to the minds of others, and this uncomfortable suspicion makes one shy of insisting on what may be already only too little in need of it. But Sir Kenelm Digby, in the dedi- cation of what Sir Thomas Browne calls his " ex- cellent Treaty of Bodies," has said better than I could what I wish to say. "For besides what faylings may be in the matter, I cannot doubt but that even in the expressions of it, there must often be great obscurity and shortnesse ; which I, who have my thoughts filled with the things themselves, am not aware of. So that, what peradventure may seeme very full to me, because every imperfect touch bringeth into my mind the entire notion and whole chain of circimistanees belonging to that thing I have so often beaten upon, may appeare very crude and maymed to a stranger, that cannot guesse what I would be at, otherwise than as my direct words do lead him." Let me add that in preparing these papers for the press I omitted much illustrative and subsidi- ary matter, and this I regret when it is too late. Five or six lectures, for instance, were condensed into the essay on Eousseau. The dates attached were those of publication, but the bulk of the ma- terial was written many years earlier, some of it so long ago as 1854. I have refrained from modify- Digitized by Microsoft® PREFATORY NOTE TO THE ESSAYS vii ing what was written by one — I know not whether to say so much older or so much younger than I — but at any rate different in some important re- spects, and this partly from deference to him, partly from distrust of myself. J. H. L. 25tli April, 1890. Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® LIST OF ILLUSTKATIONS FAGS James Russell Lowell at the Age or 23. PhotograT- ure from a crayon by William Page . . . Frontispiece Cambridge in 1824 Charles Copeland . . 54 St. Peteb's 152 View op Rome, pkom the Pincian Hill 202 John Keats 240 Ralph Waldo Embeson 350 Henry D. Thokeau 362 Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® LITERARY ESSAYS A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 1853 ADDEESSED TO THE BDELMAinS- STOEG AT THE BAGNI DI LUCCA. Thuesdat, 11th August. — I knew as little yes- terday of the interior of Maine as the least pene- trating person knows of the inside of that great social millstone which, driven by the river Time, sets imperatively agoing the several wheels of our individual activities. Bom while Maine was still a province of native Massachusetts, I was as much a foreigner to it as yourself, my dear Storg. I had seen many lakes, ranging from that of Virgil's Cumsean to that of Scott's Caledonian Lady ; but Moosehead, within two days of me, had never en- joyed the profit of being mirrored in my retina. At the sound of the name, no reminiscential atoms (according to Kenelm Digby's Theory of Associ- ation, — as good as any) stirred and marshalled themselves in my brain. The truth is, we think lightly of Nature's penny shows, and estimate what we see by the cost of the ticket. Empedocles gave Digitized by Microsoft® 2 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL Ms life for a pit-entrance to ^tna, and no doubt found his account in it. Accordingly, the clean face of Cousin Bull is imaged patronizingly in Lake George, and Loch Lomond glasses the hur- ried countenance of Jonathan, diving deeper in the streams of European association (and coming up drier) than any other man. Or is the cause of our not caring to see what is equally within the reach of aU our neighbors to be sought in that aristo- cratic principle so deeply implanted in human nature ? I knew a pauper graduate who always borrowed a black coat, and came to eat the Com- mencement dinner, — not that it was better than the one which daily graced the board of the pub- lic institution in which he hibernated (so to speak) during the other three hundred and sixty-four days of the year, save in this one particular, that none of his eleemosynary fellow-commoners could eat it. If there are unhappy men who wish that they were as the Babe Unborn, there are more who would aspire to the lonely distinction of being that other figurative personage, the Oldest Inhabitant. You remember the charming irresolution of our dear Esthwaite, (like Macheath between his two doxies,) divided between his theory that he is un- der thirty, and his pride at being the only one of us who witnessed the September gale and the re- joicings at the Peace ? Nineteen years ago I was walking through the Franconia Notch, and stopped to chat with a hermit, who fed with gradual logs the unwearied teeth of a saw-mUl. As the strident steel slit off the slabs of the log, so did the less willing Digitized by Microsoft® A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 3 macMne of talk, acquiring a steadier up-and-down motion, pare away that outward bark of conversa- tion which protects the core, and which, like other bark, has naturally most to do with the weather, the season, and the heat of the day. At length I asked him the best point of view for the Old Man of the Mountain. " Dunno, — never see it." Too young and too happy either to feel or affect the Horatian indifference, I was sincerely aston- ished, and I expressed it. The log-compelling man attempted no justifi- cation, but after a little asked, " Come from Baws'n?" " Yes " (with peninsular pride). " Goodie to see in the vycinity o' Baws'n." " Oh, yes ! " I said ; and I thought, — see Bos- ton and die ! see the State-Houses, old and new, the caterpillar wooden bridges crawling with innu- merable legs across the flats of Charles ; see the Common, — largest park, doubtless, in the world, — with its files of trees planted as if by a drill- sergeant, and then for your nunc dimittis / " I should like, 'awl, I should like to stan' on Bunker Hill. You 've ben there offen, likely ? " "N-o-o," unwillingly, seeing the little end of the horn in clear vision at the terminus of this Socratic perspective. "'Awl, my young frien', you've lamed neow thet wut a man kin see any day for nawthin', chil- dem half price, he never doos see. Nawthin' pay, nawthin' vaUy." Digitized by Microsoft® 4 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL With this modern instance of a wise saw, I de- parted, deeply revolving these things with myself, and convinced that, whatever the ratio of popular tion, the average amoimt of human nature to the square mile differs little the world over. I thought of it when I saw people upon the Pineian wonder- ing at the alchemist sun, as if he never burned the leaden clouds to gold in sight of Charles Street. I thought of it when I found eyes first discovering at Mont Blanc how beautiful snow was. As I walked on, I said to myself. There is one exception, wise hermit, — it is just these gratis pictiires which the poet puts in his show-box, and which we aU gladly pay Wordsworth and the rest for a peep at. The divine faculty is to see what everybody can look at. While every well-informed man in Europe, from the barber down to the diplomatist, has his view of the Eastern Question, why should I not go person- ally down East and see for myself? Why not, like Tancred, attempt my own solution of the Mystery of the Orient, — doubly mysterious when you begin the two words with capitals? You know my way of doing things, to let them simmer in my mind gently for months, and at last do them im- promptu in a kind of desperation, driven by the Eumenides of unfulfilled purpose. So, after talk- ing about Moosehead tiU nobody believed me capa- ble of going thither, I found myself at the Eastern Railway station. The only event of the journey hither (I am now at Waterville) was a boy hawk- ing exhUaratingly the last great railroad smash, — Digitized by Microsoft® A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 5 thirteen lives lost, — and no doubt devoutly wish- ing there had been fifty. This having a mercantile interest in horrors, holding stock, as it were, in murder, misfortune, and pestilence, must have an odd effect on the human mind. The birds of ill- omen, at whose sombre flight the rest of the world turn pale, are the ravens which bring food to this little outcast in the wilderness. If this lad give thanks for daily bread, it would be curious to inquire what that phrase represents to his under- standing. If there ever be a plum in it, it is Sin or Death that puts it in. Other details of my dreadful ride I will spare you. Suffice it that I arrived here in safety, — in complexion like - an Ethiopian serenader half got-up, and so broiled and peppered that I was more like a devilled kid- ney than anything else I can think of. 10 p. M. — The civil landlord and neat chamber at the " Elm wood House " were very grateful, and after tea I set forth to explore the town. It has a good chance of being pretty; but, like most American towns, it is in a hobbledehoy age, grow- ing yet, and one cannot tell what may happen. A child with great promise of beauty is often spoiled by its second teeth. There is something agreeable in the sense of completeness which a waUed town gives one. It is entire, like a crystal, — a work which man has succeeded in finishing. I think the human mind pines more or less where every- thing is new, and is better for a diet of stale bread. The number of Americans who visit the Old World, and the deep inspirations with which they breathe Digitized by Microsoft® 6 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL the air of antiquity, as if their mental lungs had been starved with too thin an atmosphere, is be- ginning to afford matter of speculation to obser- vant Europeans. For my own part, I never saw a house which I thought old enough to be torn down. It is too like that Scythian fashion of knocking old people on the head. I cannot help thinking that the indefinable something which we call character is cumulative, — that the influence of the same climate, scenery, and associations for several gen- erations is necessary to its gathering head, and that the process is disturbed by continual change of place. The American is nomadic in religion, in ideas, in morals, and leaves his faith and opinions with as much indifference as the house in which he was born. However, we need not bother : Nature takes care not to leave out of the great heart of society either of its two ventricles of hold-back and go-ahead. It seems as if every considerable American town must have its one specimen of everything, and so there is a college in Waterville, the buildings of which are three in number, of brick, and quite up to the average ugliness which seems essential in edifices of this description. Unhappily, they do not reach that extreme of ugliness where it and beauty come together in the clasp of fascination. We erect handsomer factories for cottons, woollens, and steam-engines, than for doctors, lawyers, and parsons. The truth is, that, till our struggle with nature is over, till this shaggy hemisphere is tamed and subjugated, the workshop will be the college Digitized by Microsoft® A MOOSE HEAD JOURNAL 7 whose degrees will be most valued. Moreover, steam has made travel so easy that the great uni- versity of the world is open to all comers, and the old cloister system is falling astern. Perhaps it is only the more needed, and, were I rich, I should like to found a few lazyships in my Alma Mater as a kind of counterpoise. The Anglo-Saxon race has accepted the primal curse as a blessing, has deified work, and would not have thanked Adam for abstaining from the apple. They would have dammed the four rivers of Paradise, substituted cotton for fig-leaves among the antediljivian popu- lations, and commended man's first disobedience as a wise measure of political economy. But to re- turn to our coUege. We cannot have fine buildings till we are less in a hurry. We snatch an educa- tion like a meal at a railroad-station. Just in time to make us dyspeptic, the whistle shrieks, and we must rush, or lose our places in the great train of life. Yet noble architecture is one element of patriotism, and an eminent one of culture, the finer portions of which are taken in by unconscious ab- sorption through the pores of the mind from the surrounding atmosphere. I suppose we must wait, for we are a great bivouac as yet, rather than a na- tion on the march from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and pitch tents instead of building houses. Our very villages seem to be in motion, following west- ward the bewitching music of some Pied Piper of Hamelin. We stiU feel the great push toward sundown given to the peoples somewhere in the gray dawn of history. The cliff-swallow alone of all animated nature emigrates eastward. Digitized by Microsoft® 8 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL Friday, 12th. — The coach leaves "Waterville at five o'clock in the morning, and one must break- fast in the dark at a quarter past four, because a train starts at twenty minutes before five, — the passengers by both conveyances being pastured gregariously. So one must be up at half past three. The primary geological formations contain no trace of man, and it seems to me that these eocene periods of the day are not fitted for sustain- ing the human forms of life. One of the Fathers held that the sun was created to be worshipped at his rising by the GentUes. The more reason that Christians (except, perhaps, early Christians) should abstain from these heathenish ceremonials. As one arriving by an early train is welcomed by a drowsy maid with the sleep scarce brushed out of her hair, and finds empty grates and polished mahogany, on whose arid plains the pioneers of breakfast have not yet encamped, so a person waked thus unsea- sonably is sent into the world before his faculties are up and dressed to serve him. It might have been for this reason that my stomach resented for several hours a piece of fried beefsteak which I forced upon it, or, more properly speaking, a piece of that leathern conveniency which in these regions assumes the name. You will find it as hard to believe, my dear Storg, as that quarrel of the Sorbonists, whether one should say ego amat or no, that the use of the gridiron is unknown here- about, and so near a river named after St. Law- rence, too ! To-day has been the hottest day of the season, Digitized by Microsoft® A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 9 yet our drive has not been unpleasant. For a con- siderable distance we followed the course of the Sebasticook Eiver, a pretty stream with alterna^ tions of dark brown pools and wine-colored rapids. On each side of the road the land had been cleared, and little one-story farm-houses were scattered at intervals. But the stumps still held out in most of the fields, and the tangled wilderness closed in be- hind, striped here and there with the slim white trunks of the elm. As yet only the edges of the great forest have been nibbled away. Sometimes a root-fence stretched up its bleaching antlers, like the trophies of a giant hunter. Now and then the houses thickened into an unsocial-looking village, and we drove up to the grocery to leave and take a mail-bag, stopping again presently to water the horses at some pallid little tavern, whose one red- curtained eye (the bar-room) had been put out by the inexorable thrust of Maine Law. Had Shen- stone travelled this road, he would never have writ- ten that famous stanza of his ; had Johnson, he would never have quoted it. They are to real inns as the skull of Yorick to his face. Where these villages occurred at a distance from the river, it was difficult to account for them. On the river- bank, a saw-miU or a tannery served as a logical premise, and saved them from total inconsequen- tiality. As we trailed along, at the rate of about four miles an hojir, it was discovered that one of our mail-bags was missing. " Guess somebody 'H pick it up," said the driver coolly; "'t any rate, likely there's nothin' in it." Who knows how Digitized by Microsoft® 10 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL long it took some Elam D. or Zebulon K. to com- pose the missive intrusted to that vagrant bag, and how much longer to persuade Pamela Grace or Sophronia Melissa that it had reaUy and truly been written ? The discovery of our loss was made by a taU man who sat next to me on the top of the coach, every one of whose senses seemed to be prosecuting its several investigation as we went along. Presently, sniffing gently, he remarked : " 'Pears to me 's though I smelt sunthin'. Ain't the aix het, think ? " The driver pulled up, and, sure enough, the off fore-wheel was found to be smoking. In three minutes he had snatched a rail from the fence, made a lever, raised the coach, and taken off the wheel, bathing the hot axle and box with water from the river. It was a pretty spot, and I was not sorry to lie under a beech-tree (Tityrus-like, meditating over my pipe) and watch the operations of the fire-annihUator. I could not help contrasting the ready helpfulness of our driver, aU of whose wits were about him, current, and redeemable in the specie of action on emergency, with an incident of travel in Italy, where, under a somewhat similar stress of circumstances, our vetturino had nothing for it but to dash his hat on the ground and call on Sant' Antonio, the Italian Hercules. There being four passengers for the Lake, a vehicle called a mud-wagon was detailed at New- port for our accommodation. In this we jolted and rattled along at a livelier pace than in the coach. As we got farther north, the country (especially Digitized by Microsoft® A MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL 11 tlie Mils) gave evidence of longer cultivation. About the thriving town of Dexter we saw fine farms and crops. The houses, too, became pret- tier ; hop-vines were trained about the doors, and hung their clustering thyrsi over the open win- dows. A kind of wild rose (called by the country folk the primrose) and asters were planted about the door-yards, and orchards, commonly of natural fruit, added to the pleasant home-look. But every- where we could see that the war between the white man and the forest was still fierce, and that it would be a long while yet before the axe was buried. The haying being over, fires blazed or smouldered against the stumps in the fields, and the blue smoke widened slowly upward through the quiet August atmosphere. It seemed to me that I could hear a sigh now and then from the imme- morial pines, as they stood watching these camp- fires of the inexorable invader. Evening set in, and, as we crunched and crawled up the long gravelly hiUs, I sometimes began to fancy that Nature had forgotten to make the corresponding descent on the other side. But erelong we were rushing down at full speed ; and, inspired by the dactylic beat of the horses' hoofs, I essayed to re- peat the opening lines of Evangeline. At the mo- ment I was beginning, we plunged into a hollow, where the soft clay had been overcome by a road of unhewn logs. I got through one line to this cor- duroy accompaniment, somewhat as a country choir stretches a short metre on the Procrustean rack of a long-drawn tune. The result was like this : — Digitized by Microsoft® 12 A MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL "Thiliis iliis thehe fohorest prihihimeheval ; thehe murhimmiring pihines hahand thehe hehemlohocks ! " At a quarter past eleven, P. M., we reached Greenville, (a little village which looks as if it had dripped down from the hills, and settled in the hol- low at the foot of the lake,) having accomplished seventy-two miles in eighteen hours. The tavern was totally extinguished. The driver rapped upon the bar-room window, and after a while we saw heat-lightnings of unsuccessful matches followed by a low grumble of vocal thunder, which I am afraid took the form of imprecation. Presently there was a great success, and the steady blur of lighted tal- low succeeded the fugitive brilliance of the pine. A hostler fumbled the door open, and stood staring at but not seeing us, with the sleep sticking out all over him. We at last contrived to launch him, more like an insensible missile than an intelligent or intelligible being, at the slumbering landlord, who came out wide-awake, and welcomed us as so many half-dollars, — twenty-five cents each for bed, ditto breakfast. O Shenstone, Shenstone ! The only roost was in the garret, which had been made into a single room, and contained eleven double- beds, ranged along the walls. It was like sleeping in a hospital. However, nice customs curtsy to eighteen-hour rides, and we slept. Saturday, IStJi. — This morning I performed my toilet in the bar-room, where there was an abundant supply of water, and a halo of interested spectators. After a sufficient breakfast, we em~ barked on the httle steamer Moosehead, and were Digitized by Microsoft® A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 13 soon throbbing up the lake. The boat, it appeared, had been chartered by a party, this not being one of her regular trips. Accordingly we were mulcted in twice the usual fee, the philosophy of which I could not understand. However, it always comes easier to us to comprehend why we receive than why we pay. I dare say it was quite clear to the captain. There were three or four clearings on the western shore ; but after passing these, the lake became wholly primeval, and looked to us as it did to the first adventurous Frenchman who paddled across it. Sometimes a cleared point would be pink with the blossoming wiUow-herb, " a cheap and excellent substitute " for heather, and, like aU. such, not quite so good as the real thing. On aU sides rose deep-blue mountains, of remarkably graceful outline, and more fortunate than common in their names. There were the Big and Little Squaw, the Spencer and Lily-bay Mountains. It was de- bated whether we saw Katahdin or not, (perhaps more useful as an intellectual exercise than the assured vision would have been), and presently Moimt Kineo rose abruptly before us, in shape not unlike the island of Capri. Mountains are called great natural features, and why they should not retain their names long enough for these also to become naturalized, it is hard to say. Why should every new surveyor rechristen them with the guber- natorial patronymics of the current year? They are geological noses, and as they are aquiline or pug, indicate terrestrial idiosyncrasies. A cos- mical physiognomist, after a glance at them, will Digitized by Microsoft® 14 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL draw no vague inference as to the character of the country. The word nose is no better than any other word ; but since the organ has got that name, it is convenient to keep it. Suppose we had to label our facial prominences every season with the name of our provincial governor, how should we like it ? If the old names have no other meaning, they have that of age ; and, after all, meaning is a plant of slow growth, as every reader of Shake- speare knows. It is well enough to caU mountains after their discoverers, for Nature has a knack of throwing doublets, and somehow contrives it that discoverers have good names. Pike's Peak is a cu- rious hit in this way. But these surveyors' names have no natural stick in them. They remind one of the epithets of poetasters, which peel off like a badly gummed postage-stamp. The early settlers did better, and there is something pleasant in the sound of Graylock, Saddleback, and Great Hay- stack. " I love those names Wherewith the exiled farmer tames Nature down to companionship With his old world's more homely mood, And stiiTes the shaggy wild to clip In the armsiof familiar habitude." It is possible that Mount Marcy and Mount Hitchcock may sound as well hereafter as Helles- pont and Peloponnesus, when the heroes, their namesakes, have become mythic with antiquity. But that is to look forward a great way. I am no fanatic for Indian nomenclature, — the name of my native district having been Pigsgusset, — but let us at least agree on names for ten years. Digitized by Microsoft® A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 15 There were a couple of loggers on board, in red flannel shirts, and with rifles. They were the first I had seen, and I was interested in their appear- ance. They were tall, weU-knit men, straight as Robin Hood, and with a quiet, self-contained look that pleased me. I feU into talk with one of them. " Is there a good market for the farmers here in the woods ? " I asked. " None better. They can seU what they raise at their doors, and for the best of prices. The lum- berers want it all, and more." " It must be a lonely life. But then we all have to pay more or less life for a living." "Well, it is lonesome. Shouldn't like it. After all, the best crop a man can raise is a good crop of society. We don't live none too long, any- how ; and without society a fellow could n't tell more 'n half the time whether he was alive or not." This speech gave me a glimpse into the life of the lumberers' camp. It was plain that there a man would soon find out how much alive he was, — there he could learn to estimate his quality, weighed in the nicest self-adjusting balance. The best arm at the axe or the paddle, the surest eye for a road or for the weak point of a jam, the steadiest foot upon the squirming log, the most persuasive voice to the tugging oxen, — all these things are rapidly settled, and so an aristocracy is evolved from this democracy of the woods, for good old mother Nature speaks Saxon still, and with her either Canning or Kenning means King. Digitized by Microsoft® 16 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL A string of five loons was flying back and forth in long, irregular zigzags, uttering at intervals their wild, tremulous cry, which always seems far away, like the last faint pulse of echo dying among the hills, and which is one of those few sounds that, instead of disturbing solitude, only deepen and confirm it. On our inland ponds they are usually seen in pairs, and I asked if it were com- mon to meet five together. My question was an- swered by a queer-looking old man, chiefly remark- able for a pair of enormous cowhide boots, over which large blue trousers of frocking strove in vain to crowd themselves. "Wahl, 't ain't ushil," said he, "and it's called a sign o' rain comin', that is." " Do you think it will rain ? " With the caution of a veteran auspex, he evaded a direct reply. " Wahl, they du say it 's a sign o' rain comin'," said he. I discovered afterward that my interlocutor was Uncle Zeb. Formerly, every New England town had its representative uncle. He was not a pawn- broker, but some elderly man who, for want of more defined family ties, had gradually assumed this avuncular relation to the community, inhabiting the border-land between respectability and the alms- house, with no regular calling, but ready for odd jobs at haying, wood-sawing, whitewashing, associ- ated with the demise of pigs and the ailments of cattle, and possessing as much patriotism as might be implied in a devoted attachment to " New Eng- land " — with a good deal of sugar and very little Digitized by Microsoft® A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 17 water in it. Uncle Zeb was a good specimen of this palaeozoic class, extinct among us for the most part, or surviving, like the Dodo, in the Botany Bays of society. He was ready to contribute (somewhat muddily) to all general conversation ; but his chief topics were his boots and the 'Eoostick war. Upon the lowlands and levels of ordinary palaver he would make rapid and unlooked-for incursions ; but, provision failing, he would retreat to these two fastnesses, whence it was impossible to dislodge him, and to which he knew innumerable passes and short cuts quite beyond the conjecture of com- mon woodcraft. His mind opened naturally to these two subjects, like a book to some favorite passage. As the ear accustoms itself to any sound recurring regularly, such as the ticking of a clock, and, without a conscious effort of attention, takes no impression from it whatever, so does the mind find a natural safeguard against this pendulum species of discourse, and performs its duties in the parliament by an unconscious reflex action, like the beating of the heart or the movement of the lungs. If talk seemed to be flagging, our Uncle would put the heel of one boot upon the toe of the other, to bring it within point-blank range, and say, " Wahl, I stump the Devil himself to make that 'ere boot hurt my foot," leaving us in doubt whether it were the virtue of the foot or its case which set at naught the wiles of the adversary ; or, looking up suddenly, he would exclaim, "Wahl, we eat some beans to the 'Eoostick war, I teU you 1 " When his poor old clay was wet witji gin, Digitized by Microsoft® 18 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL his thoughts and words acquired a rank flavor from it, as from too strong a fertilizer. At such times, too, his fancy commonly reverted to a prehistoric period of his life, when he singly had settled aU the surrounding country, subdued the Injuns and other wild animals, and named all the towns. We talked of the winter-camps and the life there. " The best thing is," said our Uncle, " to hear a log squeal thru the snow. Git a good, col', frosty mornin', in Febuary say, an' take an' hitch the critters on to a log that '11 scale seven thousan', an' it '11 squeal as pooty as an'thin' you ever hearn, I tell you." A pause. " Lessee, — seen Cal Hutchins lately? " "No." " Seems to me 's though I hed n't seen Cal sence the 'Roostick war. Wahl," &c., &c. Another pause. " To look at them boots you 'd think they was too large ; but kind o' git your foot into 'em, and they 're as easy 's a glove." (I observed that he never seemed really to get his foot in, — there was always a qualifying kind o'.) " Wahl, my foot can play in 'em like a young hedgehog." By this time we had arrived at Kineo, — a flour- ishing village of one house, the tavern kept by 'Squire Barrows. The 'Squire is a large, hearty man, with a voice as clear and strong as a north- west wind, and a great laugh suitable to it. His table is neat and well supplied, and he waits upon it himself in the good old landlordly fashion. One Digitized by Microsoft® A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 19 may be much better off here, to my thinking, than in one of those gigantic Columbaria which are foisted upon us patient Americans for hotels, and where one is packed away in a pigeon-hole so near the heavens that, if the comet should flirt its tail, (no unlikely thing in the month of flies,) one would run some risk of being brushed away. Here one does not pay his diurnal three doUars for an undi- vided five-hundredth part of the pleasure of look- ing at gilt gingerbread. Here one's relations are with the monarch himself, and one is not obliged to wait the slow leisure of those " attentive clerks " whose praises are simg by thankful deadheads, and to whom the slave who pays may feel as much gratitude as might thrill the heart of a brown-paper parcel toward the express-man who labels it and chucks it under his counter. Sunday, 14cth. — The loons were right. About midnight it began to rain in earnest, and did not hold up till about ten o'clock this morning. " This is a Maine dew," said a shaggy woodman cheerily, as he shook the water out of his wide-awake, " if it don't look out sharp, it'll begin to rain afore it thinks on't." The day was mostly spent within doors; but I found good and intelligent society. We should have to be shipwrecked on Juan Fer- nandez not to find men who knew more than we. In these travelling encounters one is thrown upon his own resources, and is worth just what he car- ries about him. The social currency of home, the smooth-worn coin which passes freely among friends and neighbors, is of no account. We are thrown Digitized by Microsoft® 20 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL back upon the old system of barter ; and, even with savages, we bring away only as much of the wild wealth of the woods as we carry beads of thought and experience, strung one by one in painful years, to pay for them with. A useful old jackknife wiU buy more than the daintiest Louis Quinze paper- folder fresh from Paris. Perhaps the kind of in- telligence one gets in these out-of-the-way places is the best, — where one takes a fresh man after breakfast instead of the damp morning paper, and where the magnetic telegraph of human sympathy flashes swift news from brain to brain. Meanwhile, at a pinch, to-morrow's weather can be discussed. The augury from the flight of birds is favorable, — the loons no longer prophesying rain. The wind also is hauling round to the right quarter, according to some, — to the wrong, if we are to believe others. Each man has his private barometer of hope, the mercury in which is more or less sensitive, and the opinion vibrant with its rise or fall. Mine has an index which can be moved mechanically. I fixed it at set fair, and re- signed myself. I read an old volume of the Patent- Office Report on Agriculture, and stored away a beautiful pile of facts and observations for future use, which the current of occupation, at its first freshet, would sweep quietly off to blank oblivion. Practical application is the only mordant which wiU set things in the memory. Study, without it, is gymnastics, and not work, which alone will get intellectual bread. One learns more metaphysics from a single temptation than from all the philoso- Digitized by Microsoft® A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 21 phers. It is curious, though, how tyrannical the habit of reading is, and what shifts we make to escape thinking. There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds. I have seen a sensible man study a stale newspaper in a country tavern, and husband it as he would an old shoe on a raft after shipwreck. Why not try a bit of hibernation? There are few brains that would not be better for living on their own fat a little whUe. With these reflections, I, notwithstanding, spent the afternoon over my Report. If our own experience is of so little use to us, what a dolt is he who recommends to man or nation the experi- ence of others ! Like the mantle in the old ballad, it is' always too short or too long, and exposes or trips us up. "Keep out of that candle," says old Father MUler, " or you '11 get a singeing." " Pooh, pooh, father, I 've been dipped in the new asbestos preparation," and frozz ! it is all over with young Hopeful. How many warnings have been drawn from Pretorian bands, and Janizaries, and Mame- lukes, to make Napoleon III. impossible in 1851 ! I found myself thinking the same thoughts over again, when we walked later on the beach and picked up pebbles. The old time-ocean throws upon its shores just such rounded and polished re- sults of the eternal turmoil, but we otly see the beauty of those we have got the headache in stoop- ing for ourselves, and wonder at the dull brown bits of common stone with which our comrades have stuffed their pockets. Afterwards this little fable came of it. Digitized by Microsdft® 22 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL DOCTOR LOBSTER A rEBCH, who had the toothache, onee Thus moaned, like any human dunce : " Why must great souls exhaust so soon Life's thin and unsubstantial boon ? Existence on such sculpin terms. Their vulgar loves and hard-won worms. What is it all but dross to me, Whose nature craves a larger sea ; Whose inches, six from head to tail, Enclose the spirit of a whale ; Who, if great baits were still to win. By watchful eye and fearless fin Might with the Zodiac's awful twain Room for a third immortal gain ? Better the crowd's unthinking plan, The hook, the jerk, the frying-pan ! O Death, thou ever roaming shark, Ingulf me in eternal dark ! " The speech was cut in two by flight: A real shark had come in sight ; No metaphoric monster, one It soothes despair to call upon. But stealthy, sidelong, grim, i-wis, A bit of downright Nemesis ; While it recovered from the shock, Our fish took shelter 'neath a rock : This was an ancient lobster's house, A lobster of prodigious nous, So old that barnacles had spread Their white encampments o'er his head. And of experience so stupend, His claws were blunted at the end, Turning life's iron pages o'er. That shut and can be oped no more. Stretching a hospitable claw, *' At once," said he, " the point I saw; Digitized by Microsoft® A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 23 My dear young friend, your case I rue, Your great-great-grandfather I knew ; He was a tried and tender friend I know, — I ate him in the end : In this vile sea a pilgrim long, Still my sight 's good, my memory strong ; The only sign that age is near Is a slight deafness in this ear ; I understand your case as well As this my old familiar shell ; This Welt-schmerz is a brand-new notion, Come in since first I knew the ocean ; We had no radicals, nor crimes. Nor lobster-pots, in good old times ; Tour traps and nets and hooks we owe To Messieurs Louis Blanc and Co. ; I say to all my sons and daughters. Shun Red Republican hot waters ; No lobster ever oast his lot Among the reds, but went to pot : Your trouble 's in the jaw, you said ? Come, let me just nip ofE your head, And, when a new one comes, the pain Will never trouble you again : Nay, nay, fear naught : 't is nature's law. Four times I ' ve lost this starboard claw ; And still, erelong, another grew, Good as the old, — and better too 1 " The perch consented, and next day An osprey, marketing that way, Picked up a fish without a head. Floating with belly up, stone dead. Sharp are the teeth of ancient saws. And sauce for goose is gander's sauce ; But perch's heads are n't lobster's claws. Monday, 15th. — The morning was fine, and we were called at four o'clock. At the moment my Digitized by Microsoft® 24 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL door was knocked at, I was moimting a giraffe with that charming nil admirari which characterizes dreams, to visit Prester John. Bat-tat-tat-tat ! upon my door and upon the horn gate of dreams also. I remarked to my skowhegan (the T&tar for giraffe-driver) that I was quite sure the animal had the raps, a common disease among them, for I heard a queer knocking noise inside him. It is the sound of his joints, O Tambourgi! (an Oriental term of reverence,) and proves him to be of the race of El Keirat. Hat-tat-tat-too ! and I lost my dinner at the Prester's, embarking for a voyage to the Northwest Carry instead. Never use the word canoe, my dear Storg, if you wish to retain your self-respect. Birch is the term among us back- woodsmen. I never knew it till yesterday ; but, like a true philosopher, I made it appear as if I had been intimate with it from childhood. The rapidity with which the human mind levels itself to the standard around it gives us the most perti- nent warning as to the company we keep. It is as hard for most characters to stay at their own average point in all companies, as for a thermom- eter to say 65° for twenty-four hours together. I like this in our friend Johannes Taurus, that he carries everywhere and maintains his insular tem- perature, and will have everything accommodate itself to that. Shall I confess that this morning I would rather have broken the moral law, than have endangered the equipoise of the birch by my awk- wardness? that I should have been prouder of a compliment to my paddling, than to have had both Digitized by Microsoft® A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 25 my guides suppose me the author of Hamlet? Well, Cardinal Richelieu used to jump over chairs. We were to paddle about twenty miles ; but we made it rather more by crossing and recrossing the lake. Twice we landed, — once at a camp, where we found the cook alone, baking bread and ginger- bread. Monsieur Soyer would have been startled a little by this shaggy professor, — this Pre-Ear phaelite of cookery. He represented the salcBratus period of the art, and his bread was of a brilliant ■ yellow, like those cakes tinged with saffron, which hold out so long against time and the flies in little water-side shops of seaport towns, — dingy extrem- ities of trade fit to moulder on Lethe wharf. His water was better, squeezed out of ice-cold granite in the neighboring moulitains, and sent through subterranean ducts to sparkle up by the door of the camp. " There 's nothin' so sweet an' hulsome as your real spring water," said Uncle Zeb, " git it pure. But it 's dreffle hard to git it that ain't got sunthin' the matter of it. Snow-water '11 burn a man's in- side out, — I larned that to the 'Eoostick war, — and the snow lays terrible long on some o' thes'ere hiUs. Mo an' Eb Stiles was up old Ktahdn onct jest about this time o' year, an' we come acrost a kind o' hoUer like, as full o' snow as your stockin 's full o' your foot. I see it fust, an' took an' rammed a settin'-pole — wahl, it was aU o' twenty foot into 't, an' couldn't fin' no bottom. I dunno as there 's snow-water enough in this to do no hurt. I don't somehow seem to think that real spring- Digitized by Microsoft® 26 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL water 's so plenty as it used to be." And Uncle Zeb, witb perhaps a little over-refinement of scru- pulosity, applied his lips to the Ethiop ones of a bottle of raw gin, with a kiss that drew out its very soul, — a hasia that Secundus might have sung. He must have been a wonderful judge of water, for he analyzed this, and detected its latent snow sim- ply by his eye, and without the clumsy process of tasting. I cotdd not help thinking that he had made the desert his dwelling-place chiefly in order to enjoy the ministrations of this one fair spirit unmolested. We pushed on. Little islands loomed trembling between sky and water, like hanging gardens. Gradually the filmy trees defined themselves, the aerial enchantment lost its potency, and we came up with common prose islands that had so late been magical and poetic. The old story of the attained and unattained. About noon we reached the head of the lake, and took possession of a deserted won- gen, in which to cook and eat our dinner. No Jew, I am sure, can have a more thorough dislike of salt pork than I have in a normal state, yet I had already eaten it raw with hard bread for lunch, and relished it keenly. We soon had our tea-kettle over the fire, and before long the cover was chatter- ing with the escaping steam, which had thus vainly begged of all men to be saddled and bridled, tiU. James Watt one day happened to overhear it. One of our guides shot three Canada grouse, and these were turned slowly between the fire and a bit of salt pork, which dropped fatness upon them as Digitized by Microsoft® A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 27 it fried. Although my fingers were certainly not made before knives and forks, yet they served as a convenient substitute for those more ancient inven- tions. We sat round, Turk-fashion, and ate thank- fully, while a party of aborigines of the Mosquito tribe, who had camped in the wongen before we arrived, dined upon us. I do not know what the British Protectorate of the Mosquitoes amounts to ; but, as I squatted there at the mercy of these blood- thirsty savages, I no longer wondered that the clas- sic Everett had been stung into a willingness for war on the question. " This 'ere 'd be about a complete place for a camp, ef there was on'y a spring o' sweet water handy. Frizzled pork goes wal, don't it? Yes, an' sets wal, too," said Uncle Zeb, and he again tilted his bottle, which rose nearer and nearer to an angle of forty-five at every gurgle. He then broached a curious dietetic theory: "The reason we take salt pork along is cos it packs handy : you git the greatest amount o' board in the smaRest compass, — let alone that it 's more nourishin' than an'thin' else. It kind o' don't disgest so quick, but stays by ye, anourishin' ye all the while. " A feUer can live wal on frizzled pork an' good spring-water, git it good. To the 'Eoostick war we did n't ask for nothin' better, — on'y beans." (^Tilt, tilt, gurgle, gurgle.) Then, with an appar- ent feeling of inconsistency, "But then, come to git used to a particular kind o' spring-water, an' it makes a feUer hard to suit. Most aU sorts o' water taste kind o' msipid away from home. Now, Digitized by Microsoft® 28 A MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL I 've gut a spring to my ijlace that 's as sweet — wahl, it's as sweet as maple sap. A feller acts about water jest as he doos about a pair o' boots. It 's aU on it in gittin' wonted. Now, them boots," &c., &c. (^Giirffle, gurgle, gurgle, smack/') All this while he was packing away the remains of the pork and hard bread in two large firkins. This accomplished, we re embarked, our uncle on his way to the birch essaying a kind of song in four or five parts, of which the words were hila- rious and the tune profoundly melancholy, and which was finished, and the rest of his voice appar- ently jerked out of him in one sharp falsetto note, by his tripping over the root of a tree. We pad- dled a short distance up a brook which came into the lake smoothly through a little meadow not far off. We soon reached the Northwest Carry, and our guide, pointing through the woods, said: " That 's the Cannydy road. You can travel that clearn to Kebeck, a hunderd an' twenty mile," — a privilege of which I respectfully declined to avail myself. The offer, however, remains open to the public. The Carry is called two miles ; but this is the estimate of somebody who had nothing to lug. I had a headache and aU my baggage, which, with a traveller's instinct, I had brought with me. (P. S. — I did not even take the keys out of my pocket, and both my bags were wet through before I came back.) Jify estimate of the distance is eighteen thousand six hundred and seventy-four miles and three quarters, — the fraction being the part left to be travelled after one of my com- Digitized by Microsoft® A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 29 panions most kindly insisted on relieving me of my heaviest bag. I know very well that the an- cient Eoman soldiers used to carry sixty pounds' weight, and all that ; but I am not, and never shall be, an ancient Roman soldier, — no, not even in the miraculous Thundering Legion. Uncle Zeb slung the two provender firkins across his shoulder, and trudged along, grumbling that " he never see sech a contrairy pair as them." He had begun upon a second bottle of his "particular kind o' spring-water," and, at every rest, the gurgle of this peripatetic fountain might be heard, followed by a smack, a fragment of mosaic song, or a confused clatter with the cowhide boots, being an arbitrary symbol, intended to represent the festive dance. Christian's pack gave him not half so much trouble as the firkins gave Uncle Zeb. It grew harder and harder to. sling them, and with every fresh gulp of the Batavian elixir, they got heavier. Or rather, the truth was, that his hat grew heavier, in which he was carrying on an extensive manu- facture of bricks without straw. At last affairs reached a crisis, and a particularly favorable pitch offering, with a puddle at the foot of it, even the boots afforded no sufficient ballast, and away went our uncle, the satellite firkins accompanying faith- fully his headlong flight. Did ever exiled monarch or disgraced minister find the cause of his fall in himself ? Is there not always a strawberry at the bottom of our cup of Hfe, on which we can lay all the blame of our deviations from the straight path ? Till now Uncle Zeb had contrived to give a gloss Digitized by Microsoft® 30 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL of volition to smaller stumblings and gyrations, by exaggerating tbem into an appearance of playful burlesque. But the present case was beyond any such subterfuges. He held a bed of justice where he sat, and then arose slowly, with a stern deter- mination of vengeance stiffening every muscle of his face. But what would he select as the culprit ? " It 's that cussed firkin," he mumbled to himself. " I never knowed a firkin cair on so, — no, not in the 'Roostehicick war. There, go long, will ye? and don't come back tiU you 've larned how to walk with a genelman ! " And, seizing the unhappy scapegoat by the bail, he hurled it into the forest. It is a curious circumstance, that it was not the firkin containing the bottle which was thus con- demned to exile. The end of the Carry was reached at last, and, as we drew near it, we heard a sound of shouting and laughter. It came from a party of men making hay of the wild grass in Seboomok meadows, which lie around Seboomok pond, into which the Carry empties itself. Their camp was near, and our two hunters set out for it, leaving us seated in the birch on the plashy border of the pond. The re- pose was perfect. Another heaven hallowed and deepened the polished lake, and through that nether world the fish-hawk's double floated with balanced wings, or, wheeling suddenly, flashed his whitened breast against the sun. As the clattering king, fisher flew unsteadily across, and seemed to push his heavy head along with ever-renewing effort, a visionary mate flitted from downward tree to tree Digitized by Microsoft® A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 31 below. Some tall alders shaded us from the sun, in whose yellow afternoob light the drowsy forest was steeped, giving out that wholesome resinous perfume, almost the only warm odor which it is refreshing to breathe. The tame hay-cocks in the midst of the wildness gave one a pleasant reminis- cence of home, like hearing one's native tongue in a strange country. Presently our hunters came back, bringing with them a tall, thin, active-looking man, with black eyes, that glanced unconsciously on all sides, like one of those spots of sunlight which a child dances up and down the street with a bit of looking-glass. This was M., the captain of the hay-makers, a famous river-driver, and who was to have fifty men under him next winter. I could now understand that sleepless vigilance of eye. He had consented to take two of our party in his birch to seek for moose. A quick, nervous, decided man, he got them into the birch, and was off instantly, without a superfluous word. He evidently looked upon them as he would upon a couple of logs which he was to deliver at a certain place. Indeed, I doubt if life and the world presented themselves to Napier himself in a more logarithmic way. His only thought was to do the immediate duty well, and to pilot his particular raft down the crooked stream of life to the ocean beyond. The birch seemed to feel him as an inspiring soul, and slid away straight and swift for the outlet of the pond. As he disap- peared under the over-arching alders of the brook, our two hunters could not repress a grave and Digitized by Microsoft® 32 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL measured applause. There is never any extrava- gance among these woodmen ; their eye, accustomed to reckoning the number of feet which a tree will scale, is rapid and close in its guess of the amount of stuff in a man. It was laudari a laudato, how- ever, for they themselves were accounted good men in a birch. I was amused, in talking with them about him, to meet with an instance of that ten- dency of the human mind to assign some utterly improbable reason for gifts which seem unaccount- able. After due praise, one of them said, " I g^ess he 's got some Injun in him," although I knew very well that the speaker had a thorough contempt for the red-man, mentally and physically. Here was mythology in a small way, — the same that under more favorable auspices hatched Helen out of an egg and gave Merlin an Incubus for his father. I was pleased with all I saw of M. He was in his narrow sphere a true oifaf avhp&v, and the ragged edges of his old hat seemed to become coronated as I looked at him. He impressed me as a man really educated, — that is, with his aptitudes draion out and ready for use. He was A. M. and LL. D. in Woods College, — -Axe-master and Doctor of Logs. Are not our educations commonly like a pile of books laid over a plant in a pot ? The com- pressed nature struggles through at every crevice, but can never get the cramp and stunt out of it. We spend all our youth in building a vessel for our voyage of life, and set forth with streamers flying; but the moment we come nigh the great loadstone mountain of our proper destiny, out leap Digitized by Microsoft® A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 33 all our carefuUy-driven bolts and nails, and we get many a mouthful of good salt brine, and many a buffet of the rough water of experience, before we secure the bare right to live. We now entered the outlet, a long-drawn aisle of alder, on each side of which spired tall firs, spruces, and white cedars. The motion of the birch re- minded me of the gondola, and they represent among water-craft \hefeUdm, the cat tribe, stealthy, silent, treacherous, and preying by night. I closed my eyes, and strove to fancy myself in the dumb city, whose only horses are the bronze ones of St. Mark and that of Colleoni. But Nature would allow no rival, and bent down an alder-bough to brush my cheek and recall me. Only the robin sings in the emerald chambers of these tall sylvan palaces, and the squirrel leaps from hanging bal- cony to balcony. The rain which the loons foreboded had raised the west branch of the Penobscot so much, that a strong current was setting back into the pond ; and, when at last we brushed through into the river, it was full to the brim, — too f uU for moose, the hunters said. Rivers with low banks have al- ways the compensation of giving a sense of entire fulness. The sun sank behind its horizon of pines, whose pointed summits notched the rosy west in an endless black sierra. At the same moment the golden moon swung slowly up in the east, like the other scale of that Homeric balance in which Zeus weighed the deeds of men. Sunset and moonrise at once ! Adam had no more in Eden — except the Digitized by Microsoft® 84 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL head of Eve upon his shoulder. The stream was so smooth, that the floating logs we met seemed to hang in a glowing atmosphere, the shadow-half be- ing as real as the solid. And gradually the mind was etherized to a like dreamy placidity, till fact and fancy, the substance and the image, floating on the current of reverie, became but as the upper and under halves of one unreal reality. In the west stiU lingered a pale-green light. I do not know whether it be from lifelong familiarity, but it always seems to me that the pinnacles of pine-trees make an edge to the landscape which teUs better against the twilight, or the fainter dawn before the rising moon, than the rounded and cloud-cumulus outline of hard-wood trees. After paddling a couple of miles, we found the arbored mouth of the little Malahoodus River, famous for moose. We had been on the lookout for it, and I was amused to hear one of the hunters say to the other, to assure himself of his familiarity with the spot, " You drove the West Branch last spring, did n't you ? " as one of us might ask about a horse. We did not explore the Malahoodus far, but left the other birch to thread its cedared soli- tudes, while we turned back to try our fortunes in the larger stream. We paddled on about four miles farther, lingering now and then opposite the black mouth of a moose-path. The incidents of our voyage were few, but quite as exciting and profitable as the items of the newspapers. A stray log compensated very well for the ordinary run of accidents, and the floating carhiss of a moose which Digitized by Microsoft® A MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL 35 we met could pass muster instead of a singular dis- covery of human remains by workmen in digging a cellar. Once or twice we saw what seemed ghosts of trees ; but they turned out to be dead cedars, in ' winding-sheets of long gray moss, made spectral by the moonlight. Just as we were turning to drift back down-stream, we heard a loud gnawing sound close by us on the bank. One of our guides thought it a hedgehog, the other a bear. I in- clined to the bear, as making the adventure more imposing. A rifle was fired at the sound, which began again with the most provoking indifference, ere the echo, flaring madly at first from shore to shore, died far away in a hoarse sigh. Half past Eleven, p. M. — No sign of a moose yet. The birch, it seems, was strained at the Carry, or the pitch was softened as she lay on the shore during dinner, and she leaks a little. If there be any virtue in the sitzbad, I shall discover it. If I cannot extract green cucumbers from the moon's rays, I get something quite as cool. One of the guides shivers so as to shake the birch. Quarter to Twelve. — Later from the Freshet ! — The water in the birch is about three inches deep, but the dampness reaches already nearly to the waist. I am obliged to remove the matches from the ground-floor of my trousers into the upper story of a breast-pocket. Meanwhile, we are to sit immovable, — for fear of frightening the moose, — which induces cramps. Half past Twelve. — A crashing is heard on the left bank. This is a moose in good earnest. We Digitized by Microsoft® 86 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL are besought to hold our breaths, if possible. My ftngei s so numb, I could not, if I tried. Crash ! crash ! again, and then a plunge, followed by dead stillness. "Swimmin' crik," whispers guide, sup- pressing all unnecessary parts of speech, — " don't stir." I, for one, am not likely to. A cold fog which has been gathering for the last hour has fin- ished me. I fancy myself one of those naked pigs that seem rushing out of market-doors in winter, frozen in a ghastly attitude of gallop. If I were to be shot myself, I should feel no interest in it. As it is, I am only a spectator, having declined a gun. Splash! again; this time the moose is in sight, and click ! click ! one rifle misses fire after the other. The fog has quietly spiked our bat- teries. The moose goes crashing up the bank, and presently we can hear it chawing its cud close by. So we lie in wait, freezing. At one o'clock, I propose to land at a deserted wongen I had noticed on the way up, where I will make a fire, and leave them to refrigerate as much longer as they please. Axe in hand, I go plung- ing through waist-deep weeds dripping with dew, haunted by an intense conviction that the gnawing sound we had heard was a bear, and a bear at least eighteen hands high. There is something pokerish about a deserted dwelling, even in broad daylight ; but here in the obscure wood, and the moon filter- ing unwillingly through the trees ! Well, I made the door at last, and found the place packed fuUer with darkness than it ever had been with hay. Gradually I was able to make things out a little, Digitized by Microsoft® A MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL 37 and began to hack f rozenly at a log which I groped out. I was relieved presently by one of the guides. He cut at once into one of the uprights of the build- ing tiU he got some dry splinters, and we soon had a fire like the burning of a whole wood-wharf in our part of the country. My companion went back to the birch, and left me to keep house. First I knocked a hole in the roof (which the fire began to lick in a relishing way) for a chimney, and then cleared away a damp growth of " pison-elder," to make a sleeping place. When the unsuccessful hunters returned, I had everything quite comfort- able, and was steaming at the rate of about ten horse-power a minute. Young Telemachus^ was sorry to give up the moose so soon, and, with the teeth chattering almost out of his head, he declared that he would like to stick it out all night. How- ever, he reconciled himself to the fire, and, making our beds of some " splits " which we poked from the roof, we lay down at half past two. I, who have inherited a habit of looking into every closet before I go to bed, for fear of fire, had become in two days such a stoic of the woods, that I went to sleep tranquilly, certain that my bedroom would be in a blaze before morning. And so, indeed, it was ; and. the withes that bound it together being burned off, one of the sides fell in without waking me. Tuesday, 16th. — After a sleep of two hours and a haK, so sound that it was as good as eight, we started at half past four for the hay-makers' camp 1 This was my nephew, Charles Eussell Lowell, who fell at the head of his brigade in the battle of Cedar Creek. Digitized by Microsoft® 38 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL again. We found them just getting breakfast. We sat down upon the deacon-seat before the fire blazing between the bedroom and the salle a man- ger, which were simply two roofs of spruce-bark, sloping to the ground on one side, the other three being left open. We found that we had, at least, been luckier than the other party, for M. had brought back his convoy without even seeing a moose. As there was not room at the table for all of us to breakfast together, these hospitable woodmen forced us to sit down first, although we resisted stoutly. Our breakfast consisted of fresh bread, fried salt pork, stewed whortleberries, and tea. Our kind hosts refused to take money for it, nor would M. accept anything for his trouble. This seemed even more open-handed when I remembered that they had brought aU their stores over the Carry upon their shoulders, paying an ache extra for every pound. If their hospitality lacked anything of hard external polish, it had all the deeper grace which springs only from sincere manliness. I have rarely sat at a table d'hote which might not have taken a lesson from them in essential courtesy. I have never seen a finer race of men. They have all the virtues of the saUor, without that unsteady roll in the gait with which the ocean proclaims it- self quite as much in the moral as in the physical habit of a man. They appeared to me to have hewn out a short northwest passage through wintry woods to those spice-lands of character which we dwellers in cities must reach, if at aU, by weary voyages in the monotonous track of the trades. Digitized by Microsoft® A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 39 By the way, as we were embirching last evening .for our moose-chase, I asked what I was to do with my baggage. " Leave it here," said our guide, and he laid the bags upon a platform of alders, which he bent down to keep them beyond reach of the rising water. " Will they be safe here ? " " As safe as they would be locked up in your house at home." And so I found them at my return ; only the hay-makers had carried them to their camp for greater security against the chances of the weather. We got back to Kineo in time for dinner ; and in the afternoon, the weather being fine, went up the mountain. As we landed at the foot, our guide pointed to the remains of a red shirt and a pair of blanket trousers. " That," said he, " is the reason there 's such a trade in ready-made clo'es. A suit gits pooty well wore out by the time a camp breaks up in the spring, and the lumberers want to look about right when they come back into the settle- ments, so they buy somethin' ready-made, and heave ole bust-up into the bush." True enough, thought I, this is the Ready-made Age. It is quicker being covered than fitted. So we all go to the slop-shop and come out uniformed, every mother's son with habits of thinking and doing cut on one pattern, with no special reference to his peculiar build. Kineo rises 1750 feet above the sea, and 750 above the lake. The climb is very easy, with fine outlooks at every turn over lake and forest. Near Digitized by Microsoft® 40 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL the top is a spring of water, wHcli even Uncle Zeb might have allowed to be wholesome. The little tin dipper was scratched all over with names, show- ing that vanity, at least, is not put out of breath by the ascent. O Ozymandias, King of kings! We are all scrawling on something of the kind. " My name is engraved on the institutions of my country," thinks the statesman. But, alas ! insti- tutions are as changeable as tin-dippers ; men are content to drink the same old water, if the shape of the cup only be new, and our friend gets two lines in the Biographical Dictionaries. After aU, these inscriptions, which make us smile up here, are about as valuable as the Assyrian ones which Hincks and Rawlinson read at cross-purposes. Have we not Smiths and Browns enough, that we must ransack the ruins of Nimroud for more? Near the spring we met a Bloomer ! It veas the first chronic one I had ever seen. It struck me as a sensible costume for the occasion, and it wiU be the only wear in the Grreek Kalends, when women believe that sense is an equivalent for grace. The forest primeval is best seen from the top of a mountain. It then impresses one by its extent, like an Oriental epic. To be in it is nothing, for then an acre is as good as a thousand square miles. You cannot see five rods in any direction, and the ferns, mosses, and tree-trunks just around you are the best of it. As for solitude, night will make a better one with ten feet square of pitch dark ; and mere size is hardly an element of grandeur, except in works of man, — as the Colosseum. It is Digitized by Microsoft® A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 41 througli one or the otlier pole of vanity that men feel the sublime in mountains. It is either, How small great I am beside it ! or, Big as you are, little I's soul will hold a dozen of you. The true idea of a forest is not a selva selvaggia, but some- thing humanized a little, as we imagine the forest of Arden, with trees standing at royal intervals, — a commonwealth, and not a communism. To some moods, it is congenial to look over endless leagues of unbroken savagery without a hint of man. Wednesday. — This morning fished. Telemachus caught a laker of thirteen pounds and a half, and I an overgrown cusk, which we threw away, but which I found afterwards Agassiz would have been glad of, for all is fish that comes to his net, from the fossil down. The fish, when caught, are straightway knocked on the head. A lad who went with us seeming to show an over-zeal in this oper- ation, we remonstrated. But he gave a good, human reason for it, — " He no need to ha' gone and been a fish if he did n't like it," — an excuse which superior strength or cunning has always found sufficient. It was some comfort, in this case, to think that St. Jerome believed in a limitation of God's providence, and that it did not extend to inanimate things or creatures devoid of reason. Thus, my dear Storg, I have finished my Oriental adventures, and somewhat, it must be owned, in the diffuse Oriental manner. There is very little about Moosehead Lake in it, and not even the Latin name for moose, which I might have obtained by sufficient research. If I had kiUed one, I would Digitized by Microsoft® 42 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL have given you His name in that dead language. I did not profess to give you an account of the lake ; but a journal, and, moreover, my journal, with a little nature, a little human nature, and a great deal of I in it, which last ingredient I take to be the true spirit of this species of writing ; aU the rest being so much water for tender throats which cannot take it neat. Digitized by Microsoft® CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 1854 A MEMOIE ADDEESSED TO THE EDELMANN SXOKG IIT ROME. In those quiet old winter evenings, around our Roman fireside, it was not seldom, my dear Storg, that we talked of the advantages of travel, and in speeches not so long that our cigars would forget their fire (the measure of just conversation) de- bated the comparative advantages of the Old and New Worlds. You will remember how serenely I bore the imputation of provincialism, whde I asserted that those advantages were reciprocal; that an orbed and balanced life would revolve be- tween the Old and the New as opposite, but not antagonistic poles, the true equator lying some- where midway between them. I asserted also, that there were two epochs at which a man might travel, — before twenty, for pure enjoyment, and after thirty, for instruction. At twenty, the eye is suffi- ciently delighted with merely seeing; new things are pleasant only because they are not old ; and we take everything heartily and naturally in the right way, — for even mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle. After thirty, we carry along our Digitized by Microsoft® 44 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO scales, with lawful weights stamped by experience, and our chemical tests acquired by study, with which to ponder and assay all arts, institutions, and manners, and to ascertain either their absolute worth or their merely relative value to ourselves. On the whole, I declared myself in favor of the after thirty method, — was it partly (so difficult is it to distinguish between opinions and personalities) because I had tried it myself, though with scales so imperfect and tests so inadequate? Perhaps so, but more because I held that a man should have travelled thoroughly round himself and the great terra incognita just outside and inside his own threshold, before he undertook voyages of discovery to other worlds. "Far countries he can safest visit who himself is doughty," says Beowulf. Let him first thoroughly explore that strange country laid down on the maps as Seauton ; let him look down into its craters, and find whether they be burnt-out or only smouldering ; let him know be- tween the good and evil fruits of its passionate tropics ; let him experience how healthful are its serene and high-lying table-lands ; let him be many times driven back (till he wisely consent to be baf- fled) from its speculatively inquisitive northwest passages that lead mostly to the dreary solitudes of a simless world, before he think himself morally equipped for travels to more distant regions. So thought pithy Thomas Fuller. "Who," he says, "hath sailed about the world of his own heart, soimded each creek, surveyed each corner, but that stiU there remains therein much 'terra incognita' Digitized by Microsoft® CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 45 to himself ? " ^ But does he commonly even so much as think of this, or, while buying amplest trunks for his corporeal apparel, does it once occur to him how very small a portmanteau will contain aU his mental and spiritual outfit? It is more often true that a man who could scarce be induced to expose liis unclothed body even to a village of prairie-dogs, will complacently display a mind as naked as the day it was born, without so much as a fig-leaf of acquirement on it, in every gallery of Europe, — " Not earing, so that stunpter-horse, the back, Be hung with gaudy trappings, in what coarse, Tea, rags most beggarly, they clothe the soul." If not with a robe dyed in the Tyriah purple of imaginative culture, if not with the close-fitting, work-day dress of social or business training, — at least, my dear Storg, one might provide himself with the merest waist-clout of modesty ! But if it be too much to expect men to traverse and survey themselves before they go abroad, we might certainly ask that they should be familiar with their own villages. If not even that, then it is of little import whither they go ; and let us hope that, by seeing how calmly their own narrow neigh- borhood bears their departure, they may be led to think that the circles of disturbance set in motion by the fall of their tiny -drop into the ocean of eternity will not have a radius of more than a week in any direction; and that the world can endure the subtraction of even a justice of the 1 Holy State ■■ The Constant Virgin. Digitized by Microsoft® 46 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO peace with provoking equanimity. In this way, at least, foreign travel may do them good, — may make them, if not wiser, at any rate less fussy. Is it a great way to go to school, and a great fee to pay for the lesson ? We cannot give too much for the genial stoicism which, when life flouts us, and says. Put that in your pipe and smoke it! can puff away with as sincere a relish as if it were tobacco of Mount Lebanon in a narghileh of Da- mascus. It has passed into a scornful proverb, that it needs good optics to see what is not to be seen ; and yet I should be inclined to say that the first essential of a good traveller was to be gifted with eyesight of precisely that kind. All his senses should be as delicate as eyes ; and, above all, he should be able to see with the fine eye of imagina- tion, compared with which all the other organs with which the mind grasps and the memory holds are as clumsy as thumbs. The demand for this kind of traveller and the opportunity for him in- crease as we learn more and more minutely the dry facts and figures of the most inaccessible corners of the earth's surface. There is no hope of another Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, with his statistics of Dreamland, who makes no difficulty of impressing "fourscore thousand rhinocerots" to draw the wagons, of the King of Tartary's army, or of kill- ing eight hundred and fifty thousand men with a flourish of his quill, — for what were a few ciphers to him, when his inkhorn was full and all Christen- dom to be astonished ? — but there is all the more Digitized by Microsoft® CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 47 need of voyagers who give us something better than a census of population, and who know of other exports from strange countries than can be expressed by $ . Give me the traveller who makes me feel the mystery of the Figure at Sai's, whose veil hides a new meaning for every beholder, rather than him who brings back a photograph of the uncovered countenance, with its one unvarying granite story for all. There is one glory of the Gazetteer with his fixed facts, and another of the Poet with his variable quantities of fancy. After all, my dear Storg, it is to know things that one has need to travel, and not men. Those force us to come to them, but these come to us, — sometimes whether we will or no. These exist for us in every variety in our own town. You may find your antipodes without a voyage to China ; he lives there, just round the next corner, precise, for- mal, the slave of precedent, making aU his teacups with a break in the edge, because his model had one, and your fancy decorates him with an endless- ness of airy pigtail. There, too, are John Bull, Jean Crapaud, Hans Sauerkraut, Pat Murphy, and the rest. It has been written : " He needs no ship to cross the tide, Who, in the lives around him, sees Fair window-prospects opening wide O'er history's fields on every side, Eome, Egypt, England, Ind, and Greece. " Whatever moulds of various brain E'er shaped the world to weal or woe, Whatever empires' wax and wane, Digitized by Microsoft® 48 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO To him who hath not eyes in vain, His village-microcosm can show." But every thing is not a Thing, and all things are good for nothing out of their natural hahitat. If the heroic Barnum had succeeded in transplanting Shakespeare's house to America, what interest would it have had for us, torn out of its appro- priate setting in softly-hilled Warwickshire, which showed us that the most English of poets must be born in the most English of counties ? I mean by a Thing that which is not a mere spectacle, that which some virtue of the mind leaps forth to, as it also sends forth its sympathetic flash to the mind, as soon as they come within each other's sphere of attraction, and, with instantaneous coalition, form a new product, — knowledge. Such, in the understanding it gives us of early Roman history, is the little territory around Rome, the gentis cunahida, without a sight of which Livy and Mebuhr and the maps are vain. So, too, one must go to Pompeii and the Museo Borhonico, to get a true conception of that wondrous artistic nature of the Gtreeks, strong enough, even in that petty colony, to survive foreign conquest and to assimilate barbarian blood, showing a grace and fertility of invention whose Roman copies RafaeUo himself could only copy, and enchanting even the base utensils of the kitchen with an inevitable sense of beauty to which we subterranean Northmen have not yet so much as dreamed of climbing. Mere sights one can see quite as well at home. Mont Blanc does not tower more grandly in the Digitized by Microsoft® CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 49 memory than did the dream-peak which loomed afar on the morning horizon of hope, nor did the smoke-palm of Vesuvius stand more erect and fair, with tapering stem and spreading top, in that Par- thenopean air, than under the diviner sky of imag- ination. I know what Shakespeare says about homekeeping youths, and I can fancy what you will add about America being interesting only as a phenomenon, and uncomfortable to live in, because we have not yet done with getting ready to live. But is not your Europe, on the other hand, a place where men have done living for the present, and of value chiefly because of the men who had done living in it long ago? And if, in our rapidly moving country, one feel sometimes as if he had his home on a railroad-train, is there not also a satisfaction in knowing that one is going some- where ? To what end visit Europe, if people carry with them, as most do, their old parochial horizon, going hardly as Americans even, much less as men ? Have we not both seen persons abroad who put us in mind of parlor gold-fish in their vase, isolated in that little globe of their own element, incapable of communication with the strange world around them, a show themselves, while it was al- ways doubtful if they could see at aU beyond the limits of their portable prison? The wise man travels to discover himself ; it is to find himself out that he goes out of himself and his habitual asso- ciations, trying everything in turn till he find that one activity, that royal standard, sovran over him by divine right, toward which all the disbanded Digitized by Microsoft® 50 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO powers of Ms nature and the irregular tendencies of his life gather joyfully, as to the common raUy- ing-point of their loyalty. AH these things we debated while the ilex logs upon the hearth burned down to tinkling coals, over which a gray, soft moss of ashes grew betimes, mocking the poor wood with a pale travesty of that green and gradual decay on forest-floors, its natural end. Already the clock at the Cappuccini told the morning quarters, and on the pauses of our talk no sound intervened but the muffled hoot of an owl in the near convent-garden, or the rattling tramp of a patrol of that French army which keeps him a prisoner in his own city who claims to lock and unlock the doors of heaven. But still the dis- course would eddy round one obstinate rocky tenet of mine, for I maintained, you remember, that the wisest man was he who stayed at home ; that to see the antiquities of the Old World was nothing, since the youth of the world was reaUy no farther away from us than our own youth ; and that, more- over, we had also in America things amazingly old, as our boys, for example. Add, that in the end this antiquity is a matter of comparison, which skips from place to place as nimbly as Emerson's Sphinx, and that one old thing is good only tiU we have seen an older. England is ancient till we go to Rome ; Etruria dethrones Rome, but only to pass this sceptre of antiquity which so lords it over our fancies to the Pelasgi, from whom Egypt straightway wrenches it,' to give it up in turn to older India. And whither then? As well rest Digitized by Microsoft® CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 51 upon the first step, since the effect of what is old upon the mind is single and positive, not cumulative. As soon as a thing is past, it is as infinitely far away from us as if it had happened millions of ' years ago. And if the learned Huet be correct, who reckoned that all human thoughts and records could be included in ten folios, what so frightfully old as we ourselves, who can, if we choose, hold in our memories every syllable of recorded time, from the first crunch of Eve's teeth in the apple down- ward, being thus ideally contemporary with hoariest Eld? ** Thy pyramids built up with newer might To U3 are nothing novel, nothing strange." Now, my dear Storg, you know my (what the phrenologists call) inhabitiveness and adhesiveness, — how I stand by the old thought, the old thing, the old place, and the old friend, tiU I am very sure I have got a better, and even then migrate painfully. Remember the old Arabian story, and think how hard it is to pick up all the pomegranate- seeds of an opponent's argument, and how, so long as one remains, you are as far from the end as ever. Since I have you entirely at my mercy, (for you cannot answer me under five weeks,) you wiU not be surprised at the advent of this letter. I had always one impregnable position, which was, that, however good other places might be, there was only one in which we could be born, and which therefore possessed a quite peculiar and inalienable virtue. We had the fortune, which neither of us have had reason to call other than good, to journey Digitized by Microsoft® 62 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO together through the green, secluded valley of boy- hood ; together we climbed the mountain wall which shut in, and looked down upon, those Italian plains of early manhood; and, since then, we have met sometimes by a well, or broken bread together at an oasis in the arid desert of life, as it truly is. With this letter I propose to make you my fellow- traveller in one of those fireside voyages which, as we grow older, we make oftener and oftener through our own past. Without leaving your elbow- chair, you shall go back with me thirty years, which will bring you among things and persons as thor- oughly preterite as Romulus or Numa. For so rapid are our changes in America that the transi- tion from old to new, the shifting from habits and associations to others entirely different, is as rapid almost as the passing in of one scene and the draw- ing out of another on the stage. And it is this which makes America so interesting to the philo- sophic student of history and man. Here, as in a theatre, the great problems of anthropology — which in the Old World were ages in solving, but which are solved, leaving only a dry net result — are compressed, as it were, into the entertainment of a few hours. Here we have I know not how many epochs of history and phases of civilization contemporary with each other, nay, within five minutes of each other, by the electric telegraph. In two centuries we have seen rehearsed the dis- persion of man from a small point over a whole continent ; we witness with our own eyes the action of those forces which govern the great migration of Digitized by Microsoft® CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 53 the peoples now historical in Europe ; we can watch the action and reaction of different races, forms of government, and higher or lower civilizations. Over there, you have only the dead precipitate, de- manding tedious analysis ; but here the elements are all in solution, and we have only to look to see how they will combine. History, which every day makes less account of governors and more of man, must find here the compendious key to all that pic- ture-writing of the Past. Therefore it is, my dear Storg, that we Yankees may stiU esteem our Amer- ica a place worth living in. But cahn your appre- hensions ; I do not propose to drag you with me on such an historical circumnavigation of the globe, but only to show you that (however needful it may be to go abroad for the study of aesthetics) a man who uses the eyes of his heart may find here also pretty bits of what may be called the social pic- turesque, and little landscapes over which that Indian-summer atmosphere of the Past broods as sweetly and tenderly as over a Roman ruin. Let us look at the Cambridge of thirty years since. The seat of the oldest college in America, it had, of course, some of that cloistered quiet which characterizes aU university towns. Even now deli- cately-thoughtful A. H. C. teUs me that he finds in its intellectual atmosphere a repose which recalls that of grand old Oxford. But, underlying this, it had an idiosyncrasy of its own. Boston was not yet a city, and Cambridge was still a country vil- lage, with its own habits and traditions, not yet feel- ing too strongly the force of suburban gravitation. Digitized by Microsoft® 64 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO Approaching it from the west by what was then called the New Road (so called no longer, for we change our names as readily as thieves, to the great detriment of all historical association), you would pause on the brow of Symonds' Hill to enjoy a view singularly soothing and placid. In front of you lay the town, tufted with elms, lindens, and horse-chestnuts, which had seen Massachusetts a colony, and were fortunately unable to emigrate with the Tories by whom, or by whose fathers, they were planted. Over it rose the noisy belfry of the College, the square, brown tower of the church, and the slim, yellow spire of the parish meeting-house, by no means ungraceful, and then an invariable characteristic of New England religious architec- ture. On your right, the Charles slipped smoothly through green and purple salt-meadows, darkened, here and there, with the blossoming black-grass as with a stranded cloud-shadow. Over these marshes, level as water, but without its glare, and with softer and more soothing gradations of perspective, the eye was carried to a horizon of softly-rounded hiUs. To your left hand, upon the Old Koad, you saw some half-dozen dignified old houses of the colonial time, all comfortably fronting southward. If it were early June, the rows of horse-chestnuts along the fronts of these houses showed, through every crevice of their dark heap of foliage, and on the end of every drooping limb, a cone of pearly flow- ers, while the hiU behind was white or rosy with the crowding blooms of various fruit-trees. There is no sound, unless a horseman clatters over the Digitized by Microsoft® Cambridge in /S34 Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 55 loose planks of the bridge, while his antipodal shadow glides silently over the mirrored bridge be- low, or unless, " winged rapture, feathered soul of spring, Blithe voice of woods, fields, waters, all in one. Pipe blown tlirough by the warm, mild breath of June Shepherding her white flocks of woolly clouds. The bobolink has come, and climbs the wind With rippling wings that quiver not for flight. But only joy, or, yielding to its will. Runs down, a brook of laughter, through the air." Such was the charmingly rural picture which he who, thirty years ago, went eastward over Symonds' Hill had given him for nothing, to hang in the Gallery of Memory. But we are a city now, and Common Councils have as yet no notion of the truth (learned long ago by many a European hamlet) that picturesqueness adds to the actual money value of a town. To save a few dollars in gravel, they have cut a kind of dry ditch through the hiU, where you suffocate with dust in summer, or flounder through waist-deep snow-drifts in winter, with no prospect but the crumbling earth-waUs on either side. The landscape was carried away cart-load by cart-load, and, dumped down on the roads, forms a part of that unfathomable pudding, which has, I fear, driven many a teamster and pedestrian to the use of phrases not commonly found in English dic- tionaries. We called it "the Village" then (I speak of Old Cambridge), and it was essentially an English village, quiet, unspeculative, without enterprise, suf- ficing to' itself, and only showing such differences Digitized by Microsoft® 56 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO from the original type as the public school and the system of town government might superinduce. A few houses, chiefly old, stood around the bare Common, with ample elbow-room, and old women, capped and spectacled, still peered through the same windows from which they had watched Lord Percy's artillery rumble by to Lexington, or caught a glimpse of the handsome Virginia General who had come to wield our homespun Saxon chivalry. People were stiU living who regretted the late un- happy separation from the mother island, who had seen no gentry since the VassaUs went, and who thought that Boston had iU kept the day of her patron saint, Botolph, on the 17th of June, 1775. The hooks were to be seen in Massachusetts Hall from which had swung the hammocks of Burgoyne's captive redcoats. If memory does not deceive me, women stiU washed clothes in the town spring, clear as that of Bandusia. One coach sufficed for all the travel to the metropolis. Commencement had not ceased to be the great holiday of the Puritan Com- monwealth, and a fitting one it was, — the festival of Santa Scholastica, whose triumphal path one may conceive strewn with leaves of spelling-book instead of bay. The students (scholars they were called then) wore their sober uniform, not osten- tatiously distinctive or capable of rousing demo- cratic envy, and the old lines of caste were blurred rather than rubbed out, as servitor was softened into beneficiary. The Spanish king felt sure that the gesticulating student was either mad or reading Don Quixote, and if, in those days, you met a youth Digitized by Microsoft® CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 57 swinging his arms and talking to himself, you might conclude that he was either a lunatic or one who was to appear in a "part" at the next Exhibition or Commencement. A favorite place for the re- hearsal of these orations was the retired amphi- theatre of the Gravel-pit, perched unregarded on whose dizzy edge, I have heard many a burst of plusquam Ciceronian eloquence, and (often re- peated) the regular saluto vos, prcestantissimce &c., which every year (with a glance at the gal- lery) causes a flutter among the fans innocent of Latin, and delights to applauses of conscious superiority the youth almost as innocent as they. It is curious, by the way, to note how plainly one can feel the pulse of self in the plaudits of an au- dience. At a political meeting, if the enthusiasm of the lieges hang fire, it may be exploded at once by an allusion . to their intelligence or patriotism ; and at a literary festival, the first Latin quotation draws the first applause, the clapping of hands being intended as a tribute to our own familiarity with that sonorous tongue, and not at all as an approval of the particular sentiment conveyed in it. For if the orator should say, "Well has Tacitus remarked, Americani omnes quddam vi natures furca dignissimi" it would be all the same. But ' the Gravel-pit was patient, if irresponsive ; nor did the declaimer always fail to bring down the house, bits of loosened earth falling now and then from the precipitous walls, their cohesion perhaps over- come by the vibrations of the voice, and happily satirizing the effect of most popular discourses, Digitized by Microsoft® 58 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO which prevail rather with the earthy than the spir- itual part of the hearer. Was it possible for us in those days to conceive of a greater potentate than the President of the University, in his square doc- tor's cap, that still filially recalled Oxford and Cambridge? If there was a doubt, it was sug- gested only by the Governor, and even by him on artillery-election days alone, superbly martial with epaulets and buckskin breeches, and bestriding the war-horse, promoted to that solemn duty for his tameness and steady habits. Thirty years ago, the town had indeed a char- acter. Railways and omnibuses had not rolled flat all little social prominences and peculiarities, making every man as much a citizen everywhere as at home. No Charlestown boy could come to our annual festival without fighting to avenge a certain traditional porcine imputation against the inhab- itants of that historic spot, to which our youth gave vent in fanciful imitations of the dialect of the sty, or derisive shouts of " Charlestown hogs ! " The penny newspaper had not yet silenced the tripod of the barber, oracle of news. Everybody knew everybody, and all about everybody, and village wit, whose high 'change was around the little mar- ket-house in the town square, had labelled every more marked individuality with nicknames that clung like burs. Things were established then, and men did not run through all the figures on the dial of society so swiftly as now, when hurry and com- petition seem to have quite unhung the modulating pendulum of steady thrift and competent train- Digitized by Microsoft® CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 59 ing. Some slow-minded persons even followed their father's trade, — a humiliating spectacle, rarer every day. We had our established loafers, to- pers, proverb-mongers, barber, parson, nay, post- master, whose tenure was for life. The great polit- ical engine did not then come down at regular quadrennial intervals, like a nail-cutting machine, to make all official lives of a standard length, and to generate lazy and intriguing expectancy. Life flowed in recognized channels, narrower perhaps, but with all the more individuality and force. There was but one white -and -yellow -washer, whose own cottage, fresh -gleaming every June through grape-vine and creeper, was his only sign and advertisement. He was said to possess a secret, which died with him like that of Luca della Rob- bia, and certainly conceived aU colors but white and yellow to savor of savagery, civilizing the stems of his trees annually with liquid lime, and meditat- ing how to extend that candent baptism even to the leaves. His pie-plants (the best in town), com- pulsory monastics, blanched under barrels, each in his little hermitage, a vegetable Certosa. His fowls, his ducks, his geese, could not show so much as a gray feather among them, and he would have given a year's earnings for a white peacock. The flowers which decked his little door-yard were whitest China-asters and goldenest sunflowers, which last, backsliding from their traditional Par- see faith, used to puzzle us urchins not a little by staring brazenly every way except towards the sun. Celery, too, he raised, whose virtue is its paleness, Digitized by Microsoft® 60 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO and the silvery onion, and turnip, which, though outwardly conforming to the green heresies of sum- mer, nourish a purer faith subterraneously, like early Christians in the catacombs. In an obscure corner grew the sanguine beet, tolerated only for its usefulness in allaying the asperities of Satur- day's salt-fish. He loved winter better than sum- mer, because Nature then played the whitewasher, and challenged with her snows the scarce inferior purity of his overalls and neck-cloth. I fancy that he never rightly liked Commencement, for bring- ing so many black coats together. He founded no school. Others might essay his art, and were allowed to try their prentice hands on fences and the like coarse subjects, but the ceiling of every housewife waited on the leisure of Newman (^ich- neumon the students called him for his diminutive- ness), nor would consent to other brush than his. There was also but one brewer, — Lewis, who made the village beer, both spruce and ginger, a grave and amiable Ethiopian, making a discount always to the boys, and wisely, for they were his chiefest patrons. He wheeled his whole stock in a white- roofed handcart, on whose front a signboard pre- sented at either end an insurrectionary bottle ; yet insurgent after no mad Gallic fashion, but soberly and Saxonly discharging itseK into the restraining formulary of a tumbler, symbolic of orderly pre- scription. The artist had struggled manfully with the difficulties of his subject, but had not succeeded so well that we did not often debate in which of the twin bottles Spruce was typified, and in which Digitized by Microsoft® CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 61 Ginger. "We always believed that Lewis mentally distinguished between them, but by some peculiar- ity occult to exoteric eyes. This ambulatory chapel of the Bacchus that gives the colic, but not inebri- ates, only appeared at the Commencement holidays, and the lad who bought of Lewis laid out his money well, getting respect as well as beer, three sirs to every glass, — " Beer, sir ? yes, sir : spruce or ginger, sir ? " I can yet recall the innocent pride with which I walked away after that some- what risky ceremony, (for a bottle sometimes blew up,) dilated not alone with carbonic acid gas, but with the more ethereal fixed air of that titular flat- tery. Nor was Lewis proud. When he tried his fortunes in the capital on Election-days, and stood amid a row of rival venders in the very flood of custom, he never forgot his small fellow-citizens, but welcomed them with an assuring smile, and served them with the first. The barber's shop was a museum, scarce second to the larger one of Greenwood in the metropolis. The boy who was to be clipped there was always accompanied to the sacrifice by troops of friends, who thus inspected the curiosities gratis. While the watchful eye of R. wandered to keep in check these rather unscrupulous explorers, the unpaus- ing shears would sometimes overstep the bound- aries of strict tonsorial prescription, and make a notch through which the phrenological develop- ments could be distinctly seen. As Michael An- gelo's design was modified by the shape of his block, so R., rigid in artistic proprieties, would con- Digitized by Microsoft® 62 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO trive to give an appearance of design to this aber- ration, by making it tbe key-note to his work, and reducing the whole head to an appearance of premature baldness. What a charming place it was, — how fuU of wonder and delight ! The sun- ny little room, fronting southwest upon the Com- mon, rang with canaries and Java sparrows, nor were the familiar notes of robin, thrush, and bobo- link wanting. A large white cockatoo harangued vaguely, at intervals, in what we believed (on R.'s authority) to be the Hottentot language. He had an unveracious air, but in what inventions of for- mer grandeur he was indulging, what sweet South- African Argos he was remembering, what tropi- cal heats and giant trees by unconjectured rivers, known only to the wallowing hippopotamus, we could only guess at. The walls were covered with curious old Dutch prints, beaks of albatross and penguin, and whales' teeth fantastically engraved. There was Frederick the Great, with head drooped plottingly, and keen sidelong glance from under the three-cornered hat. There hung Bonaparte, too, the long-haired, haggard general of Italy, his eyes sombre with prefigured destiny ; and there was his island grave ; — the dream and the fulfil- ment. Good store of sea-fights there was also ; above all, Paul Jones in the Bonhomme Richard : the smoke rolling courteously to leeward, that we might see him dealing thunderous wreck to the two hostile vessels, each twice as large as his own, and the reality of the scene corroborated by streaks of red paint leaping from the mouth of every gun. Digitized by Microsoft® CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 63 Suspended over the fireplace, with the curling-tongs, were an Indian bow and arrows, and in the cor- ners of the room stood New Zealand paddles and war-clubs, quaintly carved. The model of a ship in glass we variously estimated to be worth from a hundred to a thousand dollars, R. rather favoring the higher valuation, though never distinctly com- mitting himself. Among these wonders, the only suspicious one was an Indian tomahawk, which had too much the peaceful look of a shingling-hatchet. Did any rarity enter the town, it gravitated natu- rally to these walls, to the very nail that waited to receive it, and where, the day after its accession, it seemed to have hung a lifetime. We always had a theory that R. was immensely rich, (how could he possess so much and be otherwise ?) and that he pursued his calling from an amiable eccentricity. He was a conscientious artist, and never submitted it to the choice of his victim whether he would be perfumed or not. Faithfully was the bottle shaken and the odoriferous mixture rubbed in, a fact red- olent to the whole school-room in the afternoon. Sometimes the persuasive tonsor would impress one of the attendant volunteers, and reduce his poll to shoe-brush crispness, at cost of the reluctant ninepence hoarded for Fresh Pond and the next half-holiday. So purely indigenous was our popu- lation then, that R. had a certain exotic charm, a kind of game flavor, by being a Dutchman. Shall the two groceries want their vates sacer, where E. & W. I. goods and country prodooce were sold with an energy mitigated by the quiet Digitized by Microsoft® 64 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO genius of the place, and where strings of urchins waited, each with cent in hand, for the unweighed dates (thus giving an ordinary business transaction all the excitement of a lottery), and buying, not only that cloying sweetness, but a dream also of Egypt, and palm-trees, and Arabs, in which vision a print of the Pyramids in our geography tyran- nized like that taller thought of Cowper's ? At one of these the unwearied students used to ply a joke handed down from class to class. Enter A, and asks gravely, " Have you any sour apples, Deacon ? " " Well, no, I have n't any just now that are ex- actly sour ; but there 's the bell-flower apple, and folks that like a sour apple generally like that." (^Exit A.y Enter B. "Have you any sweet apples. Dea- con?" " Well, no, I have n't any just now that are ex- actly sweet ; but there 's the bell-flower apple, and folks that like a sweet apple generally like that." {Exit B.) There is not even a tradition of any one's ever having turned the wary Deacon's flank, and his Laodicean apples persisted to the end, neither one thing nor another. Or shall the two town-consta- bles be forgotten, in whom the law stood worthily and amply embodied, fit either of them to fill the uniform of an English beadle? Grim and silent as Ninevite statues they stood on each side of the meeting-house door at Commencement, propped by long staves of blue and red, on which the Indian Digitized by Microsoft® CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 65 with bow and arrow, and the mailed arm with the sword, hinted at the invisible sovereignty of the state ready to reinforce them, as For Achilles' portrait st»od a spear Grasped in an armed hand." Stalwart and rubicund men they were, second only, if second, to S., champion of the county, and not incapable of genial unbendings when the fasces were laid aside. One of them still survives in octogenarian vigor, the Herodotus of village and college legend, and may it be long ere he depart, to carry with him the pattern of a courtesy, now, alas! old-fashioned, biit which might profitably make part of the instruction of our youth among the other humanities ! Long may R. M. be spared to us, so genial, so courtly, the last man among us who will ever know how to lift a hat with the nice graduation of social distinctions. Something of a Jeremiah now, he bewails the decline of our man- ners. " My children," he says, " say, ' Yes sir,' and ' No sir ' ; my grandchildren, ' Yes ' and ' No ' ; and I am every day expecting to hear ' D — n your eyes ! ' for an answer when I ask a service of my great-grandchildren. Why, sir, I can remember when more respect was paid to Governor Hancock's lackey at Commencement, than the Governor and all his suite get now." M. is one of those invalu- able men who remember your grandfather, and value you accordingly. In those days the population was almost wholly without foreign admixture. Two Scotch gardeners there were, — Rule, whose daughter (glimpsed per- Digitized by Microsoft® 66 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO haps at churcli, or possibly the mere Mrs. Harris of fancy) the students nicknamed Anarchy or Miss Rule, — and later Fraser, whom whiskey sublimed into a poet, full of bloody histories of the Forty- twa, and showing an imaginary French bullet, sometimes in one leg, sometimes in the other, and sometimes, toward nightfall, in both. He asserted that he had been at Coruna, calling it by its archaic name of the Groyne, and thus raising doubts in the mind of the young listener who could find no sach place on his map. With this claim to a military distinction he adroitly contrived to mingle another to a natural one, asserting double teeth all round his jaws, and, having thus created two sets of doubts, silenced both at once by a single demonstration, displaying the grinders to the con- fusion of the infidel. The old court-house stood then upon the square. It has shrunk back out of sight now, and students box and fence where Parsons once laid down the law, and Ames and Dexter showed their skill in the fence of argument. Times have changed, and manners, since Chief Justice Dana (father of Rich- ard the First, and grandfather of Richard the Second) caused to be arrested for contempt of court a butcher who had come in without a coat to witness the administration of his country's laws, and who thus had his curiosity exemplarily grati- fied. Times have changed also since the cellar beneath it was tenanted by the twin-brothers Snow. Oyster men were they indeed, silent in their sub- terranean burrow, and taking the ebbs and flows Digitized by Microsoft® CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 67 of custom with bivalvian serenity. Careless of the months with an R in them, the maxim of Snow (for we knew them but as a unit) was, " When 'ysters are good, they air good ; and when they ain't, they is n't." Grecian F. (may his shadow never be less !) teUs this, his great laugh expected all the while from deep vaults of chest, and then coming in at the close, hearty, contagious, mount- ing with the measured tread of a jovial but stately butler who brings ancientest goodfellowship from exhaustless bins, and enough, without other sauce, to give a flavor of stalled ox to a dinner of herbs. Let me preserve here an anticipatory elegy upon the Snows, written years ago by some nameless coUege rhymer. DIFFUGERE NIVES. Here lies, or lie, — decide the question, you, If they were two in one or one in two. — P. & S. Snow, whose memory shall not fade, Castor and Pollux of the oyster-trade : Hatched from one egg, at once the shell they burst, (The last, perhaps, a P. S. to the first,) So homoousian both in look and soul. So undiscernibly a single whole. That whether P. was S., or S. was P., Surpassed all skill in etymology ; One kept the shop at once, and all we know Is that together they were the Great Snow, A snow not deep, yet with a crust so thick It never melted to the son of Tick ; Perpetual ? nay, our region was too low, Too warm, too southern, for perpetual Snow; Still, like fair Leda's sons, to whom 't was given To take their turns in Hades and in Heaven, Oiir Dioscuri new would bravely share The cellar's darkness and the upper air : Digitized by Microsoft® 68 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO Twice every year woiild each the shades escape, And, like a sea-hird, seek the wave-washed Cape, Where (Rumor voiced) one spouse sufficed for both ; No bigamist, for she upon her oath, Unskilled iu letters, could not make a guess At any difference twixt P. and S. — A thing not marvellous, since Fame agrees They were as little different as two peas, And she, like Paris, when his Helen laid Her hand 'mid snows from Ida's top conveyed To cool their wine of Chios, could not know, Between those rival candors, which was Snow. Whiche'er behind the counter chanced to be Oped oysters oft, his clam-shells seldom he ; If e'er he laughed, 'twas with no loud guffaw. The fun warmed through him with a gradual thaw : The nicer shades of wit were not his gift. Nor was it hard to sound Snow's simple drift ; His were plain jokes, that many a time before Had set his tarry messmates in a roar. When floundering cod beslimed the deck's wet planks, — The humorous specie of Newfoundland Banks. But Snow is gone, and, let us hope, sleeps well, Buried (his last breath asked it) in a shell ; Fate with an oyster-knife sawed off his thread. And planted him upon his latest bed. Him on the Stygian shore my fancy sees Noting choice shoals for oyster colonies. Or, at a board stuck full of ghostly forks, Opening for practice visionary Yorks. And whither he has gone, may we too go, — Since no hot place were fit for keeping Snow ! Jam satis nivls. Cambridge has long had its port, but the greater part of its maritime trade was, thirty years ago, intrusted to a single Argo, the sloop Harvard, which belonged to the College, and made annual Digitized by Microsoft® CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 69 voyages to that vague Orient known as Down East, bringing back the wood that, in those days, gave to winter life at Harvard a crackle and a cheerfulness, for the loss of which the greater warmth of an- thracite hardly compensates. New England life, to be genuine, must have in it some sentiment of the sea, — it was this instinct that printed the device of the pine-tree on the old money and the old flag, — and these periodic ventures of the sloop Harvard made the old Viking fibre vibrate in the hearts of all the village boys. What a perspective of mystery and adventure did her sailing open to us ! With what pride did we hail her return ! She was our schoHast upon Robinson Crusoe and the mutiny of the Bounty. Her captain still lords it over our memories, the greatest sailor that ever sailed the seas, and we should not look at Sir John Franklin himself with such admiring interest as that with which we enhaloed some larger boy who had made a voyage in her, and had come back without braces (gallowses we called them) to his trousers, and squirting ostentatiously the juice of that weed which stiU gave him little private returns of something very like searsickness. All our shingle vessels were shaped and rigged by her, who was our glass of naval fashion and our mould of aquatic form. We had a secret and wild delight in believing that she carried a gun, and imagined her sending grape and canister among the treacherous savages of Oldtown. Inspired by her were those first essays at navigation on the Winthrop duck-pond, of the plucky boy who was afterwards to serve two famous years before the mast. Digitized by Microsoft® 70 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO The greater part of what is now Cambridgeport was then (in the native dialect) a huckleberry pastur. Woods were not wanting on its outskirts, of pine, and oak, and maple, and the rarer tupelo with downward limbs. Its veins did not draw their blood from the quiet old heart of the village, but it had a distinct being of its own, and was rather a great caravansary than a suburb. The chief feature of the place was its inns, of which there were five, with vast barns and court-yards, which the railroad was to make as silent and de- serted as the palaces of Nimroud. Great white- topped wagons, each drawn by double files of six or eight horses, with its dusty bucket swinging from the hinder axle, and its grim bull-dog trotting silent underneath, or in midsummer panting on the lofty perch beside the driver, (how elevated thither baffled conjecture,) brought all the wares and pro- ducts of the country to their mart and seaport in Boston. These filled the inn-yards, or were ranged side by side under broad-roofed sheds, and far into the night the mirth of their lusty drivers clamored from the red-curtained bar-room, whUe the single lantern, swaying to and fro in the black cavern of the stables, made a Rembrandt of the group of ostlers and horses below. There were, beside the taverns, some huge square stores where groceries were sold, some houses, by whom or why inhabited was to us boys a problem, and, on the edge of the marsh, a currier's shop, where, at high tide, on a floating platform, men were always beating skins in a way to remind one of Don Quixote's fulling- Digitized by Microsoft® CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 71 mills. Nor did these make all the Port. As there is always a Coming Man who never comes, so there is a man who always comes (it may be only a quarter of an hour) too early. This man, so far as the Port is concerned, was Rufus Davenport. Looking at the marshy flats of Cambridge, and considering their nearness to Boston, he resolved that there should grow up a suburban VenicCo Accordingly, the marshes were bought, canals were dug, ample for the commerce of both Indies, and four or five rows of brick houses were built to meet the first wants of the wading settlers who were ex- pected to rush in — WHENCE ? This singular ques- tion had never occurred to the enthusiastic projec- tor. There are laws which govern human migrations quite beyond the control of the speculator, as many a man with desirable building-lots has discovered to his cost. Why mortal men will pay more for a chess-board square in that swamp, than for an acre on the breezy upland close by, who shall say ? And again, why, having shown such a passion for your swamp, they are so coy of mine, who shall say? Not certainly any one who, like Davenport, had got up too early for his generation. If we could only carry that slow, imperturbable old clock of Oppor- tunity, that never strikes a second too soon or too late, in our fobs, and push the hands forward as we can those of our watches ! With a foreseeing economy of space which now seems ludicrous, the roofs of this forlorn-hope of houses were made flat, that the swarming population might have where to dry their clothes. But A. u. C. 30 showed the Digitized by Microsoft® 72 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO same view as A. u. C. 1, — only that tlie 'brick blocks looked as if tkey had heen struck by a malaria. The dull weed upholstered the decaying wharves, and the only freight that heaped them was the kelp and eel-grass left by higher floods. Instead of a Venice, behold a Torzelo ! The un- fortunate projector took to the last refuge of the unhappy — book-making, and bored the reluctant public with what he called a right-aim Testament, prefaced by a recommendation from General Jack- son, who perhaps, from its title, took it for some treatise on ball-practice. But even Cambridgeport, my dear Storg, did not want associations poetic and venerable. The stranger who took the " Hourly " at Old Cam- bridge, if he were a physiognomist and student of character, might perhaps have had his curiosity ex- cited by a person who mounted the coach at the Port. So refined was his whole appearance, so fastidiously neat his apparel, — but with a neatness that seemed less the result of care and plan than a something as proper to the man as whiteness to the lily, — that you would have at once classed him with those individuals, rarer than great captains and almost as rare as great poets, whom Nature sends into the world to fill the arduous office of Gentleman. Were you ever emperor of that Bara- taria which under your peaceful sceptre would present, of course, a model of government, this remarkable person should be Duke of Bienseance and Master of Ceremonies. There are some men whom destiny has endowed with the faculty of Digitized by Microsoft® CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 73 external neatness, whose clothes, are repellent of dust and mud, whose unwithering white neek-eloths persevere to the day's end, unappeasably seeing the sun go down upon their starch, and whose linen makes you fancy them heirs in the maternal line to the instincts of all the washerwomen from Eve downward. There are others whose inward natures possess this fatal cleanness, incapable of moral dirt- spot. You are not long in discovering that the stranger combines in himself both these properties. A nimbus of hair, fine as an infant's, and early white, showing refinement of organization and the predominance of the spiritual over the physical, undulated and floated around a face that seemed like pale flame, and over which the flitting shades of expression chased each other, fugitive and gleam- ing as waves upon a field of rye. It was a coun- tenance that, without any beauty of feature, was very beautiful. I have said that it looked like pale flame, and can flnd no other words for the impres- sion it gave. Here was a man all soul, his body seeming a lamp of flnest clay, whose service was to feed with magic oils, rare and fragrant, that waver- ing fire which hovered over it. You, who are an adept in such matters, would have detected in the eyes that artist-look which seems to see pictures ever in the air, and which, if it fall on you, makes you feel as if all the world were a gallery, and yourself the rather indifferent Portrait of a Gentle- man hung therein. As the stranger brushes by you in alighting, you detect a single incongruity, — a smell of dead tobacco-smoke. You ask his name, and the answer is, " Mr, AUston." Digitized by Microsoft® 74 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO " Mr. AUston ! " and you resojve to note down at once in your diary every look, every gesture, every word of the great painter ? Not in the least. You have the true Anglo-Norman indifference, and most likely never think of him again till you hear that one of his pictures has sold for a great price, and then contrive to let your grandchildren know twice a week that you met him once in a coach, and that he said, " Excuse me, sir," in a very Titian- esque manner, when he stumbled over your toes in getting out. Hitherto BoSwell is quite as unique as Shakespeare. The country-gentleman, journey- ing up to London, inquires of Mistress Davenant at the Oxford inn the name of his pleasant com- panion of the night before. " Master Shakespeare, an't please your worship." And the Justice, not without a sense of the unbending, says, "Truly, a merry and conceited gentleman ! " It is lucky for the peace of great men that the world seldom finds out contemporaneously who its great men are, or, perhaps, that each man esteems himself the fortunate he who shall draw the lot of memory from the helmet of the future. Had the eyes of some Stratford burgess been achromatic telescopes, capable of a perspective of two hundred years! But, even then, would not his record have been fuller of says I's than of says he^s ? Neverthe- less, it is curious to consider from what infinitely varied points of view we might form our estimate of a great man's character, when we remember that he had his points of contact with the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker, as well as with Digitized by Microsoft® CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 75 the ingenious A, the sublime B, and the Right Honorable C. If it be true that no man ever clean forgets everything, and that the act of drowning (as is asserted) forthwith brightens up all those o'er-rusted impressions, would it not be a curious experiment, if, after a remarkable person's death, the public, eager for minutest particulars, should gather together all who had ever been brought into relations with him, and, submerging them to the hair's-breadth hitherward of the drowning-point, subject them to strict cross-examination by the Humane Society, as soon as they become conscious between the resuscitating blankets ? All of us probably have brushed against destiny in the street, have shaken hands with it, fallen asleep with it in railway carriages, and knocked heads with it in some one or other of its yet unrecognized incarna- tions. Will it seem like presenting a tract to a colpor- teur, my dear Storg, if I say a word or two about an artist to you over there in Italy ? Be patient, and leave your button in my grasp yet a little longer. T. G. A., a person whose opinion is worth having, once said to me, that, however one's notions might be modified by going to Europe, one always came back with a higher esteem for Allston. Cer- tainly he is thus far the greatest English painter of historical subjects. And only consider how strong must have been the artistic bias in him, to have made him a painter at all under the circumstances. There were no traditions of art, so necessary for guidance and inspiration. Blackburn, Smibert, Digitized by Microsoft® 76 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO Copley, Trumbull, Stuart, — it was, after all, but a Brentford sceptre whicb their heirs could aspire to, and theirs were not names to conjure with, like those from which Fame, as through a silver trum- pet, had blown for three centuries. Copley and Stuart were both remarkable men ; but the one painted like an inspired silk-mercer, and the other, though at his best one of the greatest of por- trait-painters, seems sometimes to have mixed his colors with the claret of which he and his genera/- tion were so fond. And what could a successful artist hope for, at that time, beyond the mere wages of his work? His picture would hang in cramped back-parlors, between deadly cross-fires of lights, sure of the garret or the auction-room ere- long, in a country where the nomad population carry no household gods with them but their five wits and their ten fingers. As a race, we care noth- ing about Art ; but the Puritan and the Quaker are the only Englishmen who have had pluck enough to confess it. If it were surprising that AUston should have become a painter at aU, how almost miraculous that he should have been a great and original one ! I call him original deliberately, because, though his school be essentially Italian, it is of less consequence where a man buys his tools, than what use he makes of them. Enough Eng- lish artists went to Italy and came back painting history in a very Anglo-Saxon manner, and creat- ing a school as melodramatic as the French, with- out its perfection in technicalities. But AUston carried thither a nature open on the southern side, Digitized by Microsoft® CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 77 and brought it back so steeped in rich Italian sun- shine that the east winds (whether physical or in- tellectual) of Boston and the dusts of Cambridge- port assailed it in vain. To that bare wooden studio one might go to breathe Venetian air, and, better yet, the very spirit wherein the elder bro- thers of Art labored, etherealized by metaphysical speculation, and sublimed by religious fervor. The beautiful old man ! Here was genius with no vol- canic explosions (the mechanic result of vulgar gunpowder often), but lovely as a Lapland night ; here was .fame, not sought after nor worn in any cheap French fashion as a ribbon at the button- hole, but so gentle, so retiring, that it seemed no more than an assured and emboldened modesty ; here was ambition, undebased by rivalry and inca- pable of the sidelong look ; and all these massed and harmonized together into a purity and depth of character," into a tone, which made the daily life of the man the greatest masterpiece of the artist. But let us go back to the Old Town. Thirty years since, the Muster and the Cornwallis allowed some vent to those natural instincts which Puritan- ism scotched, but not killed. The Cornwallis had entered upon the estates of the old Guy-Fawkes procession, confiscated by the Revolution. It was a masquerade, in which that grave and suppressed humor, of which the Yankees are fuller than other people, burst through all restraints, and disported itself in all the wildest vagaries of fun. Commonly the Yankee in his pleasures suspects the presence of Public Opinion as a detective, and accordingly Digitized by Microsoft® 78 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO is apt to pinion himself in his Sunday suit. It is a curious commentary on the artificiality of our lives, that men must be disguised and masked before they will venture into the obscurer corners of their in- dividuality, and display the true features of their nature. One remarked it in the Carnival, and one especially noted it here among a race naturally self-restrained ; for Silas and Ezra and Jonas were not only disguised as Redcoats, Continentals, and Indians, but not unfrequently disguised in drink also. It is a question whether the Lyceum, where the public is obliged to comprehend aU vagrom men, supplies the place of the old popular amuse- ments. A hundred and fifty years ago. Cotton Mather bewails the carnal attractions of the tavern and the training-field, and teUs of an old Indian who imperfectly understood the English tongue, but desperately mastered enough of it (when under sentence of death) to express a desire for instant hemp rather than listen to any more ghostly conso- lations. Puritanism — I am perfectly aware how great a debt we owe it — tried over again the old experiment of driving out nature with a pitchfork, and had the usual success. It was like a ship in- wardly on fire, whose hatches must be kept hermet- ically battened down ; for the admittance of an ounce of Heaven's own natural air would explode it utterly. Morals can never be safely embodied in the constable. Polished, cultivated, fascinating Mephistopheles ! it is for the ungovernable break- ings-away of the soul from unnatural compressions that thou waitest with a deprecatory smile. Then Digitized by Microsoft® CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 79 it is that thou offerest thy gentlemanly arm to un- guarded youth for a pleasant stroll through the City of Destruction, and, as a special favor, intro- ducest him to the bewitching Miss Circe, and to that model of the hospitable old English gentle- man, Mr. Comus. But the Muster and the Cornwallis were not peculiar to Cambridge. Commencement-day was. Saint Pedagogus was a worthy whose feast could be celebrated by men who quarrelled with minced- pies, and blasphemed custard through the nose. The holiday preserved all the features of an Eng- lish fair. Stations were marked out beforehand by the town constables, and distinguished by num- bered stakes. These were assigned to the different venders of small wares and exhibitors of rarities, whose canvas booths, beginning at the market- place, sometimes half encircled the Common with their jovial embrace. Now all the Jehoiada-boxes in town were forced to give up their rattling depos- its of specie, if not through the legitimate orifice, then to the brute force of the hammer. For hither were come all the wonders of the world, making the Arabian Nights seem possible, and these we beheld for half price ; not without mingled emo- tions, — pleasure at the economy, and shame at not paying the more manly fee. Here the mummy unveiled her withered charms, — a more marvellous Ninon, still attractive in her three-thousandth year. Here were the Siamese twins ; ah ! if all such forced and unnatural unions were made a show of ! Here were the flying horses (their supernatural Digitized by Microsoft® 80 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO effect injured — like that of some poems — by the visibility of the man who turned the crank), on which, as we tilted at the ring, we felt our shoul- ders tingle with the accolade, and heard the clink of golden spurs at our heels. Are the realities of life ever worth half so much as its cheats ? And are there any feasts half so filling at the price as those Barmecide ones spread for us by Imagina- tion? Hither came the Canadian giant, surrep- titiously seen, without price, as he alighted, in broad day, (giants were always foolish,) at the tavern. Hither came the great horse Columbus, with shoes two inches thick, and more wisely intro- duced by night. In the trough of the town-pump might be seen the mermaid, its poor monkey's head carefully sustained above water, to keep it from drowning. There were dwarfs, also, who danced and sang, and many a proprietor regretted the transaudient properties of canvas, which al- lowed the frugal public to share in the melody without entering the booth. Is it a slander of J. H., who reports that he once saw a deacon, emi- nent for psalmody, lingering near one of those vocal tents, and, with an assumed air of abstraction, furtively drinking in, with unhabitual ears, a song, not secular merely, but with a dash of libertinism? The New England proverb says, " All deacons are good, but — there 's odds in deacons." On these days Snow became superterranean, and had a stand in the square, and Lewis temperately contended with the stronger fascinations of egg-pop. But space would fail me to make a catalogue of every- Digitized by Microsoft® CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 81 thing. No doubt, Wisdom also, as usual, had her quiet booth at the corner of some street, without entrance-fee, and, even at that rate, got never a customer the whole day long. For the bankrupt afternoon there were peep-shows, at a cent each. But aU these shows and their ■ showmen are as clean gone now as those of Csesar and Timour and Napoleon, for which the world paid dearer. They are utterly gone out, not leaving so much as a snuff behind, — as little thought of now as that John Robins, who was once so considerable a phe- nomenon as to be esteemed the last great Anti- christ and son of perdition by the entire sect of Muggletonians. Were Commencement what it used to be, I should be tempted to take a booth myself, and try an experiment recommended by a satirist of some merit, whose works were long ago dead and (I fear) deedeed to boot. "Menenius, thou who fain wotddat know how calmly men can pass Those biting portraits of themselves, disguised as fox or ass, Go borrow coin enough to buy a full-length psyche-glass, Engage a rather darkish room in some well-sought position, And let the town break out with bills, so much per head admis- sion, Great nathbal cnniosiTT ! ! The biggest livikg fool ! I Arrange your mirror cleverly, before it set a stool, Admit the public one by one, place each upon the seat, Draw up the curtain, let him look his fill, and then retreat. Smith mounts and takes a thorough view, then comes serenely down. Goes home and tells hia wife the thing is curiously like Brown ; Brown goes and stares, and tells his wife the wonder's core and pith Is that 'tis just the counterpart of that conceited Smith, Digitized by Microsoft® 82 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO Life calls us all to such a show : Menenius, trust in me, While thou to see thy neighbor smil'st, he does the same for thee." My dear Storg, wotild you come to my show, and, instead of looking in my glass, insist on tak- ing your money's worth in staring at the exhib- iter? Not least among the curiosities which the day brought together were some of the graduates, post- humous men, as it were, disentombed from country parishes and district-schools, but perennial also, in whom freshly survived aU the college jokes, and who had no intelligence later than their Senior year. These had gathered to eat the College dinner, and to get the Triennial Catalogue (their lihro d'oro), referred to oftener than any volume but the Concordance. Aspiring men they were certainly, but in a right unworldly way; this scholastic festival opening a peaceful path to the ambition which might else have devastated man- kind with Prolusions on the Pentateuch, or Geneal- ogies of the Dormouse Family. For since in the academic processions the classes are ranked in the order of their graduation, and he has the best chance at the dinner who has the fewest teeth to eat it with, so, by degrees, there springs up a com- petition in longevity, — the prize contended for be- ing the oldest surviving graduateship. This is an office, it is true, without emolument, but having certain advantages, nevertheless. The incumbent, if he come to Commencement, is a prodigious lion, and commonly gets a paragraph in the newspapers Digitized by Microsoft® CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 83 once a year with the (fiftieth) last survivor of Washington's Life-Gruard. If a clergyman, he is expected to ask a blessing and return thanks at the ' dinner, a function which he performs with cente- ' narian longanimity, as if he reckoned the ordinary life of man to be fivescore years, and that a grace must be long to reach so far away as heaven. Accordingly, this silent race is watched, on the course of the Catalogue, with an interest worthy of Newmarket; and as star after star rises in the galaxy of death, till one name is left alone, an oasis of life in the stellar desert, it grows solemn. The natural feeling is reversed, and it is the soli- tary life that becomes sad and monitory, the Sty- lites there on the lonely top of his century-pillar, who has heard the passing-bell of yoiith, love, friendship, hope, — of everything but immitigable eld. Dr. K. was President of the University then, a man of genius, but of genius that evaded utiliza- tion, — a great water-power, but without rapids, and flowing with too smooth and gentle a current to be set turning wheels and whirling spindles. His was not that restless genius of which the man seems to be merely the representative, and which wreaks itself in literature or politics, but of that milder sort, quite as genuine, and perhaps of more contem- poraneous value, which is the man, permeating the whole life with placid force, and giving to word, look, and gesture a meaning only justifiable by our belief in a reserved power of latent reinforcement. The man of talents possesses them like so many Digitized by Microsoft® 84 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO tools, does his job with them, and there an end ; but the man of genius is possessed by it, and it makes him into a book or a life according to its whim. Talent takes the existing moulds, and makes its castings, better or worse, of richer or baser metal, according to knack and opportunity ; but genius is always shaping new ones, and runs the man in them, so that there is always that hu- man feel in its residts which gives us a kindred thrill. What it will make, we can only conjecture, contented always with knowing the infinite balance of possibility against which it can draw at pleasure. Have you ever seen a man whose cheque would be honored for a million pay his toll of one cent ? and has not that bit of copper, no bigger than your own, and piled with it by the careless toll-man, given you a tingling vision of what golden bridges he could pass, — into what Elysian regions of taste and enjoyment and culture, barred to the rest of us ? Something Kke it is the impression made by such characters as K.'s on those who come in contact with them. There was that in the soft and rounded (I had almost said melting) outlines of his face which reminded one of Chaucer. The head had a placid yet dignified droop like his. He was an anachro- nism, fitter to have been Abbot of Fountains or Bishop Golias, courtier and priest, humorist and lord spiritual, all in one; than for the mastership of a provincial eoUege, which combined, with its purely scholastic functions, those of accountant and chief of police. For keeping books he was incom- Digitized by Microsoft® CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 86 petent (unless it were those he borrowed), and the only discipline he exercised was by the unobtrusive pressure of a gentlemanliness which rendered in- subordination to him impossible. But the world always judges a man (and rightly enough, too) by his little faults, which he shows a hundred times a day, rather than by his great virtues, which he discloses perhaps but once in a lifetime, and to a single person, — nay, in proportion as they are rarer, and he is nobler, is shyer of letting their ex- istence be known at all. He was one of those mis- placed persons whose misfortune it is that their lives overlap two distinct eras, and are already so impregnated with one that they can never be in healthy sympathy with the other. Born when the New England clergy were still an establishment and an aristocracy, and when office was almost al- ways for life, and often hereditary, he lived to be thrown upon a time when avocations of all colors might be shuffled together in the life of one man, like a pack of cards, so that you could not pro- phesy that he who was ordained to-day might not accept a colonelcy of filibusters to-morrow. Such temperaments as his attach themselves, like bar- nacles, to what seems permanent ; but presently the good ship Progress weighs anchor, and whirls them away from drowsy tropic inlets to arctic waters of unnatural ice. To such crustaceous na- tures, created to cling upon the immemorial rock amid softest mosses, comes the bustling Nineteenth Century and says, " Come, come, bestir yourself and be practical J get out of that old shell of yours Digitized by Microsoft® 86 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO forthwith ! " Alas ! to get out of the shell is to die! One of the old travellers in South America tells of fishes that built their nests in trees, (piscium et summa hcBsit genus ulmo,') and gives a print of the mother fish upon her nest, while her mate mounts perpendicularly to her without aid of legs or wings. Life shows plenty of such incongruities between a man's place and his nature, (not so easily got over as by the traveller's undoubting en- graver,) and one cannot help fancying that K. was an instance in point. He never encountered, one would say, the attraction proper to draw out his native force. Certainly, few men who impressed others so strongly, and of whom so many good things are remembered, left less behind them to justify contemporary estimates. He printed noth- ing, and was, perhaps, one of those the electric sparkles of whose brains, discharged naturally and healthily in conversation, refuse to pass through the non-conducting medium of the inkstand. His ana would make a delightful collection. One or two of his official ones wiU be in place here. Hearing that Porter's flip (which was exemplary) had too great an attraction for the collegians, he resolved to investigate the matter himself. Ac- cordingly, entering the old inn one day, he called for a mug of it, and, having drunk it, said, " And so, Mr. Porter, the young gentlemen come to drink your flip, do they ? " " Yes, sir, — sometimes." " Ah, weU, I should think they would. Good day, Mr. Porter," anc|: departed, saying nothing more ; Digitized by Microsoft® CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 87 for he always wisely allowed for the existence of a certain amount of human nature in ingenuous youth. At another time the " Harvard Washington " asked leave to go into Boston to a collation which had been offered them. " Certainly, young gentlemen," said the President, " but have you engaged any one to bring home your muskets ? " — the College be- ing responsible for these weapons, which belonged to the State. Again, when a student came with a physician's certificate, and asked leave of absence, K. granted it at once, and then added, " By the way, Mr. , persons interested in the relation which exists between states of the atmosphere and health have noticed a curious fact in regard to the climate of Cambridge, especially within the College limits, — the very small number of deaths in proportion to the cases of dangerous Illness." This is told of Judge W., himself a wit, and capable of enjoying the humorous delicacy of the reproof. Shall I take Brahmin Alcott's favorite word, and call him a dsemonic man ? No, the Latin ge- nius is quite old-fashioned enough for me, means the same thing, and its derivative geniality expresses, moreover, the base of K.'s being. How he sug- gested cloistered Tcpose, and quadrangles mossy with centurial associations ! How easy he was, and how without creak was every movement of his mind ! This life was good enough for him, and the next not too good. The gentleman-like pervaded even his prayers. His were not the manners of a man of the world, nor of a man of the other world either ; but both met in him to balance each other Digitized by Microsoft® 88 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO in a beautiful equilibrium. Praying, he leaned forward upon the pulpit-cushion as for conversa- tion, and seemed to feel himself (without irrever- ence) on terms of friendly, but courteous, familiar- ity with Heaven. The expression of his face was that of tranquil contentment, and he appeared less to be supplicating expected mercies than thankful for those already found, — as if he were saying the gratias in the refectory of the Abbey of Theleme. Under him flourished the Harvard Washington Corps, whose gyrating banner, inscribed Tarn Marti quam Mercurio (atqui magis LycBO should have been added,) on the evening of training-days, was an accurate dynamometer of Willard's punch or Porter's flip. It was they who, after being roy- ally entertained by a maiden lady of the town, en- tered in their orderly book a vote that Miss Blank was a gentleman. I see them now, returning from the imminent deadly breach of the law of Eechab, unable to form other than the serpentine line of beauty, while their officers, brotherly rather than imperious, instead of reprimanding, tearfully em- braced the more eccentric wanderers from military precision. Under him the Med. Facs. took their equal place among the learned societies of Europe, numbering among their grateful honorary mem- bers Alexander, Emperor of all the Russias, who (if College legends may be trusted) sent them in return for their diploma a gift of medals confis- cated by the authorities. Under him the College fire-engine was vigilant and active in suppressing any tendency to spontaneous combustion among the Digitized by Microsoft® CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 89 Freshmen, or rushed wildly to imaginary conflagra- tions, generally in a direction where punch was to be had. All these useful conductors for the natu- ral electricity of youth, dispersing it or turning it harmlessly into the