EN G I LIED ^•FLY+IUEAYES LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, - y y Shelf :..__?.3.5 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. BY THE SAME AUTHOR. Western auEftrtotos ana other Dorms. 1 volume. 16mo. $1.50. rhc Host jFarm: HanomarUs auto other Dorms. 1 volume. 16mo. $1.30. Dorms of ?§ousr antr fgome. 1 volume. 16mo. $1.50. " He la to the West we think, what Mr. Bryant la to the East."— R, 11. Stoddard, in Scribm r't Monthly. "Hla poema are totally unlike the prodncta of the Atlantic coast; they have a racy flavor ol their own, and arc a positive ad- dition to our national literature." — Underwood's "fond-boot of EngUth LiU ratw ■ " He has made himself the poetic voire of < »hio."— Bayard Tay- lor, in N< is York '/ Sent by mail, prepaid, on receipt o/ price. PENCILLED FLY-LEAVES: Boott oC 3EssaBS fit 2Totott anto <£ountrg. JOHN JAMES PIATT. ■ CINCINNATI : ROBERT CLARKE & COMPANY 18S0. 7S PS^s Copyright. 1SS0, ROBERT CLARKE &. CO. TO M. HALSTEAD, ESQ. S L I (i II T T O K K X WARM REGARD. CONTENTS. PAGR Invitation to a House-Warming, ... 9 The Sight of a Ghost, 21 Thanksgiving for a Spring-Day, . . . 35 A First Look at Strawberries, .... 40 Simmer Pictures with One's Eyes Shut, . . 47 Unexpected News of Death, .... 57 The Business Man's Farm, .... 68 A Chapter of Paragraphs, 74 A Handful of Autumn Leaves, . . . 85 A Newspaper's Monologue on its Birthday, . 9f> In Winter Quarters, 107 Going to Bed in a Cold Room, . . . .114 Idyl of a Winter's Morning, . . . . 126 New-Year Addresses 135 How the Bishop built his College in the Woods. 153 (iii) PREFACE. HERE seems little need of preface to this volume ; I desire to intimate by its title my sense of the slightnesss as well as the desultory nature of its contents; — these are, in- deed, such things as one begins and often ends in pencil marks on the fly-leaves of favorite books. (Doubtless here, in more than one instance, the particular favorite book has hinted itself in its fly- leaf suggestion.) I wish I might confidently say of these brief essays, as Thackeray is reported — by the editor of his "Early and Late Papers" — to have remarked regarding some uncollected pieces of bis own: "They are small potatoes — but pretty good small potatoes, I believe.*' Rather I may say, of a part of them at least — keeping the vegetable allusion in sight : Good people (vii) viii PSEF of the market, pray remember, if small, they are early ones. The final and much tho longest paper, " How the Bishop built his College in the Woods," was not intended to fall under the gen- eral title of the volume; it aims to sketch one of the most interesting episodes in the history of education in America. $jj0ji&tt yg^mmm, 3v #^~~ip J*- —"^ ifslr.i _^-^>^^ " ■• >w f INVITATION TO A HOUSE-WARMING. E have just finished our new house; we expect to move into it to-mor- row, and shall be at home to our friends on next Thursday evening. Per- haps some of those most curious would know at once what manner of house we have built; — we shall only in part gratify their curiosity by saying that it is a house built with hands — all of whom, we believe, have been fairly well paid ; it is made of brick and wood and mortar. It was not built for eternity, let us confess, but for humble temporal uses. In planning it we did not re- call unheeding those honest words of the Roman poet to some wealthy neighbor : " You (9) Id INVITATION TO A HOUSE-WARMING. put out marble to hew, though with one foot in the grave, and, forgetful of a tomb, are building houses;"* nor did we fail to re- member the same poet's not less pertinent words, questioning the wisdom — since no ma- terial splendor or luxury may quiet a troubled mind — of raising an edifice whose architecture should excite envy, and in the modern taste. ! (It would seem that modern taste has existed for a long time.) Whether we have ransacked the multitudinous books on house furnishing and household decoration need not, therefore, remain an open question. Indeed, we knew at its foundation that ours would not be the House Beautiful, unless the Being Beautiful *"Tu secanda marmora Locas sub ipsum funus; et, sepulcri Immemor, stiiiis demos." —Horace, Book IT., Ode XVIII. ■(•••Quod si dolentem nee Phrygius lapis, Nee purpurarum sidere clarior Delenit usus, lire Palerna Vitia, Achsemeniumve costum; Cur invidendia posticus et novo Sublime ritu moliar atrium?" — Hokace, Booh III, Ode I. INVITATION TO A HOUSE-WARMING. \\ should so elect by consenting to dwell in it. And it is hardly necessary to suggest the dimensions of our new house (there is suffi- cient room in it for our friends, we trust). We should gladly have carved over its door- way, as was over that of Ariosto, " Parva, sed apta mihi " (Small, but fit for me), did it seem quite modest to publish one's modesty. Let us repeat: — we shall move into our new house to-morrow. But do any of our friends appreciate the difficulties of moving into a new house ? Do they know how hard it is to get ourselves fairly into a new house? To the inconsiderate, indeed, this may not seem a serious matter, and, of course, if yon, dear sir or madam, be happily or unhappily the image of God cut in rosewood or ma- hogany (and so might properly come under the head of furniture), one house, old or new, will fit you as well as another — you require room somewhere else, and the transfer car does the business at once; you are moved, you do not move. Or if you are the atmospheric mechanism of some lucky discoverer of per- ]o INVITATION TO A HOUSE-WARMING. petual motion (a sort of Yankee Prometheus perhaps), why, then you simply keep going — you never stay — content. Home to you is any place, whether or not the heart be there. You take your household — goods and chattels — -with you. Your sails are set, your cable is cut, and no woven sea-sunk trail of electric wire follows you all your way, "And drags, at each remove, a lengthening chain." But if you be a living soul; if, as you have passed from day to day, from year to year, the invisible anus of your human sympathies have been clasping their quick tendrils lovingly about inanimate things until these have become a part of your being, you must, before getting into a new house, get out of an old one. This will take some time — for those invisible arms are not to be disengaged lightly; those tendrils will not loose their hold without drawing heart's blood. Fated to be exiles, these strag- glers arc strongly disposed to linger about the ruins of Troy, and have little faith in unknown Lavinian shores. Thcv do not wish to make IXVITATIOX TO A HOUSE-WABMIXG. 13 voyages into Italy with ./Eneas. ^Eneas, how- ever, will go, and Father Anchises, and the boy Ascanius, with the household gods per- force in their company ; — but the mother Creiisa remains behind. We are all, how often, like that Trojan family, whose record was so fondly traced by Virgil, when we move from old houses into new ones; we go with many back- ward footsteps. Some sweet wife, some tender mother, Creiisa, remains behind, and depart- ing we behold only her elusive spirit. " Farewell, and love the son we loved together ence, we twain," * are her last tender words, recalling all the old affection ; and then it happens to us as ./Eneas relates of himself: "She left me when these words were given, me weep- ing sore, and fain To tell her much, and forth away amid thin air she passed ; And there three times about her neck I strove mine arms to cast, *"Jamque vale, et nati serva communis amorem." 14 INVITATION TO A HOUSE-WARMING. And thrice away from out my hands the gathered image streams E'en as the breathing of the wind or winged tiling of dreams." * — Yes, so we commune -with and strive to pos- sess again and embrace, ere we go away, the spirit of the old house. To-morrow we shall move into our new house. But the truth is, it is impossible to move wholly from an old house. To-morrow we shall begiu to move out of our old house, and to-morrow we shall begin to move into our new one. Our old houses — all old houses — deserted by their long-familiar tenants, are somewhat like old men whoso children are dead. A sug- gestion of forlorn humanity looks through their vacant windows, clings to their niolder- ing caves. It is no marvel that vulgar super- *" Hsec ubi dicta dodit, lacriinantem et multa volen- tem Dicere deseruit, tenuesque recessit in auras. Ter conatue ibi collo dare brachia circum ; Ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago, Par I' \ ibua ventis rblucrique similma Bomno." — Virgil's -Exkiii, Book II. ; translation by W. Morris. INVITATION TO A HOUSE-WARMING. 15 stition so often makes old houses haunted. There is one great pensive ghost always present in each; their halls echo forever the footsteps of the Past. In them have infants lisped their first language up into happy mo- thers' eyes and learned their first prayers. Children's footsteps have beaten like pulses of fresh new hearts in every room — on every stair — and grown old and slow and heavy, with those same hearts above them also grow- ing old and slow and heavy. There brides have entered and breathed their smiling breath away, and gone out with household lamenta- tions, ignorant tears of children (smiling again how soon !) and the silence of the strong man's sorrow. Old clocks have haunted the apart- ments — making audible the pulse of Time, fast or slow, answering, heard or unheard, the heart-pulses of watchers and dreamers in those rooms — through long, long years. How the sweet lightnings of the fireside have breathed about glad household faces their happy even- ing halo! Friends have come and met the threshold smile of welcome, and, departing, 16 INVITATION TO A H0U8E-WABMING. left their blessing at the door. All these asso- ciations quicken the atmosphere and people the emptiness of old houses. A living soul has been breathed into them; our living soul has been breathed into those which we have made our homes. To leave the old house we must leave something, indeed much, of ourselves. We think we are free, but some better part of us we leave behind. The body is withdrawn ; our souls remain behind, and are in the pre- sumably vacant chamber's prison in spite of us — lovingly in spite of us. Yes, and in spite of the mortgage on the old family hearth — through which now, as in the days of Horace,* wife and husband are turned out, bearing in their arms their house- hold gods and their destitute children — we have possession still. " Possession is nine points of the law," says the proverb, and, at any rate, the law can not dispossess us. AVe * " Pellitur paternos In sinu ferene deoa la uxor ct vir Bordidosque di IIohack, Book IL, Ode X VIII. INVITATION TO A HOUSE-WARMXG. 17 have the incontestable possession of — a dream! Very pleasantly we sit and chat there in the old days, around the blazing, crackling, sing- ing flame; we speak of things that sound most pleasant about a family fireside; talk merrily, laugh joyously, and — wake up some forty years older in our new honse ! There, we fondly remember, was Mary's gentle face, just as she looked — clear God! how easily dreams make us tenderly happy, and our wakings leave us their delicious sadness! — just as she looked when the sweet little girl was singing over her knitting (the old house was a country farm-house, and our first piano had not then been brought across the Allegheny Mountains). George is passing toward the fifties now — you will perhaps rind his latest Congressional speech in your morn- ing paper; then he was just filling out the first sunny lustrum of boyhood. And we — alas! it would take clearer spectacles than you or we wear to transform us into the sprightly lad of twelve who was cracking walnuts in the chimney-corner. And they who sat so ]8 INVITATION TO A WOUSE-W ARMING. quietly with tlicir loving years buried calmly, like Bleeping children, in their bosoms — they had their last seasons for Time to drift his snows about their temples sufficiently, and for "Winter to heap snow upon their graves, twenty years ago. Yes, it was but a dream, but the old house out of which we began to move forty years ago gave up its dead — they became once more the living; the home fire- light there, whose last coals crumbled into ashes when we came away, leaped and danced and sang, and the dead Past, like the kiss- awakened fairy sleeper, thrilled with the warm pulses of a quick and happy Present. This experience, which we have now only feigned — but it is often the true experience of many hearts — will serve to show how we can not gel wholly out of an old house, and wholly into a new one. We may doubt whether in Heaven we shall always feel ourselves entirely there. Shall we not fall dreaming and be old men, now and then, in some of these old-and-new hous< our.-? Sometimes, in placid reveiy, by the INVITATION TO A HOUSE-WARMING. 19 celestial waters, will not the doors of our old earthly houses re-open to receive us? Will there not be goings and comings, and will not the "House not built with hands" be at times willingly deserted for some bumble dwelling around which the sweet human roses clam- bered? Or shall we then have finally and forever moved into that New House? Our new house, we have said, is finished: it is ready for us to enter and occupy it. We arc about to open its doors, and begin to call it home. We shall have the first ownership of its threshold. No gentle household foot- step has been upon»any floor or stairway to hallow them. ]STo dreamers have awakened in any of its rooms, with an angel standing in the moonlight, "writing in a book of gold." We shall have to people the chambers first with our own dream-children — no otbers have been begotten there. "It might have been," and " it still may be," — Regret and Hope — must open lonely graves, or picture winged messengers descending the rainbow to our bid- ding, there. And we must invite our friends 20 INVITATION TO .1 HOUSE-WARMING. that live in memory only, as well as those that meet and greet us day by day, to come from the Past with old familiar looks, and help us take possession of the new places — let them take still possession with us. There, as in our olden chambers, rise from the grave- yards of the heart, revisit our dreams. No lock shall keep their silent feet away. But you that "draw the vital air," come and take your warm seats there; if not with visible faces, come in thought and Ave shall feel your presence. But rather come with hearty knocks (we do not care for spirit-rapping visitors), to echo and re-echo through our new halls. Make our house your very own. "VVe build no houses for ourselves only — we could not build such. Let your dreams he some- times on the pillow in our new house, even though you shall awaken far oil"; and let your remembrance join our morning meetings. After our own entrance into the new house, who can tell whether a cradle shall enter its doors first after us,or a coffin? TBE STGI1T OF A GHOST. HE late English poet, Sidney Dobell, somewhere naively says: "Doubtless there are no ghosts; Yet somehow it is better not to move, Lest cold hands seize upon us from the dark;" and, in his " Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," Dr. Holmes shows a happy recognition of what maybe called the ghost-sense, that mysterious apprehension (some of the brute kind appear to share it with us) which is born and lives — and is doubtless never thoroughly dead — in us all, where he alludes to a man lying in the dark, alone, whose " wholcbody seems but one great nerve of hearing," and who " sees the phos- phorescent flashes of his own eye-balls as (21) THE SIGHT OF A GIInsT. they turn suddenly in the direction of the Last strange noise." There are few persons, per- haps, who have not experienced, and do not experience (even now, when science seems de- termined to exorcise, if possible, both spirit and spirits) these superstitious feelings, at least occasionally. They are plants that find their old, obscurely clinging roots deep down in the mystery of our being, and have not their strange seeds sown by education, although they may themselves be educated. Charles Lamb, in his essay on " Witches and Other Night Fears," gives an example of a child — understood to be Thornton, the son of Leigh Hunt — who was carefully kept from any con- tact with the whispering of legends and sto- ries tending to excite superstitious fears — guarded jealously against the sight of ghosts by keeping from him all suggestions of such things; yet his own mind created, his own imagination realized them, " and from his little midnight pillow," writes Lamb, "this nurse child of optimism will start at shapes unbor- rowed of tradition, in sweats to which the THE SIGHT OF A GHOST. 23 reveries of the cell-damned murderer are tran- quility." Introducing this personal illustra- tion, the essayist says: "It is not book or picture, or the stories of foolish servants which create these terrors in children. They can, at most, but give them a direction." And, fur- ther on, he says: " Gorgons, and hydras, and chimeras — dire stories of Celaeno and the har- pies — may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition ; but they were there before. They are transcripts, types — the archetypes are in us and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us at all ? — or " ' Names, whose sense we see not, Fray us with things that be not ?' Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? Oh, least of all ! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body — or, with- out the body, they would have been the same. All the cruel, tormenting, defined devils in '24 THE SIGHT OF A GHOST. Dante — tearing, mangling, choking, stifling, scorching demons — are they one-half so tear- ful to the spirit of a man as the simple idea of a spirit, unembodied, following him, — " ' Like one that on a lonesome road, Doth walk in fear ami dread, Ami, having once turned round, walks on, And turns no more his head, Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread?' That the kind of fear here treated of is purely spiritual ; that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless upon earth ; that it predominates in the period of sinless infancy, are difficulties, the solution of which might afford some prob- able insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep, at least, into the shadow-land of pre-existence." But to return to the ghost it- Belf: — Dr. Samuel Johnson has observed some- where, that one of the best reasons for be- lieving that spirits sometimes make themselves visible to men, is that, always and every-where, among the most enlightened as well as the most ignorant nations, supernatural appari- THE SIGHT OF A GHOST. 25 tions have been chronicled, associated often with important events in the history of indi- viduals and peoples. To Miss Anna Seward, who smiled incredulously at his serious inter- est in a ghost reported to and believed in by John Wesley, he said : " This is a question which, after five thousand years, is yet unde- cided; a question, whether in theology or phi- losophy, one of the most important that can come before the human understanding." And, at another time, he said: "A total disbelief of them is adverse to the opinion of the exist- ence of the soul between death and the last day. The question simply is, whether departed spirits ever have the power of making them- selves perceptible to us." Dr. Johnson was satirized by Churchill as a believer in the story of a ghost in Cock Lane, which, in the year 1762, had gained very general credit in Lon- don; but Boswell affirms that, because the story had become so popular he had only thought it should be investigated, and was, in fact, one of those, the Bishop of Salisbury be- ing another, by whom the ghost in question 26 THE SIGHT OF A GHOST was proved to be an imposture, himself writing an account of it, published in the Gentleman's Magazine. In this connection, we remember that some years ago, in one of our largest Western cities (Louisville), a ghost was said to be seen at " about the stroke of twelve," walk- ing between two certain points in the outskirts of the place. This may have been, like the ghost in Cock Lane, a fictitious ghost. But did the hundreds of people who nightly went to visit the locality go entirely incredulous of its reality? Were they not disappointed be- cause the ghost was too timid to "walk" in the moonlight stare of several hundred spec- tators, on tiptoe with tremulous curiosity? "We (one of the spectators) gave the ghost credit for this natural, if not supernatural, feeling; and were we not also disappointed? The influence of a belief in ghosts is occa- sionally somewhat illustrated now-a-days — the influence illustrated, and the belief at- tested — by the depreciation of real estate, by the giving of a ghostly or spiritual valuation to real estate, upon which the mortgage of a THE SIGIIT OF A GHOST. 27 ghost, so to speak, has been foreclosed. Men may live, and grow old, and die, for years and years, in a Christian and natural manner, in their dwelling-houses — bridals may come and funerals go — and the house retains its charac- ter as an abode for undisturbed tranquility ; for children's blossoming fancies by the fire- side, and second childhood's blossoming faith. But so soon as in a house some deed is done which sets apart a chamber for Bluebeard's key, the curse is come — the silence begins to brood — the place is haunted. If, perchance, reasoning ghost-destroyers dare to make its hearth home, gradually the sounds that every old house treasures up — the vague, out-of-the- world whisperings through the chinks that Time has made — are, little by little, inter- preted by the suggested and growing ghost- sense into the English or French or German of their every-day vernacular. The ghost- exorcisers, the ghost-destroyers, at length con- cede that they "dislike the place" — that "it does not suit them in some respects " — and forfeit the time their lease has yet to run (and 28 THE SIGHT OF A GHOST. how willing arc ghost-owners — that is, owners of haunted real estate — to give long lea The fact is, they have seen the ghost ! And peo- ple are wise enough to know why they quit. The ghost is fully installed master of the sit- uation ; the place is shunned — the house is haunted. And the little boys cast stones at those common daylights of the weird darkness within — the windows ; the casements are ready for midnight visits of shrieking winds and gusts of rain, and fearful glares of lightning — music and light of which ghosts are fond; and, slowly but surely, the " old, forgotten mansion'' becomes a ghost itself. But the quotation with which we began this paper, made us recur to an experience of our own boyhood, which at the time, and long afterwards, impressed us deeply. Our family lived in a house which was in the first pe- riod of its haunted era. It had been built by a man concerning whom there were bad, vague old stories afloat (he always seemed to us, in days, a very good sort of a bad man, nevertheless) It was one of three houses, THE SIGHT OF A GHOST. 29 each less than a hundred rods from its fel- lows — the other two having a simply terrible ghostly reputation. Near one of these was a deep, old well, in which out of which we do not remember ever to have drunk any water ! And when this old house was tenantless — as it sometimes remained for many months — we never cared to venture near it unless with a noisy company of braver boys than we. The third house was an old tavern stand — this it had been since the early pioneer days of Ohio. It stood near one of the great ancient highways of the State — the S y Pike — overlooking a deep, wide hollow, as did its two more or less ghostly neighbors. Ah ! — there were ugly stories told about certain rooms in that old tavern ! There is a vague chill just now creeping up between our shoulders as we re- call the accounts reported to have been given by travelers of their experience in those rooms. But let us get back to our own only partially haunted house across the hollow, in which we saw the ghost. We were — we mean he was — a boy of ten, 30 THE SIGHT OF A QHOST. or about that age. He had read somewhat of Shakspeare; Macbeth's witches never appeared to more ghostly effect, on any stage, than on some dreary heath of his imagination. He had been, with Macbeth, clutching at the " air-draw dagger." He had shared the guilt of being accessory — particeps criminis — with the Thane and Lady Macbeth ; he knew all about those bloody hands, and had a terri- bly wide-awake sense of discovery, when that dreadfully-humorous knocking was heard. He had been, with Macbeth, at the banquet, and he, too, saw Bancjuo in the chair; he had seen the eight princes, to be kings hereafter, pass across the stage. He had lain awake, with Richard in his tent, that morning on Bos- worth Field, with Brutus that night before Philippi. He had read certain sea-stories and old romances, and had heard many read, about a listening hearth, "in the long, long winter nights of old." He had the ghost- sense cultivated, therefore, to some extent. And about this time he saw his (and our) first ghost. THE SIGUT OF A GHOST. 31 You have our pardon, reader, for looking at us so wisely, believing that we believe it to have been a ghost, even now. No matter. It was a ghost then. He awoke very early (he never knew cer- tainly what time it may have been, but it was, presumably, after midnight), one still, snow- lighted winter morning. How warm is a little boy, growing larger, when, his mother having tucked him softly in at night, he sleeps so well that the covers retain the pressure of her careful hands ! How warm he was ! And — how cold he grew! How cold! — though his eyes, with the sense of the ghost standing over the opposite bed in those eyes, were un- der the blanket ! "White and certain — a draped figure; tall and — there! Ah, he never looked again to see if It were there. We beg the reader (if he be a reasonable creature, that is), when he sees a ghost, to look again — to see if he sees it. The ghost-sense is different from second sight. The ghost-sense (we admit this for the sake of our rational reputation) is gen- erally first sight. One look may make a 32 THE SIGHT OF A GIIOST. ghost to our ghost-sense — another, exorcise it forever. The little hoy did not look a second time, and the ghost remained standing. Yes, that ghost, we felt assured, many a time (and a long time) afterward, -was there. The room was large — had two windows look- ing eastward, and two, with chimney -jamhs and fireplace between, looking southward. The only other window, a western one, was at the foot of the little hoy's hud ; he slept with a younger hoy, a cousin, in the northwest cor- ner. In the southeast corner, between an eastern and a southern window, was another bed, in which slept a young man, employed for some forgotten purpose on our place. It was over this young fellow's pillow that the ghost was visible. It was the full development of the little boy's ghost-sense. Why did he keep the im- pression of this ghost then (we shall not ask why do we keep it now) with peculiar tenac- ity ? Ah, that same morning one of the alien young man's uld relations — a grand- THE SIGHT OF A GHOST. 33 father, we believe — was dying in the same neighborhood. This fact, to the little boy, associated itself, not unreasonably, with the ghost ever afterward. Somebody came, an hour or two later, to call the young man home; but although his call, from the snowy road below the southern windows, gave the ghost-seer courage to look beyond his breast- work of blankets across the dawn-lighted, ghost-empty room, it could not banish the ghost that had been there. Have we ever exorcised that ghost com- pletely? Oh, the little boy reasoned it away, as we have completely reasoned away many ghosts which other little boys have had the sight of. He began to reason it away at once; he threw what early light of natural and (Aber- crombie's) intellectual philosophy he possessed upon it. "We remember that, lying in the same room some time afterward, and waking in the weird-lit darkness of early dawn, he remarked an effect of the outer light on the corner of the white chimney-jamb between 34 THE SIGHT OF A QHOST. the windows at the soutli end of the room. This vaguely recalled the terribly white, dis- tinctly outlined Nothing (of course a ghost is nothing) in question. The ghost, however, was unquestionable : not a figment of the dawn, a mere Solar Myth. -5^>^3br4 THANKSGIVING FOR A SPRING-DAY. ■ * - s ^Ffr-^*- *1?// P« MODERN writer has happily sug- r^-V^i gested the eagerness of expectation with which all men and women would go forth from their houses if the sight of the starry heavens, instead of being on free ex- hibition at the close of each day, were adver- tised as the single fortunate revelation of a lifetime. And this same remark might be re- peated of any other among the great mani- festations of Nature to which our senses have become so accustomed as to let it pass into what we call the common-place. " The sunshine is a glorious birth." indeed, but, then, it happens every morning. (35) 36 THANKSGIVING FOR A SPRING DAT. Men have always marked, with more or less awe ami wonder, eclipses of the sun and moon, or the occupations of the planets, or the multitu- dinous flights of meteors — they being, or at least seeming, exceptional phenomena; but these have never been more worthy of admira- tion than the myriad daily workings of the universe, the countless visible effects of natural laws, which demonstrate forever and as fully divine ordering and power. Doubtless we all feel, more or less, a grate- ful sense of the infinite freshness and glad- ness at the assured coming of the New Year — not as we meet him conventionally at the begin- ing of January, in the almanac, wrapped in blankets and furs and shawls, but in the warmth and brightness and glory of Spring, garmented with leaves and garlanded with blossoms. But how few of us think to realize the boundlessuess and majesty of the miracle wrought, by day and by night, before our eyes, from the firs! shooting of the sap and swelling of the bud, from the first greening of the tender grass, from the firsl del irate breath- THANKSGIVING FOR A SPRING DAY. 37 ing of the violet, to the measureless profusion of leaves, the luxury of meadows and pastures deep with verdure, the flying lovely colors and delightful odors of middle May or June. It is one vast procession of miracles, one con- tinuous resurrection of the dead, one ceaseless marvel of creation. "We are now in the midst of this period of beauty and wonder. How fitting is it that we should not let it pass without its due recogni- tion and influence in our hearts and in our spirits. Every road that leads from the city streets takes us into the sensible presence of this marvelous working — it is a presence we can not escape, that can not escape us. If we be blind, it will come to us in the hum of insects, the songs of birds; if we be deaf, it will be breathed to us in traveling odors; if we have no sense of smell, it will touch us with delicate fingers of air, with the moist pressure of newly plowed earth and dewy grasses; if we be dead indeed, it will enfold us with the moving warmth of myriad new 38 THANKSGIVING FOR A SPRING DAY. lives — it will turn our dust itself into new and beautiful life. Meanwhile, if we be not blind, nor deaf, nor have lost our power to smell and feel, let us "go forth into the open air," and, while we "list to Nature's teachings," let them be the teachings of life rather than of death — for now, if ever, is the season to recognize the truth of that sweeter thanatopsis of another poet, who says : " There is no death — what seems so is transition." And for to-morrow (for this is written on Saturday) — to-morrow, a Sabbath in the high tide of Spring — we know of no more becom- ing thanksgiving, for men and women city- pent, than for the divine gift of the senses, whose true and tender enjoyment in the open air — in the woods and fields — will be its proper celebration. If our thanksgiving for a Spring- Day be offered but to the sun, upon which we may look — behind which there must be a far greater Brightness, upon which we may not look, save in that dazzling eclipse and through THANKSGIVING FOR A SPRING DAY. 39 these smoked glasses of ours — even then it shall not seem a foolish thanksgiving. Think of the sun himself — the great, eternal, material Recreator, under whom, though Solomon deny, all thing's are forever new ! A FIRST LOOK AT STRAWBERRIES. HE sis;ht f strawberries in the mar- ket is one of the most delightful sug- gestions of the fullness and perfec- tion of Spring, and the taste of them is our most delicious and complete realization. Of the early vernal days it may be said, " by their fruits ye shall know them," and if the -weather lias not been obedient to our wishes, yet these exquisite scarlet offspring of the warmer hours of May are enough to make us forget much of her April waywardness. Who is there that loves not the straw- berry? Dispute about tastes is forbidden by the Latin proverb, but there are a few things on which we may insist. A man must love (40) A FIRST LOOK AT STRAWBERRIES. 41 music, in some degree, to be a worthy member of the human family. A man must love woman to be — a man. Martin Luther sang lustily : " Who loves not woman, wine, and song, He is a fool his whole life long;" and he might safely, if he was a wise man himself, have included the strawberry, had his rhyme permitted. He who does not confess a first love and lasting affection for the straw- berry is, surely, the equal of " the man who has no music in his soul," in the capabilities of depraved sense and spirit. We have ourselves a feeling of tenderness, mingled with our sense of the beautiful and our hardly less delicate sense of taste, when we approach the strawberry. Of all the fruits of the earth in their season there is hardly another that may be compared with it in hum- ble origin, secluded growth, and high position in polite society. Let us, forgetting a little while the delicious heap before us, in their slight frost of sugar and tender bath of cream, visit the strawberry plot in our garden (or our 42 -1 FIRST LOOK AT STRAWBERRIES. neighbor's — it matters not). How helplessly the ripened cones, full of a charming luxury, lie waiting under the green coverlet of their vine- haves, just touching yet not soiled by the rich earth on which, with a light heaviness, they re- cline! (It needs a no less delicate-thoughted poet than Keats to make a gentle human com- parison here.) Or, if growing wild in the low meadow-lands, how they sleep in their own fragrant atmosphere, dewy-wet, among the screening grasses, in their lovely nakedness ! Is it not natural that we should think to liken this fruit to the violet, which has similar near- ness of education to the great mother's bosom, and a subtile delicacy of scent, as the strawberry has <>f scent and taste, matched with a kindred dewy shyness ami nun-like seclusion? We re- call Wordsworth's pretty and pathetic verses: " A violet by a mossy stone, Ealf-hidden from the eye," and have a fancy that their tender suggestion will be as true if we allow the strawberry to A FIRST LOOK AT STRAWBERRIES. 43 take (it will not usurp) the place of the violet in the poetry. " Strawberries," wrote Leigh Hunt, " de- serve all the good things that may be said of them. They are beautiful to look at, delicious to eat, have a fine odor, and are so wholesome that they are said to agree with the weakest digestions, and to be excellent against gout, fever, and all sorts of ailments. It is recorded of Fontanelle, that he attributed his longevity to them, in consequence of their having regu- larly cooled a fever which he had every spring; and that he used to say : ' If I can but reach the season of strawberries !' Boerhave (Phil- lips tells us in his 'History of Fruits') looked upon their continued use as one of the princi- pal remedies in cases of obstruction and vis- cidity, and in putrid disorders; Hoffman fur- nishes instances of obstinate disorders cured by them, even consumptions ; and Linnaeus says that, by eating plentifully of them, he kept himself free from the gout. They are good even for the teeth." But it is as simply " a thing of beauty " and 44 A FIRST LOOK AT STRAWBERRIES. " a joy forever," that we prefer now to think of the strawberry. The writer quoted above tells us of an Italian poet who wrote a poem of several hun- dred lines upon strawberries. lie says: "The poet of the strawberries was a Jesuit, a very honest man, too, notwithstanding the odium of his order's name; and a grave, eloquent, and truly Christian theologian, of ajife re- corded as ' evangelical.' It is delightful to see what playfulness such a man thought not in- consistent with the most sacred aspirations. The strawberry, to him, had its merits in the creation, as well as the star; and he knew how to give each its due. Nay, he runs the joke down, like a humorist who could no nothing else but joke if he pleased, but gracefully withal, and with a sense of nature above his art, like a true lover of poetry." The poem happily closes with an apostrophe to a newly- married couple, friends of the poet, of cele- brated Venetian families, and has this good wish and blessing at the end: A FIRST LOOK AT STRAWBERRIES. 45 "Around this loving pair may joy serene, On wings of balm, forever wind and play ; And laughing Health her roses shake between, Making their life one long, sweet, flowery way ! May bliss, true bliss, pure, self-possessed of mien, Be absent from their side, no, not a day ! In short, to sum up all that earth can prize, May they have sugar to their strawberries." The strawberry season is the happiest season of the honeymoon, and it is not improper for the intoxicating thought of the two to he joined together in blissful union. But the Italian poet should have added cream to the sugar, above. Of the cream without the strawberry, Herrick sings : " You see how cream but naked is, Nor dances to the eye Without the strawberry," And without the cream the strawberry, how- ever it may dance to the eye, does not come so kiss-worthy to the lips. The man who loves not strawberries in his mouth, And is not moved with concord of sweet cream, is — but we have some faith in human nature, 16 .1 FIRST LOOK AT STRAWBERRIES. and do not think such a man possible. We admireingly see the strawberry disappear grad- ually in the rich cream — becoming only visi- ble by a rosy suggestion, and then arising like Aphrodite from her sea-cradle. SUMMER PICTURES WITH ONES EYES SHUT. E have been a day in the country. Will you not recognize the sun's mark in the increased warmth of our own countenance? The word "white"* is just for the present stricken from our consti- tution ; we belong to some noble order of Red Men, — we are distinctly and happily sun- burnt. Where was our little midsummer holiday, do you ask us? It was not at a fashionable watering-place, we assure you ; — neither was it at any seaside resort, nor at any advertisable * Written at the time when the striking-out of the word " white " from the Constitution of Ohio was under consideration. (47) 48 SUMMER PICTURES 11777/ ONE'S EYES SHUT. " springs." The Saturday night's train took us, and at sunrise of the Sabbath morning we saw the happy light through the windows of a country tavern ; then in a few minutes we were walking buoyantly among orchards, between broad meadows, in sight of tlie full loveliness of Summer — in hearing of her best morning music. Whither? Let a poet answer. He says : '• I know a cottage where the woodbine grows," etc. These dreamy people are always finding Par- adise in some modern disguise, unsuspected by the evolution-raised Adam, proprietor of the real estate and personal property thereof. This good Adam pays the taxes, and finds that the garden costs more than its apples and less dangerous fruits come to at market, perhaps. Now let us shut our eyes, this hot July morning, and be in the country again. What shall we see? First, we sec a low, level field full of rat- tle scattered in the early sunrise, one here, SUMMER PICTURES WITH OXE'S EYES SHUT. 49 one there — some chewing the quiet cud, some grazing with their dewy backs toward the sun and glistening; some radiant, with uplifted horns, a light mist creeping about their feet and half enveloping a few of those farthest away. An open woodland grows before us, show- ing closets and caverns of green gloom, with a brook in the foreground, making as much as it can of the Sabbath morning quiet, laughing and splashing along, and talking in its under- tone, doubtless of the transient hour-passenger who looks so wistfully and perhaps enviously at its gay eternity. Among the tree-boles behind drifts "A flock of sheep that leisurely pass hy," having just been set free from their night's fold by their good shepherd, who is standing yon- der at the open fence, watching affectionately a young lamb which manifests delight — bear witness his twinkling tail — in the transub- stantiation of his mother's milk into lamb- chops. 50 SUMMER PICTURES WITH OXE'S EYES SHUT. Now arises a frame school-house on the hill- top near us, with pleasant grass and green beeches about it; and, look! a pretty make- believe of house-keeping is contrived with these crossed fence-rails, the inclosurc floored with nmsscs, Nature's costliest Brussels or Persian ; the broken china arranged so neatly here, and yonder the suggestion of a tiny cradle, empty now, but yesterday filled with that first birth of the future mother of man- kind, into which the tender maternal instinct breathes the breath of life — a doll. Hark! (we may hear through the ears as well as see through the eyes of revcry, repeating a yester- day's dream in to-day) what a gentle hum through the opcu windows of the school- house, and now what a sudden overflowing of happy voices, as from the opening door rush the eager faces of twenty girls and boys to take possession of the vacant play-grounds! — two demure little maidens become ''perma- nent tenants" of the play-house; while the young mistress of the "infant hive" makes a charming window-picture, unconscious of SUMMER PICTURES WITH ONE'S EYES SHUT. 51 the eyes which merely create her for the mo- ment, and in another moment send her with her noisy flock back into the air, of which they are, and into the silence which invades the school-house that yet remains. Next wavers before us a woodland path — sinuous, dark, and cool — into possible faiiw- laud. How tender and comforting is the quiet and freshness! — ''Nature, with folded hands, seems there,' blessing the wanderer. Let us not follow it too far. Yonder, at the opening, is a saw-mill; and this, we might discover too late, is the path along which the ruined wood-gods have been dragged groaning. Now we are sitting on the porch of the cot- tage, concerning which we have hinted fore- knowledge with Mr. Boker's line; before us descends the green slope, newly planted with young maples, toward the country turnpike, and at our feet a flowery terrace sends up the warm, rich, sultry breath of clover in the noon sunshine ; to the left are paths walled with 52 SUMMER PICTURES MTU ONE'S EVES SHUT. moss-touched rocks replaced by Art to ac- knowledge and make-believe Nature's deliber- ate carelessness ; and, look! two persons ap- pear on the silent scene; two sisters (so let us fancy them), with their faces under graceful and broad drooping hats, pass slowly by. The elder, seeming invalid, leans upon the you uger's supporting arm; the former is dark, and has a pensive feeling in her face; the younger has light, lovely hair, and the fresh brightness of girlhood in her cheek and on her forehead. Over them, instead of the dainty parasol which counterfeits protection, is the one-sided, wea- ther-worn, and wind-harassed umbrella, which, long since, did its full service in rain and snow- storm, and had retired, as was fitting, to the Homo of Disabled Umbrellas in the closet. But old things are come to honor, and never was there any thing so becoming as this present one in its past uses. Yonder rides a solitary horseman — master of the woods and fields — in the meridian sun- shine ; lie is returning from the village church, of which he is, it may be, a pillar in pro- SUMMER PICTURES WITH OXE'S EYES SHUT. 53 fession — we trust he is one in practice ; his horse steps slowly, and with a gentle, Sabbath grav- ity, — perhaps he w r as not a careless listener to the preacher's voice, that, rang an hour and a quarter through the open church-door. Suddenly, while we are looking far off at the yellow uplands of the new wheat stubble, and catch a glimpse of a farm-house through distant orchards, a thunder-storm, which has been lazily brooding in the sultry afternoon sunshine, intrudes itself upon our attention; it is growing near. How pleasant are all the approaches of a Summer shower in the coun- try! The wind that runs before seems to make merry roughly with every thing; the geese, and other "tame villatic fowl " appre- ciate the humor of the play — the former rising and flapping their wings as if they felt the original wild-goose within, and meant to visit far-off regions; the Guinea hens are con- cordantlj- and discordantly vociferous; the little, healthy children of the household race wildly back and forth, with shaken hair and happy laughter. The orchard trees, waving, 54 SUMMER PICTURES WITH OSE'S EYES SHUT. fling down their early-ripened fruit; the pop- lars Bhiver and shake; the oak-trees toss their boughs, and all Nature is lively. Now the storm is overhead, and the rain is pouring — how eool and pleasant is its breath, as we look out upon it from the open window! That fearful, beautiful arrow of lightning! — the almost instant, terrible thunder! The black locust, fifty rods away, took the thun- derbolt. Other flashes and thunder-peals fol- low, with interrupted and repeated rain; but, before we arc well aware, the skirts of the storm, westward, are lifted, and the sun has created a rainbow — that old, lovely, ever new miracle. A little later, the whole atmosphere is full of golden mist, and the gates of Eden seem open in the West. We think of Words- worth's tine lyric rapture, inspired by such a marvelous Evening Splendor: " Ami if there be whom broken ties Afflict, <>r injuries assail, Yon hazy ridges to their eyes Present :i practicable sc:ih\ Climbing, suffused in sunny air, To stop — no record hath told where: SUMMER PICTURES WITH OXE'S EYES SHUT. 55 And tempting fancy to ascend And with immortal Spirits blend! " Wings at my shoulders seem to play ; Eut, rooted here, T stand and gaze On those bright steps that heavenward raise Their practicable way. Come forth, ye drooping old men, look around, And see to what fair countries ye are bound ! " Meanwhile the sun is going down ; the last rays touch the oak-tops on the hill, and soon the darkness gathers slowly over hill and val- lc} T , and from the woodland shrills the oft- repeated melancholy cry of a single whip- poorwilh So our — eyes make pictures when they're shut; " — we open them, and read, in the daily jour- nal before us, such worldly head-lines (all run together and confused) as these : BY TELEGRAPH. latest washington intelligence. off the track. serious railroad accident in michigan. mews by the ocean cable. Russia's never ending trouble. — more or less about THE CZAR. LOCAL CASUALTIES AND CRIMES. YELLOW FEVER — WHAT THE HEALTH ' AUTHORITIES SAY. 56 SUMMER PICTURES KITH ONE'S EYES SHUT. THE STATE CONSTITUTION. TIIK FARMERS AM) THEIR FIGURES. MORE LIGHT IN' THE COTTOM CORKER. AX IMPOSING lusi'l.AV OF POLICE. THE SERT ART-GIRL QUESTION, ETC. These are the world's great interests, which we had left behind us for a day ; — they would not lot ua wholly forget them, even in the midst of our one delightful holiday. The dear Heaven pity us ! " Was it a vision or a waking dream?" "We were in the country — we are hack again in town. But we hugged the good Mother Earth, and we are stronger for a new week. UNEXPECTED NEWS OF DEATH. ^ NE of the later Greek poets, praising Homer's well-known comparison of the human race to the loaves upon trees, goes on to say that but few mortals, learning the truth of this sentiment by hear- say, take it really to heart. To each, he adds, is present the hope implanted in the breasts of young men, and so long as one holds the flower of youth he entertains light thoughts, and imagines many things never to be accom- plished, for he has no expectation of growing old or dying; nor, when he is in health, has he any thoughts of sickness. Hazlitt, in one of his essays, quotes, as a Baying of his brother, what seems a concise echo of Simonides, that (57) 58 US EXPECTED SEWS OF DEATH. no young man believes lie shall ever die. And, as this remark applies in some degree to each one of us individually in our full enjoy- ment of health and in our warm pursuit of happiness, we are quite apt to make it apply also to those nearest us in heart and blood. They, too, wo fondly dream, are gifted with this private immortality; and, unprepared for death ourselves (we do not mean in the sense commonly used by religious moralists), we are unprepared for it likewise in these other selves of our own. "We do not, indeed, fail to recognize the great general fact of death in the world about us, but we keep this great general fact out-of-doors, so to speak, and at our neighbor's door instead of our own. Wo recognize it as something far away from us, even when the hearse passes heavily from the gate of some neighbor younger than we. We do not let its realization come home to us and cast its shadow among our loved ones at table and fireside. We hear, it may be, that pass- ing voice crying out at our threshold, " Re- member thou art mortal;" but it was only a US EXPECTED SEWS OF DEATH. 59 voice, and that we must not let it trouble us was our last thought of it. 'We devote our- selves to the wishes and purposes of our lives as if there were set no bound; and we make our household plans aud social schemes, not for the actual moment in which we really ex- ist, and which we call to-day, -but for the seeming eternity on earth, our future, which we call to-morrow. Yet there arc interruptions to this sense of our permanence — this feeling without which, perhaps, we could not keep heart for the task- work which is mysteriously placed before us; and at times we see plainly the smallness of the thread on which our own lives are depend- ent, and the frail bond by which the warm hearts that beat nearest us are held in our company, — the great law compels our instant reading, the fancied security of ourselves and of those who have become a part of ourselves is shaken, and we feel how transient is all we deemed so lasting. This experience does not come to us most vividly, perhaps, when we are present during 60 UNEXPECTED SEWS OF DEATH. the illness and at the death of our friends. Then sickness, which accustoms the Bufferer gradually to the putting away of earthly life — weaning the soul gently or painfully — has a similar effect noon us, who are the nervous and anxious watchers; when the loss is an- ticipated Time seems to have begun his healing beforehand. But when we open a sud- den and unexpected dispatch, that brings us a fatal word of which we had no forewarning, how poignant is the blow ! It is like the stroke in the darkness against which we have put out no defense. It is the quick lightning out of the clear sky. Or, when, after delays of mail, the welcome letter, opened without foreboding, and it may be, with a pulse of gladness (created by the recognition of a familiar handwriting on the envelope) because seem about to hear the latest familiar re- cords of those in whose daily history and for- tunes we arc tenderly interested, gives us in its first lines the sudden knowledge which has been darkening toward us unseen for a week in the atmosphere — how bitter! Mean- UNEXPECTED NEWS OF DEATH. 61 while, ignorant, we have been planning some- thing of tender earthly significance and pleas- ure, perhaps, for that one whose last hold on all things of the earth was loosened and chill during all the days we planned. Meanwhile, too, it may he, we have written playful words, recalling little homely memories made dear by mutual sharing and association — making thoughtful allusions, touched with light jests and laughter, mingled with pleasant house- hold gossip and fireside talk ; then, put into the mail after the death-da}* of which we were unconscious, this letter of our own, mean- while, has been journeying to the wonted address, and midway, doubtless, passed the dark-spirited messenger unknown. Ah, the pathos of such dead letters as this one ! But how many are thus going ever to and fro; — among the hurried business messages, the multitudinous missives burdened heavily or lightly with all the vast and minute concerns of life, how many of these that fly in vain ! The bitterness of the unexpected news of death, referred to above, is made deeper, per- 62 UNEXPECTED NEWS OF DEATH. haps, when the message comes to us from a distant land, and the slow ship that bears as the unhappy tidings has been many weeks in passage. Meanwhile, we have been receiving cheerful and hopeful letters from the dead hand, and thus the speechless lips have been speaking to us yet with the familiar tones of life. And, if we had reason for apprehension before, these have dissipated it, and our inex- plicable dreams and shapeless presentiments of loss have been denied their weight by these words flying with hope and encourage- ment, which have reached us and been cher- ished warmly in our bosoms, long since the dear hand that penned and the close heart that inspired them with living affection have been lying in a stranger's grave in a foreign cemetery. Think of that wile whose hus- band had been visiting some far-off land to seek for the health which home would not give back to him. Think of the careful anxiety, the eager waiting for happier tidings, the nightly thoughts of tenderness and the prayers of love, the fitful renewals of hope, UNEXPECTED NEWS OF DEATH. 63 the temporary return of gladness and gentle gayety, the light indulgence in social pleasant- ries without reproach from her sensitive heart. And all these many days the black sail of the funeral ship has been glooming invisible over the horizon ! And all these many days should she have worn the weeds of mourning and widowhood ! To the temporary sojourner in a foreign land the unexpected news of death at home — the death of parent, wife, or child — comes with like circumstance of added anguish. An Ameri- can poet has written of one such experience — the death of a little boy, a brother whom, four years earlier, he had left at home a child — in some pathetic lines, which we shall quote. Wandering in the Venetian dawn, he broods over the distant bereavement, and can not make it seem other than a haunting dream : "A dormant anguish wakes with day, And my heart is smitten with strange dismay ; — Distance wider than thine, O sea, Darkens between my brother and me ! A scrap of print, a few brief lines, The fatal word that swims and shines G-l UNEXPECTED SEWS OF DEATH. On my tears, with a meaning new and dread, Make {altering reason know him dead. And I would that my heart might feel it too, And unto its own regret he true; For this is the hardest of all to bear, That his life was so generous and fair, So full of love, so full of hope. Broadening out with ample scope. And so far from death, that his dying seems The idle agony of dreams To my heart, that feels him living yet, — And I forget, and I forget. He was almost grown a man when he passed Away ; hut when I kissed him last He was still a child, and I had crept Up to the little room where he slept, And thought to kiss him good-bye in his sleep; But he was awake to make me weep With terrible home-sickness before My wayward feet had passed the door. Round about me clung his embrace, And he pressed against my face his face, As if some prescience whispered him then That it never, never should be again. Out of far-off days of boyhood dim, "When lie was a babe and I played with him, I remember his looks and all his ways ; And how he grew through childhood's grace, To the hopes and strifes, and sports and joys, And innocent vanity of boys : I hear his whistle at the door, His careless step upon the floor, UNEXPECTED NEWS OF DEATH. 65 His song, his jest, his laughter yet, — And I forget, and I forget." But not less poignant is the unexpected news of death which the long-absent wanderer — to whom no home-tidings have come for many months or years — learns, ere he reaches the old home itself, in the village graveyard. Plays and poems (for example, Wordsworth's pathetic pastoral of "The Brothers"'), have long illustrated these sorrows, bnt they still belong to the living drama of our passion, and men yet return, heart-full with glad warmth, to their early homes, and find them empty, their hearths cold. The prodigal son does not always see his father run toward him afar-off, ready to welcome him with the fatted calf. How full of the bitterness of a kindred anguish seemed the experience of one we knew — a young soldier in our late Civil War — who, after a long fever in a Southern camp-hospital, returned home and found all the household absent at the graveyard. His mother, to whom no knowledge of his illness had been given by him until his convalescence, 66 UNEXPECTED NEWS OF DEATH. was deeply anxious about him, and had many apprehensions lest his fever had returned, for he was expected home and did not come. She dreamed of him as a mother dreams, and was troubled — for he did not write. Then she, too, was taken with a painful illness; and in her fever she talked of him, and her waking delirium and restless sleep were tilled with her motherly distress about him. How she longed to see him onee again ! — an earthly joy that was denied her. "Within that week, how- ever, her boy started homeward. It was late in October, 18G5. The railway station was seven or eight miles, across the Illinois prairie, from his father's house. He crossed the prairie afoot, entered the familiar gate, and ap- proached the door. The warmth of home seemed so near him, though no one came out to meet him. How glad was the quick wel- come the young soldier expected ! — how happy would the face of his mother grow to see him safe at home! An hour earlier, lie had seen her dead face, at least, with the final peace upon it. This sad yet precious privilege was UNEXPECTED NEWS OF DEATH. qj forbidden by the grave in which she was already shut, three miles away; and the unex- pected news of death came to him only when his father and brothers and sisters returned from his mother's burial. THE BUSINESS MANS FARM. E doubt whether that old man of Ve- rona, celebrated by Claudian, who had lived all his days in the suburbs, and knew of tbe city only by heresay, just as he knew of the Indies, however much he might illustrate the healthful physical effects of country life, could \cr\ well be chosen to speak its higher praises. For there is a dif- ference between the animal contentment and health of ignorance, and the mental and moral satisfaction which the intelligent spirit takes in a simple natural life. It is not the shut ting-up of one's self in rural scenery from the first, but the coming-back to it from worldly travail, that gives the higher and (68) THE BUSINESS MAN'S FARM. 69 deeper feeling for its influences and benefits. We doubt if the Garden of Eden, to the naked Adam and Eve, who had not eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, were quite the de- lightful Paradise that a country-seat — with a goodly apple-orchard in vigorous bearing, to be a gentle reminder of " the fruit of that forbidden tree " — is to the worldly-wise and weather-troubled Adam in the dog-days, in a vague reverie over his ledger at his counting- house, in one of the many great cities to which he emigrated in company with Eve (or, haply, "one of Eve's family") from that early, and yet unenlightened, state of blissful ignorance. In other words, we need to get experience of the artificial world, the confined business world, fully to realize and enjoy the out-of- door natural world. Having the roar of mul- titudinous wheels, the jarring of hammers, the trample of footsteps, all the sounds and voices of busy people, ringing in our ears, Ave may best feel the charm of bird-singing, cattle- 7,i THE BUSINESS MAN'S FARM. lowing, water-rippling, leaf-turning, and corn- rustling, which are outside of all our present hubhub; seeing tlic dusty streets, the burning pavements, the hurried motion, the sweltering arms, tlic anxious faces, and all the nameless and numberless sights of a large city, we may create, sweetly and easily, the contrasted vision of blowing woodlands, waving hay- fields, wandering lanes (that have no especial anxiety to reach any place of appointment punctually), steadfast but leisurely harvesters, straggling and cud-chewing cattle, cool and indolent rivers, or bright and dancing brooks, pastures crowded with quiet sheep, orchards ruddy and golden with their ripening fruit, cider mills swarmed about with half-tipsy bees, cottage-glimpses through elms and their embracing vines, and faces touched with quiet cares alone, or sunburnt with healthy work and hearty pleasure. The country life must have a background of the city life for its best appreciation, and get its assured sense of the freedom of re- THE BUSINESS MAN'S FARM. "J\ straint in loose-hanging social habits and gar- ments, from the — " Black dress-coats and silken stockings," and other hampering accompaniments of ur- bane society. That many men, even the most matter-of-fact ones, think of the country life under such circumstances, and with such contrasts to " add a precious seeing to the eye," is an old story. And that many such men retire from their business to such country retreats, in fond anticipation, all their lives, making investments in land still unsettled (so far as their own real settlement is concerned), and building airy homes thereon — meanwhile going about their old treadmills of business, ambition, or office — is, too, an old story. How they "Resolve and re-resolve, then die the same," lias been the frequent theme of poets and moralists. Horace's usurer, Alh'dus, who is represented as saying : 7:2 THE BUSINESS .VAX's farm. " Elappy the man whom bounteous gods allow, W* 1 1 1 1 his own hands paternal grounds to plow; Like the first golden mortals, happy he, From business and the cares of money free! " * and who, picturing to himself the works and pleasures, the comforts and contents of such an one, was on the point of turning country- man, then gathered in all his money on the Ides to put it out again at the Calends, is but the ancient portrait in which thousands of modern bond-holders and "Wall Street brokers find their family-likeness to-day. But the fact that so man}', who — "by the vision splendid Are on their way attended," about their daily callings, do not ever come to Lts realization, does not prove that the happy farm of the business man may not be genuine real estate to any one. Some have found it and have dwelt upon it, and thanked the *"Beatns tile, qui prooul negotiis, Ut prisca gens mortalium, Faterna rura bubus exercet suis, Solutis omni fenore." — 1 1 oiiACE, Book of Epodes, Ode IT., Cowley's paraphrase THE BUSINESS MAN'S FARM. 73 good God for their release, from the dust, and heat and burden of the day, into that rural peace and quiet becoming to the closing-in of the beneficent Night wherein no man shall work. A CHAPTER OF PARAGRAPHS. *• T is very pleasant (and a frequent habit of charitably disposed people) to look ^±^^1 out of our own cheerful windows, and sec but the bright reflection of our own warm rooms, instead of the darkness of the street, full of cold and hungry faces, beyond the window-panes. There arc times when the pulse flags ; when the spirit sleeps, apparently, the sleep that knows no waking ; when we wish the shutters closed, and the knocker tied up : — we arc sick, but would have physic thrown to the dogs, we'll none of it; we are, indeed, to all in- tents and purposes, for the time being, dead. (74) A CHAPTER OF PARAGRAPHS. 75 "What shall quicken us with new breath ? — what shall make the heart throb strongly again? — the pulse beat the music of life instead of the muffled funeral march? Men have tried many stimulants; — the stimu- lants they use but require the use of more. The intoxication of drink sets the world whirling, indeed, — the pulse galloping, the thought flying; but the fast clock soon runs down, and the unnatural excitement leaves the lonely house it has filled with unwonted revelry more silent, empty, and sad. Love is, we know, the great stimulant, most intoxi- cating of all, and performs all happiest mira- cles ; it makes the sick man well, — " The lame his crutch forego; " but it is a miracle, the chief of miracles, itself, and is not at any drug-store, whatever they say. Next to Love, there is another potent stimulant, which, though it never intoxicates, accomplishes many wonders; and if Love be present with it, the cold water it offers us is transmuted iuto costliest wine : — we mean 76 -1 CHAPTER OF PARAGRAPHS. Duty. Duty puts over each dark day, for every man, a blue sky, into which a lark has gone singing. It is the best inspirer of those fine heroes who conquer themselves. True success is perhaps only onr own inward recognition of progress toward the ideal goal of our own hearts or spirits. The oak feels a possible forest within its leaves at each spring-time, and at every autumn shakes it down and sows it in acorns. It is an unwise habit of very well-meaning people to be continually possessing themselves of something too good for present use. It is well enough to have provisions — vegetables and fruits, for example— preserved and sealed for winter use; but it is very unprofitable to furnish rooms in so elegant and costly a man- ner as to keep the feet of your children, and shut your own enjoyment, out of them ; it is unprofitable to buy books with covers too fine to permit the leaves within to be turned by A CHAPTER OF PARAGRAPHS. 77 familiar fingers, or the illustrations to please and instruct familiar eyes. To-morrow may be a well-deserving personage, and it is proper to make suitable preparation for his reception and entertainment ; but we should not forget that, as Emerson has happily said, " To-daj- is a king in disguise." The face of a newspaper reflects the world's ; the world looks into it each day to see itself. "What little things — seeming trifles of which we may be at the time, and remain ever after- ward, unconscious — sometimes affect the whole current of our lives. In illustration of this remark recurs to us the touching little story — some will read it not without tears — found in the " Recollections " of Samuel Rogers : a story told him by Sir Walter Scott, in the autumn of 1831, on the day before the latter's embarkation for Malta, whence he returned only to die. " There was a boy in my class at school," Scott said, " who stood always at the top ; nor could I, with all my efforts, sup- 7S A CHAPTER OF PARAGRAPHS. plant him. Day passed after day, and still lie held his place, do what I would; till at length I observed that, when a question was asked him he always fumbled with his fingers at a par- ticular button on the lower part of his waist- coat. To remove it, therefore, became ex- pedient in my eyes ; and in an evil moment it was removed with a knife. Great was my anxiety to know the success of my measure, and it succeeded too well. TVhcn the boy was again questioned, his fingers sought again for the button, but it was not to be found. In his distress he looked down for it ; it was to be seen no more than to be felt. He stood confounded, and I took possession of his place; nor did he ever recover it, or ever, I believe, suspeet who was the author of his wrong. Often in after life," Scott went on to say, " has the sight of him smote me as I passed by him ; and often have I resolved to make him some reparation ; but it ended in good resolutions. Though I never renewed my acquaintance with him, I often saw him, for he filled some inferior office in one of A CIIAPTER OF PARAGRAPHS. 79 the courts of law at Edinburgh. Poor fellow ! he took early to drinking, and I believe he is dead." Rogers characterizes Scott's boyish act as " an achievement worthy of Ulysses him- self," but Sir "Walter could scarcely have been proud of it, and seems, from his own account, to have been sensible of the life-long misfor- tune which apparently resulted to the " poor fel- low " from his school-boy stratagem. The boy's happier fate hung by the button, and his schoolmate's unrecognized hand held the shears of destiny. Nothing can give us a more pathetic appre- ciation of Pope's familiar phrase, " Lo, the poor Indian," than the statement which we have just seen made, that a remnant of the great Mohawk tribe is now resident in ISTew York city, and occupies basement rooms of a ten- ement house. Our old romantic notions about the red man of the forest, which must linger and live in spite of the damaging things spoken of him by modern observers, is shocked at this pitiful taming-out of the noble savage race. SO ^ CHAPTER OF PARAGRAPHS. It is said that these Indians, nearly a hundred, used formerly to revisit their old homes, near the St. Lawrence, during the summer months, but at present they stay all the year round in the city. They are Roman Catholics, and at- tend Roman Catholic places of worship. Sorrow is a great wise teacher from Heaven, but we, like little ignorant children, grow pale with having to learn her lessons by heart. A hero always comes forth from the atmos- phere of agreat deed, as Virgil's ./Eneas from the cloud in which Venus had veiled him, witli a glowing and godlike face; a heroine rises from the atmosphere of a good deed, as Venus herself from her cradle of sea-foam, beautiful with divine beauty, the worship of men and the model of women. " The groves were God's first temples," and it is good oftentimes to go forth from His later temples of brick and stone; out of His houses built with human hands; out of the gorgeous A CHAPTER OF PARAGRAPHS. 81 gloom of stained cathedrals ; out of the sight of velveted and cushioned pews and pulpits; out of the sound of organs shaking these structures, too often empty of the presence of God Himself; out of the fashionable assem- blies of formal church-goers — into those old solemn churches, where the light is only inter- rupted and made a "dim religious light" by the shadows of leaves; where the birds are the choristers and the wind in the tree-tops touches fitfully the keys of the silent organ ; where the old, sweet, tender sermons are forever preached to the listening heart by the preachers without parish whom Shakespeare and other poets have recognized and interpreted. What's in a name? That is a question easily asked, and answered easily in the one- sided way, that " Brutus will start a spirit as soon as Csesar," or that " A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." And, certainly, there is often little in a name, with its present, however much there may have been with its original, application ; we refer to " proper 82 -1 CHAPTER OF PARAGRAPHS. names" — so-called, however improperly. Let us think of some that we know. Mr. Little, we remember, is very big; Mr. Small and Mr. Smalley are both quite large; Mr. Blaek is found to be bleached out, and is eligible for "a white man's government" (what is now a " pure Democracy," we believe) ; while Mr. White is a candidate for the colored suffrage, and has a " visible admixture." Tom Short is long-drawn-out ; Sam Long, to use a vulgar ex- pression, is "nothing shorter." "And that's the short and long of it," as Hood observes of the short man and his tall wife. But what pigmies Mr. Little's ancestors may have been — how gigantic Mr. Long's! And so forth. We do not mean to presume that such names as these were originally given as appropriate descriptive designations, but to show how, if they were so given, time and the whims of na- ture have wrought confusion in the propriety of the family nouns. It was said of some great anonymous, "slat nominis umbra;" — it may often be said, perhaps, of a person nom- inally well known, that he indeed stands the A CHAPTER OF PARAGRAPHS. 83 shadow of a name, for he is not the substance indicated. There is no end to pleasant and odd suo-jjestions about the multitudinous words meaning men and women, which crowd our directories; — the trades-people, by the way (for we may presume that at some remote period they took their designation from their callings), are fearfully and wonderfully confused ; but we shall not now follow our fancies into the terrible Babylon whither they would lead us. "What's in a name?" Can you depend on Carpenter to build you a house ? Will Taylor mend your garments? "Will Smith attend to your horse's hoofs? Will Shoemaker not go beyond his last? It is a bright, soft, gentle day of March. Sauntering forth this lovely afternoon, we see everywhere a constant flow of pleasant faces through the streets : men and women in holi- day garments ; graceful maidens, with charm- ing hats and breeze-caressed veils, confident that Spring is in the world, for they have it in their hearts; little school-girls, whose shadowy 84 A CHAPTER OF PARAGRAPHS. hoods can not keep the sunbeams from being in their eyes; happy boys, let loose from the old schoolmaster, Time — the young and the old together; -while the streets themselves, we fancy, are wishing themselves rural solitudes, so they might feel the new spring-warmth with fresh hearts of flowers. And through the sunny quiet, how pleasantly, far away in the country air, go the sounds of the city, — the trample of its busy feet softened and lost, and only the tender voices of bells haunting placid waters with their dreamy music. There the calm air broods over pastures that send the smell of growing grass abroad; the cattle stand chewing the cud, contemplatively, and, Where road and valley meet, Nor huddled close, but whitening all the scene, Wide-scattered flocks, with many a vernal bleat, Call patient and serene. A HANDFUL OF AUTUMN LEAVES. Sa/ftSi HANDFUL of maple leaves lying ^Jm\v> u P on * ne TaD le before us, marvelous "HePV^n with their variety of exquisite colors, reminds us of the presence of October, and so we shall beg leave to take our theme from the almanac. The progress of October is like that of some grand monarch of the East, with his gorgeous robes of gold and crimson, and flying colors of leaf and flower; — all the earth and heavens are flushed with his coming and going. And if May be Queen of the Year, surely Oc- tober maybe entitled King (unless, indeed, we shall fancy him a sort of Red Republican). These two are the most poetic of the months ; (85) 86 A HANDFUL OF AUTUMN LEAVES. they are "the poet's seasons when they flower." May is the very breathing-time of new delight, and is associated with all ideas of youth and freshness, and beauty and gladness; — leaves are full of the young dew of the year, and flutter in the breezy sunshine like fairy dancers; flowers are just painting all the earth, coming as if at the wand of some sweet enchantress, whose obedient spirits are all loving and lovely, all with fragrant souls and beautiful faces; birds have nestled down, singing, into the green heart of the new Spring, and find that a great deal of the " bliss of Paradise " has "survived the fall" of the last year's leaves, which roofed their Eden — for they sing as joj-ously as ever, and make Nature's solemn heart as full of sweet voices and delicate pulses of music; youths and maidens go forth in wood and meadow to "fetch in May" with their hands, as they take and bring it back in blood and bosom. But October is the matured season of the year — it is that season which brings "the philosophic mind." AVe fondly recall the blossom but use A HANDFUL OF AUTUMN LEAVES. 87 the fruit ; we think of the green spring-leaves and see the crimson kiss of decay on those of Autumn. "We dream of being young and are growing old. (Ah, have we not grown old?) In May we are full (as every thing is) and flushed with the earth's fresh blood ; in May we talk not of October, — in October we think of May. With the ripened fruit of the orchard and vineyard, — with the garnered store of the harvest-fields, — the hope of the 3"ear is completed or blasted ; and we recognize a correspondence of results in the season as it touches our lives. It is the sober time of tran- quil fullness of experience, of peaceful thought and quiet feeling, when " Spring's honeyed cud of youthful thought we love To ruminate." October opens the door to (if it be not part of) that lovely season poets have called the Sabbath of the year, and breathes a hushing breath before its approach, as Saturday Xight, in the good old-fashioned, witch-burning, 88 A HANDFUL OF AUTUMN LEAVES. Quaker-hanging Puritan era, was the prayer- hushed threshold of Sunday, when the steps became solemn and week-day noises grew still. Nature's temples in October are growing awful with "expressive silence;" the birds that, jubilant, made the great aisles of the forest ring with their sweet minor voices of praise — harmonious always with some deep organ's sublime utterance — are mostly flown or flying away; the solemn windows of the heavens (which are soon to be opened, as we know) are richly stained, and through all the world streams the " dim, religious light." Is it any marvel that our spirits should now be hushed and chastened? — that into our thouuhts, with the sound of winds and waters only, or the still small voice which is not interrupted by these, should breathe the painted light that touches every tiling with a holier and tenderer beauty? — that the images which throng our souls, like the slatues of saints and pictures of sacred and ancient histories iu great cathedrals, should shine out and be illuminated and A HANDFUL OF AUTUMN LEAVFS. 89 transfigured by the breath of that more glorious light ? As at night the sweetest and most spiritual and subtile poetry takes its wings most visibly in our souls, so in Autumn the deep currents of sentiment within us steal forth. The deepest and tenderest poetry, indeed, is wreathed with dying flowers and fallen leaves. That which is beyond us, and for which we long, comes to our recognition with the still spirit of Melancholy : "She dwells with Beauty, Beauty that must die, And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu," says Keats. Melancholy is the soul's appre- ciation of beauty — "beauty that must die," — and of the divine and deathless beauty that is suggested by the transient and mortal. The inmost yearnings of the spirit of man arc con- nected subtly with Death and the Tast. In October we are homesick. All the regrets that, like haunting footsteps, echo in the silent chambers of memory, come back in October. We long for and dream of all that has been 90 A IIAXDFUL OF AUTUMN LEAVES. or may be. The faces that are " two handfuls of white dust," look into our hearts with gentle and beautiful smiles from graves of gone years, or from that unseen Sphere which has bereft us. (The soul, in its diviner moods, perhaps, seems ever an orphan — a wanderer that broods over old grave-stones and thinks of old homes in a new Earth.) "We sec, more seemingly palpable and real, that divine mirage, so beau- tiful, which the desert itself may suggest within us: that floating dream haply created by our thirsty lips, by the unsatisfied want of our mor- tality, by the sun and sand: the vision which all, in some way, trust to find substantial when they shall surely awake, and which human sympathy and affection name in many lan- guages, differently perhaps, but with the same meaning — Heaven. This mingling of sweet and tender and mel- ancholy thought with the year's consummation and its beautiful decline has expressed itself through all the poets. It would be heresy to all established custom to write of either May or October without quotation of poetry. May A ITAXDFUL OF AUTUMN LEAVES. 91 and October, as we have said, are the poet's months — one the bright Epicurean season, en- joying the sunshine of to-day, the other full of that "divine philosophy As musical as is Apollo's lute." Who, in writing of May, would dare to forget hearty old Chaucer, the great poet of May, whose May thoughts come to us from his good "well of English undefiled" (for it was of his early language that these words were first used) as fresh as May-dew, and with as joyous a charm, forever? Who can forget his description of May morning, when — "firy Phebus riseth up so brighte, That al the Orient laugh eth of the lighte?' etc. Chaucer is the poet of May; Shakespeare of all seasons. And who of all the poets (but Shakespeare is all molded into One), has said more expressive things of the October time? None will fail to recall Macbeth's mournful re- flection, " My way of life Is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf," or that most beautiful line in the sonnet de- 92 -1 IIASDFUL OF AUTUMN LEAVES. scribing old age by comparing it to the season of leafless boughs, " Bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. " And very many other passages will recur, which are part of our choice autumnal language. But perhaps for delicate plaintiveness and sweetness of pensive sentiment nothing can be quoted more fit for the season and the accom- paniment of these leaves upon our table than the following verses, by James Montgomery : "Sweet Sabbath of the Year, "While evening lights delay, Thy parting Btep methinks I hear Steal from the world away. "Amid thy yellow bowers " r is. sad, yet sweet to dwell, While fulling leaves and fading flowers: Around us breathe farewell. "A soft and tender streak Thy dying leaves disclose, As on Consumption's ghastly cheek 'Mid ruin blooms the rose. "Thy scene each vision brings < If beauty in decay, Of fair and early fading things, Too exquisite to Btaj ; A HANDFUL OF AUTUMN LEAVE*. 93 "Of all that now may seem To Memory's tearful eye The vanished rapture of a dream On which we gaze and sigh." — Kow does the frost begin its nightly minis- trations, and touch with stealthy fingers the yet green leaves ; now will the corn-fields glitter with all their twinkling blades of gold in warm and hazy noons; now will the nuts be dropping evcry-where in vast woodlands, and the boys will be gathering the walnuts with hands innocently stained — brown with merry toil ; now will the cider be oozing from the bee-frequented presses, and the house- wives in the country will busy themselves with the paring machine and the copper kettle; now in rural places, where Fashion and her city manners have not destroyed the blithe old customs, will the apple-cuttings flourish on moonlight nights, and, after countless merry " Quips and cranks and wanton wiles, Nods and becks and wreathed smiles. Such as hang on Mollies cheek — " (Pardon, Master Milton — Mollie serves as well 94 -1 HANDFUL OF AUTUMN LEAVES. as any mythological Hebe, and was the cup- bearer wo best- remember), and, after the "Marching to Quebec" and " Io, Sister Phoebe," and twenty other games, Bob will start home with Sue. and Miss Mary Brown will take Christopher Jones's arm, and the great round moon will look beautiful and romantic, and the stars will wink prettily and coaxingly, and the air will be " rather chilly," and — and so forth ! Welcome, October; welcome thy dreamy, delicious afternoons, when the air hangs breathless over the death-beds of the flowers, and when " Heavily hangs the hollyhock, Heavily hangs the tiger-lily;" Welcome thy clouded evenings, when " The charmed sunset lingers lew adown In the red W( Welcome thy gladness and thy sadness; thy grains in the stack and the corn-bin ; welcome thy buoyant mornings, that A HANDFUL OF AUTUMN LEAVES. 95 " Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye," the gathering of thy fruits in the orchard and the transfiguration of thy fallen and fall- ing leaves. A NEWSPAPER'S MONOLOGUE ON ITS BIRTH- DAY. IIIRTY-FIVE is not often an age for confession, but a newspaper need not blush to own it. That was a bright day — however dark it may have been to the weather-prophet — the 24th of November, 1830, when we became a living newspaper. Mind you, it is the Louisville Journal speaks — not one of the several somewhat gray and grizzled gentlemen "connected," as they are proud to say, with us. Just now we forget the connec- tion ; let them stroke their beards to their bosoms, and brush the stray locks across their shining baldness ; — they maybe passing fifty, but thirty-five is our hey-day oflife. Yet, alter all — we may safely confess it — we (96) A NEWSPAPER'S MONOLOGUE OX ITS BIRTHDAY. 97 are growing old. Thirty-live years exhaust half the human chances of time. At thirty- five, men enter the half-way house, in whose eastward chambers are dreams of youth — from whose westward windows is the forecast of age. This half-way house is on the very summit of life ; — behind are the eager and early harvests ; before, and away below, are the white har- vests, the ripening fruits, and the Reaper. But you will say, generous reader, that a newspaper may live a thousand years, and what to it are thirty-five? We thank you. The)* are much in the past; let them be little in our future. Our funeral bells shall not ring this morn- ing; yet there is something mournful in rejoic- ings at returning birthdays, for they recall the earlier ones. "We imagine those occasions which latterly are made so much of, the silver and golden weddings, are saddened somewhat in the same way by vague regrets for youth and youthful freshness, and for the diviner warmth of the first wedding — to which Nature brought her costliest gifts of ecstacy, for which no 98 A NEWSPAPER'S MONOLOGUE OX ITS BlRTUlhl V. precious metal nor priceless stone may give a name. While it is pleasant, therefore, for us to feel our friends gathering around us, and wishing us many returns of our fortunate da}', a sense of sadness touches us for those whose faces we shall miss, whose voices shall not be heard in words of congratulation and sympathy. For a newspaper, God bless us, thinks of many graveyards; it has its friends — its warm, and strong, and dear ones — and they pass away. We can not name our own, for they are num- berless — we shall refer you to our moldered subscription books; ask us not for their ad- dresses — their old and once familiar addresses : — look at the worn-out Post-office Directories. Many of them, how many, have removed to that country in which the President has no power to appoint postmasters ; to which the Postmaster-general finds no mail communica- tions open. It was a pathetic remark of Dr. Johnson: "We shall receive no letters in the grave;" and a newspaper may feel poignantly the solemn reflection that we can receive no subscriptions from the grave. No editions A NEWSPAPER'S MONOLOGUE ON ITS BIRTHDAY. 99 have been issued for, and no mail contracts made with, the Last Passenger boat. Friends of thirty-five years, how many of you are reading us over your breakfast-cups, or in your counting-rooms, this morning? How many of you remember our original and genu- ine birth-day? Let us greet you, and have your common sympathy. For, have we not a close kindred feeling? Many of those years which seem so little to a newspaper's future, are much to our common memories. And the melancholy which we feel goes more tenderly through your -hearts. Look at the figures as they stand: 1830-1865; — thirty-five years are between these mile-stones. How many of you, we repeat, remember to have passed with us the first ? It was a glad time ; — " The harvests glowed, And the earth danced in Heaven's near light." Those years are put away more feelingly in your hearts than they have been in our col- umns — with all their varied circumstances of 100 A NEWSPAPER'S MOSOLOGUE OX ITS BIRTHDA V. Life and death; event and accident; growth and change — thirty-five years! Venerable sir (whose eyes are now so benevolently fixed 141011 us), how long is it, we beg, that yon have known us chiefly through your glasses? Ah, you shake your head, thinking of funerals that have made them dim with other mists than those of time, and arc silent. Gentle madam, how many years is it since it was our pleasure to whisper to the world, under the unobtrusive but always looked-for " Married " heading, that one man had reached — " the only bliss Of Paradise that has survived the Fall " through you — so young; so tender; so sweei with goodness, grace, and beauty, then ? (That happy man touches his smoking coffee caress- ingly with his spoon while reading this, and smiles across the table, and murmurs, "Mrs. Smith, how long is it, my dear?") "Twenty- live years," your thoughtful answer is to us and "John" together. So long — BO long — so long? And yet, " Mrs. Smith, '* your face A XEIVSPAPER'S MONOLOGUE OX ITS BIRTHDAY. \Q\ has not lost the freshness of young woman- hood, and "John" seems to keep "youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm " of every day still. Esteemed young friend, whose voice was so eloquent for ours and us in those warm campaigns before the sad war just ended had burdened the air with its fast-com- ing gloom, how many summers have the polit- ical butterflies fluttered since — a boy eager on the first steps of ambitious studies — you first read this Journal's columns? " Fifteen," you answer. So long — so long, indeed? Dear lady (we well knew your charming school-girl face when our carriers met you, on their morning rounds), you remember when at sweet sixteen you took our "Weekly from your fath- er's table, and read "Amelia's " * poems by the light of a dream, and with the flutter of a dove, in your bosom? Pray, how long ago was that? " ," you answer, with your fin- * The poems of "Amelia " (Mrs. Amelia B. Welby), once quite popular in this country, were first printed in the Louisville Journal. 102 *1 NEWSPAPEB'S MONOLOGUE ON ITS BIRTHDAY. ger, drawing the expressive dash in air, archly smiling. So long — so long — so long? We feel that we are growing old, for yon, too, look thirty-f we beg a thousand pardons ! Good readers, among you all might we not glance around, and, wherever you may be, ask such questions as these, and receive answers which should make the fountains of tears in your hearts give up the sweet and glad, or sad, spirits of old memories? For, to our morn- ing recognition, you have all been sitting at a great breakfast-table, and if we have spoken a word of wisdom in our thirty-five years of living type, we know it has found response in many a worthy mind; if we have uttered a patriotic sentiment, it has always been echoed by many a patriot's sense; if we have given light birth to a pleasantry, on many a bright- ening lip it has blossomed anew with a smile or flashed out merrily with a laugh ; if we have said a sweet thing, or a tender thing, or a beautiful thing (remember we have dealt largely in quotations), how many a heart has A NEWSPAPER'S MONOLOGUE ON ITS BIRTHDAY. 103 felt it? All this appreciation has come home to us, and we were not alive this morning had not our pulses been strong with the warm blood of your encouragement. For a newspa- per, too, lives much on the milk of human kindness — it requires the sympathy of its readers. And now, while we have asked these questions and heard your recollections blos- soming and beating in your hearts around this great breakfast-table where you sit (how many you and we have missed about it who left their vacant chairs !) is it strange that we are saddened, and softened to tearful dreams, in our place? Here let us not forget (perhaps you, readers, have never cared to know) those who have been our ministers at home and abroad. Printers, we do not cease to remember your busy and careful hands; how you have melted away like the fonts you distributed! — one or two of you, good and faithful servants, yet re- main. Editors, show your vanished faces again above the fresh exchanges, — without you 104 -1 NEWSPAPER'S MONOLOGUE ON ITS BIRTHDAY. what were we? There is but one* to-day — of the many ye have been — who lias your procession passing through all those days into which we have not failed to accom- pany the sun. Newsboys, the newspaper's wise children, take our blessing. You are still our quick morning immortals, and " Never grow old, nor change, nor pass away." Ah, we feel that ours has been a pleasant life, with these ministers, public and private; and what journeys, mail-carriers, have we gone with you (whither have ye traveled?) — what "hair-breadth escapes " have had — to meet our myriad friends in their distant homes: not of late years, with trampling en- gine and hurrying car; but long ago, with ro- mance (dusted or frost-bitten) in the stage- coach, or with adventure and daring — through woodlands and water-courses, and along moun- tain paths — on horses of mettle! *George I' Prentice, at whose request this article was written for the thirty-fifth anniversary — November 24, 1865 — <>f the establishment of lii> newspaper, The Louitvillt Journal, died January, 1870. A NEWSPAPER'S MONOLOGUE ON ITS BIRTHDAY. ]05 This reminds you, reader, that once we were many weeks completing for you the chronicle of each day; — now To-Day (when the Great Eastern* shall have done as much successful wire-pulling as some of our old political friends and foes accomplished in their day and genera- tion) is likely to give its world-wide history to you, in dressing-gown and slippers, with cigar and easy chair, in our morning columns. We said, a little while ago, that a newspa- per thinks of many graveyards ; — and we have assisted at many funerals. Let us acknowl- edge those most unhappy things we saw, and of which we were a great part, — we make our good neighbor over the way f our father-con- fessor. In the far days which we recall this morning, ive, too, went, somewhat downcast, with the vanquished, as well as elated with the victors. But a newspaper has personal feelings, and must not be expected to air too freely its sensitive plants. One great victory * At this time engaged in laying the first successful ocean telegraph cable. f A rival newspaper — The Louisville Democrat, edited by John H. Harney (died, 1869). 106 -• NEWSPAPER'S VONOLOGUE OS TTS BIRTHDAY. is enough to-day, we trust, for all of us; — let us consign the little trifles of political ex- ultation or disappointment to the past; let them fade away and be forgotten. Old dis- appointments of defeat, in petty wars of words, might well lose their darkness in the mighty presence of gloom, which has shadowed our columns and hung our country with mourn- ing; those old, little, foolish exultations of victory lose their light in the presence of brightness so newly apparent, so freshly flow- iiur into the thoroughfares of our lives — into the windows and doors of our people. This, our private yet public New Year day, shall end, we pray, as it is beginning, and be a vcar of Peace. Let us find you and greet you, reader! under your vines and fig-trees. And, though we must " Look before and after, And pine for what is not," let us remember that which is given us ; let us be thankful for our daily bread, — we trust that -hall make you thankful for your Daily Newspaper. IN WINTER QUARTERS. ERY pleasant in many ways — if we be well provided with coal and other creature comforts, and have enough of that praiseworthy sellish cheerfulness which makes us temporarily forgetful of other people who lack these — seem the beginnings of Win- ter: those chill breathings that come through the late autumnal twilights, making old and young gather closely, blithely, over newly- kindled fires that acknowledge but do not fear the great Coming Cold. All at once we see the whole world's faces in the illumined air of Home. All at once a charmed atmosphere of quietness and warmth breathes into our thoughts and makes us careless, if not forge t- (107) 108 TH WINTER QU4RTEBS. ful, of the more gentle out-door season de- parted. The leaves are fallen, the flowers are withered, out-of-doors. Out-of-doors, as the poet has sung, "the melancholy days have come, the saddest of the year;" but this need be ovly the out-door aspect and influence of the season. The early winter season is the weather-signal for all to go in-doors (shall we not rather say for all to come in-doors, for we ourselves are already snugly fixed in our win- ter quarters?), and, shutting softly out the naked and shivering earth, and with the gath- ered fruits and well-heaped plenty of the har- vest-fields: with fireside warmth and light, with wife, children, and friends: with song and laughter, and pleasant talk: with all feelings that make " The summer never shine so bright As thought of in a winter's night," — to live inclosed in radiant privacy. Yet, indeed, — the hearty and healthful lover of out-door life may justly claim, — Nature IN WINTER QUARTERS. 109 never, in her more desolate and deserted season, when the woodlands are " Bare, ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang," forgets to show forth beauty sufficient to fill the sense and excite the love and admiration of the observant and appreciative spirit. The sky is never lovelier than during the early winter time. The -mornings are never more exquisite or richer in color. Never more ten- derly beautiful do the orange sunsets die away than through the black and leafless boughs of the December trees, hushing the world into the presence of heavens never more divinely deep and pure, where the moons make all the shivering silence twiukle star-like below, and the stars themselves are " atoms of intensest light." Think, too, of the meteoric showers which happen in the late autumnal or early winter season, when the invisible spirits of the " darkness visible " have their gigantic games of fire-ball! Then, moreover, the Frost has begun its wonder-work out-of-doors. (But we can observe Irs weird spiritual manifesta- ]10 IN WINTER QUARTERS, tions with our backs to the fire, safely in- doors.) Frost is the airy magician who creates a phantom-summer on the leafless boughs which only the warming sunshine shall disen- chant ; and to childish eyes how he paints the windows with delight — with exquisite traceries of ferns and flowers and forests — and builds enchanted castles, " where giants dwelt of old," and Aladdin palaces, which poets and children only are up early enough to see, and wide awake enough, when seeing, to recognize for what they really are ! But we fancy that with the great majority of us the beauty of the winter earth, its miraculous garment of snow, its exquisite jewelry of ice, are best appreciated when we either view them from our cosy win- ter quarters behind the window-pane, or make quick and daring adventures and rcconnois- sances beyond our fortifications, so to speak, into the camp of Winter, with the surety of easy and Bafe retreat, should danger threaten, within our breastworks. (And, by-the-way, is not this a good phrase for the happy bar- riers of Home ?) IN WINTER QUARTERS. \H In alluding to tlie late autumnal and early winter time above, we may be held to have spoken a little retrospectively— although the comparative mildness of the season may be said to have extended the proper November weather with its "bright late quiet" for into December. Now, whether well-provisioned and well-fueled or not (but at any rate the bountiful latter rains and full river prevented the sorely dreaded coal famine) we are in winter quarters. Let us pile the smoke-breathing Youghioghcny, or the flinty white-ash anthra- cite, or, better still, the armful of weirdly sighing hickory, and enjoy them. Let us en- joy them with heart-full love and gratitude. Let us not forget sometimes, too, to open the door gently when some sorely-pressed one knocks. (Even that One, whom many good people name themselves after and profess to follow, might possibly come in the disgustful disguise of the outlawed tramp — it is most likely on Christmas Eve he would prefer to choose that very disguise.) Let us not rather say — "it was only the wind." 1 I -J IX WINTER QUARTERS. Now the cricket, the homc-poct of all hos- pitable hearths and households, — the cheerful winter philosopher who preaches, according to his beloved disciple and most loving apostle, Leigh Hunt, " In-doors and out, Summer and Winter, mirth." — retired also into winter quarters, shall send his pleasant jargonings into the fire-lighted circle of his listeners; and blessed now are they who have children to take upon their knees, and knowing them shall drop more ambitious cares ere they fly away and escape; yes, blessed are even they, who, like Elia, have at least the fairy visits of dream-children in their gentle fire-lit reveries, wearing the eyes of sonic tenderly mythical '-Alice "W — n," and showing the kinship of her soul. Let us shut the doors with music, saying, " Blessings be with him and eternal praise," the good poet Longfellow, for taking from old Kome and setting in sight of all the mile-stones we may pass, out on the dusty highways of the 7iV WINTER QUARTERS. H3 world (all roads properly lead to Home even as those of old led to Rome), "the Golden Mile- stone : " " Each man's chimney is his golden milestone, Is the central point from which he measures Every distance, Through the gateways of the world behind him. " On his farthest wanderings still he sees it, Hears the talking flame, the answering night-wind, As he heard them When he sat with those who were but are not." ■fc |&sr 2S& GOING TO BED IN A COLD ROOM. A "WINTKR-NIliHT IDYL. T is a thing sufficiently commonplace, unworthy of prose or verse, to go to bed in a warm room, where " Small busy flames play through the fresh-laid coals " as your sleeping, or rather your waking, com- panions. You stir the replenished grate, look vaguely into the fallen ashes which bear wit- ness to the white martyrdom of coal, resolve (for you have not the soft, delicious persuasion of the sleepy eyelids weighed down with their proper night-dew) that it is your bed-hour, think languidly of the useless yesterdays and the unnecessary to-morrows, bring Macbeth's (114) GOING TO BED IN A COLD BOOM. \\§ soliloquy, it may be, to your private benefit, saying : " To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time" — (your clock striking twelve to echo the last syllable) : "And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to restless beds. Out, out, brief candle ! " 111 lieu of the figurative candle, you turn off the fluttering gas-jet, and, as you classically phrase it, you "turn in," careful not so much of a new morning sunrise as for the fresh morning Sun, Times, or Herald. Nothing more of you need be known until half-past eight a. m. of the coming day, when you think lazily first of breakfast (if one had but an ap- petite), and then perhaps of business— some- what bored by both. But blessed and thrice blessed is he for whom hardy choice or a most beneficent — even when least smiling— Fortune has made his bed and smoothed his pillow in a cold room ! He ]16 GOIXG TO BED IX A COLD ROOM. sleeps in Abraham's bosom all the year, in- deed. To him are given, night by night, such new sensations as those for which kings might throw away their foolish kingdoms. lie con- quers his Paradise at one shuddering although faithful leap, and the gentle tropics over the feathers and under the coverlets breathe their tenderest influences to confirm its enjoyment. Presuming yourself to be that happy per- son, reader, we beg to see you safely and snugly to bed. You have passed your evening until the approaching bed-time in the close, secluded company of your books, it may be ; yon have had the best human society, into whose first circles no ceremonious cards conduct, of some favorite novelist; you have shared and enjoyed the sweetest and tenderest thoughts and the exquisite pictures of some dear poet, the terse and wise, or gay and graceful, language of some rare essayist ; perhaps you, a bachelor (for, if yon are a married man, this whole subject of going to bed falls to the ground and disappears in a gentle rosy mist), have been traveling in the good-humored company of that charming GOING TO BED IN A COLD ROOM. \\1 American couple, Basil and Isabel, on " Their Wedding Journey : " — it may be that you have had fitful communion with all of these, old and new (and Nature makes the old new for- ever in healthier and happier temperaments) ; but you come at last to a stand-still, or, we may say, a sit-still, unbidden. Your sitting- room must be comfortable, of course ; it is warm, and what you fancy to be cosy ; your feet are warm; your fancies go wandering through the glowing caverns of the red flames before you into that vague frontier of dream- land we call reverie. Suddenly you start, and think it is time to go to bed. Your thought melted away, and was a dream, a moment ago. It would not take you long to fall asleep. " Sleep, the wide blessing," you say. But, of course, you are in no haste to go to bed. You are alone, and a faint shiver crawls up between your shoulders. That is a ghostly passage in Macbeth to recall at such a mo- ment, — we mean the knocking incident, which thrills the fearfully-startled reader of Shakes- US QOINQ TO UF.D IS A COLD ROOM. peare with a certain consciousness of guilt, and makes him fool an accessory while King Duncan's murder is shuddering through the house. Then you remember it was a sadden wind which clutched the sashes (the house be- ing old is subject to such ghostly interrup- tions), and suggested that terribly wide-awake passage whieh haunted you so many years ago in boyhood. It is a good thing to go to bed ; it will be a good thing then to go to sleep. Sleep! Sancho Panza said something — what was it? — about sleep; and, like Lord Dundreary, you stagger through ludicrous mental misquota- tions before you reach Sancho'a happy prov- erb. Yes, "Blessed be the man" — "Sleep, the wide blessing," you repeat; but whosequo- tation-marks shall you fold around this ex- jion ? Ah, y<>u have it — Coleridge! You recall what other poets, too, have said about sleep. First, Shakespeare, who has many ten- der passages regarding it — that one, for ex- ample, iu Macbeth itself, in which he makes ii bo sacred in personification : GOING TO BED IN A COLD ROOM. ng "Macbeth does murder Sleep, the innocent Sleep, Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of Care, The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath, Balm of hurt minds." And the delicious little prayer in Beaumont and Fletcher's drama, which seems to bring a hushing atmosphere of vernal dusk and dew about one to repeat it, occurs to you : " Care-charming Sleep, thou easer of all woes, Brother of Death, sweetly thyself disp On this afflicted prince; fall like a cloud In gentle showers; give nothing that is loud Or painful to his slumber; easy, sweet, And as a purling stream, thou Son of Night, Pass by his troubled senses ; sing his pain, Like hollow, murmuring wind or silver rain ; Into this prince gently, oh gcnily glide, And kiss him into slumbers like a bride !" Wordsworth's slumber-coaxing sonnet comes to mind, beginning : "A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by, One after one; the sound of rain and bees Murmuring; the fall of waters, winds, and seas," and ending : " Without thee what is all the morning's wealth ? Come, blessed barrier between day and day, Dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health." ]20 GOIXG TO BED IS A COLD ROOM. Then, with an awakcifing interest in tlie drowsy subject, Spenser's famous " House of Morpheus" arises in your fancy ; and, desiring to see the description again, you take down Moxon's edition of Eliza's laureate, and read with italics here and there in your voice. (Knowing where you place them, we repeat them likewise) : '• He, making speedy way through spersed ay re, And through the world of waters wide and deepe, To Morpheus house doth hastily repaire. (lie was going to sleep in a hurry.) Amid the bowels of the earth full stoepe, And low, where dawning day doth never peepe, His dwelling is; there Tethys hi.* wet bed I)n(h i vet wash, and Cynthia still doth stt In silver deaw his ever-drouping hed, Whiles sad Night over him her mantle black doth spred. ("Tethys his wet hed" — a rather uncom- fortable suggestion for a cold night, isn't it?) " Whose double gates he findeth forked fast : The one faire fram'd of burnisht yvory, The other all with silver overcast : .1 d wakeful dogges before themfarre doe lye, GOING TO BED IN A COLD ROOM. 121 Watching to banish Care their enimy, Who oft is wont to trouble gentle Sleepe. By them the Sprite doth passe in quietly, And unto Morpheus comes, whom drowned deepe In'drowsie fit he findes: of nothing he takes keepe. (The next stanza is the one, you remember, of which Hazlitt wrote : " It is as if ' the honey -heavy dew of slumber ' had settled on his pen in writing these lines :") "And, more to lulle him in his slumber soft, A trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe, And ever drizling raine upon the loft, Mixt with a murmuring vnnde, much like the sowne Of swarming bees, did cast him in a Bwowne. No other noyse, nor peoples troublous t As still are wont t' annoy the walled towne, Might there be heard : but carelesse Quiet lyes, Wrapt in eternall silence Jarre from enimyes.' What a sense of security those " wakeful dogges " and the assurance in the last line quoted, give to sleep! You, yourself, shall hear the watch-dog's honest bark if any one comes near your door, and the invasion shall neither molest nor make you afraid. Now, the ludicrous little story you heard \-_>2 GOING TO BED IS A COLD ROOM. your friend Smith Tell yesterday (to-day or yes- terday shall you call it?) repeats itself to you. An old house-servant, a slave, in a Virginia family before the war (he is now an African citizen of Richmond), was sitting up late one night, his old and young masters and mis- tresses being out at a play. Nodding a while over the kitchen-fire, he concluded to lie down, hugging it closely, and soon was dozing. Sud- denly the door bed rang, and Sam awoke. "Nowdafs some one come to 'sturb me, but I sha'n'nt let him in nohow." However, he started drowsily, rubbing his eyes, as if brushing away imaginary gnats, to the door, and, opening it, found a gentleman, who had come to call upon the family. u Well, my boy," said he, " is your master in?' "No, sah, he is out." " Is your mistress in ? " " \o, sah, she is out." The caller, after a pause: "Are any of the young ladies in ? *' "No, sah, dey is all out.*' GOING TO BED IX A COLD ROOM. 123 The caller, after an irresolute moment: " Well, then, I will walk in and sit by the fire, and wait until they come in." "And dat is out too, Bah." Yes, your fire, too, is dying out, and — well, it has been your bed-hour for some time past. It is growing late, indeed — the clock-index ap- proaches eleven ; a late hour for an early riser, first cousin of lamb and lark. It is very -cold ; you begin to feel it taking subtile possession of your study-room ; a moment ago, stepping into the adjoining chamber for some est rayed trifle, you saw the water in a pitcher had put on its white overcoat, and the late moon, just arisen, shone scintillant over the crispy roofs of frozen snow. You must go to bed. Yes, you must go to bed. Your fire is burnt out ; only a hovering mist of flame flutters here and there, and you begin to cover the embers that wink at you slowly and drowsily from under their soft gray coverlets. " May you be covered as well and warm," they seem to say. You must wink and blink at them in return for a little while ; but, after ten minutes, you 124 GOIXG TO BED IN A (OLD BOOM. rouse yourself suddenly, standing up resolutely determined : " Yes, I must go to bed." . There! — you cross to the chill chamber-door and open it. " If it were done, when 'tis done, then t were well It were done quickly." And now, indeed, you are gone to bed in a cold room ! Once under the covers, you begin to receive the reward of your virtue. Those thin layers of snow that lino the blankets, and are familiarly known as sheets, assume a gentle moisture and melt away; the wind drops its icy treble and sings ^Eolian harmonies; the kind household deities breathe their dearest in- fluence to give tbeirbeloved Bleep. To-morrow, j'on think — no matter about to-morrow, any- how. The baker is welcome with his bill, the butcher will come with his beef. Somehow, jusi then, you thought of that dear and blessed time, when, with the gentle motion "!' a world of love (in the old farm-house, some- where far away, thatched with memories), your mother came to tuck her sleepy darling in. GOIXG TO BED IX A COLD ROOM. 125 and — just now you find yourself with some tears of blissful sadness in your eyes, awakened into the white light of buoyant morning air, your breath, like the Afrite of the Arabian Nights, above you in the new day. -*#¥^ IDYL OF A WINTER MORNING. XE of the most beautiful of all sights for eyes at peace with Providence and the Weather (that secondary divinity "that shapes our ends'*) to be awakened to, is a world buried deep in snow; — not buried, in- deed, but warmly laid asleep, by Nature's gen- tle hands, under the pure coverlet she has woven, through all the still December night, on her mystic loom up against the stars. After some soft, delicious, tlower-creating night in April, you awake, and the peach-boughs seem to have beeD touched with magic — how beau- tiful! But not less happily suggestive of enchantment, not less marvelously beautiful, is the Buow-fall, which loads the hare trees (126) IDYL OF A WINTER MORNING. 127 as with a myriad blossoms in their first sun- rise. Aladdin's Genius built palaces of wonder over-night, of which it is not recorded that they received final and fatal sun-strokes at morning — at least your curly-headed, six-year- old laureate of the family Avill not think so, for (it may be he will prove a mere historian !) did not Aladdin and his princess live in their palace? But look at the Snow-whim's pal- aces — dazzling the sun himself! Ah, you were thinking of ice-houses, were you ? You open your eyes, breathing the chill in- spiration of winter air, your whole body in the pleasant summer of a North Temperate Zone of blankets, and feel an unusual light in the room — a sort of shadow of the white silence every- where without ; and, lifting your head gently, at once the scene steals upon you through the slightly frosted panes : it has been snowing! Then you remember there was a quiet rustling, scarcely perceived — the alight- ing of the numberless wings of the snow- fairies, almost inaudible — about your windows, 128 IDYL OF A WINTER MORNING. far into the night : all the midnight was hushed to the coming of this mysterious presence ; and now all the earth, like an enchanted world, is hound by this spell of the snow. Soon you hear your children, whose buoyant young souls answer (we are decently tearful to say, with Meranonmnsic) to the earliest touches of the morning rays through their windows, merrily breaking the silence below-stair- : " Snow ! snow ! " Like a new, strange world it comes to them, the first snow of the winter, whose approach was proclaimed by the white comings of the frost in Octohcr, and the long [November rains. Like a strange, new world it comes to them, and they are the look-outs who cry "Snow! snow ! " instead of " Land ! land ! ** Into this half fairy-land, this unsubstantial dream-reality, they leap, they rush, and take possession: not sternly and solemnly, in the name of " Ferdinand and Isabella," or any other evanescent and temporal powers of earth ; but merrily, in the name of Joy, and Love, and Hope, and Beauty, the magic and eternal IDYL OF A WINTER MORXIXG. ] 29 sovereigns of the wide realm of Childhood, under whose invisible ensigns such new worlds are best taken possession of, and can not and would not resist. By this time, really awakened yourself (poor bear in the winter sluggishness of your days !) into some former, almost youthful, state of ani- mal spirits, by your children's merry hearts ringing out their joy-bells so clearly, by their laughter and happy-shouting voices, you are up, and take a stealthy look below. Look! look! Will, and Charley, and Jacob, and Benjamin, have a shrewd battle in the snow ; the harmless powder flies and smokes around their glowing faces, that half illumine it with their rosily-flushing brightness, while the innocent cannon-balls fly in quick succession to and fro, and, instead of taking a hapless head off, merely take off the cap of an eager combatant, now and then, and leave him hors du combat for a confused moment only, when, like the reserve at Waterloo, he is " up and at them." You think of this behind your breath-misted 130 n ' yi < oF - l WINTER MORNING. window-pane, and then young Napoleon's snow-generalship of old at the military school recurs to you, and soon the mimic cannon-balls become cannon-balls in reality, the boy's play becomes a man's battle, and the snow-powder, which now gleams into the just- rising sun, a twinkling mist of diamonds, is the lurid cloud of the black gunpowder which makes national earthquakes, and whose explosions palpitate, and tremble, and echo in a million hearts. And you think of Moscow, the terrible Rus- sian snow, and Bonaparte's army retreating, while " Stern winter barricades the realm of Frost;" and then again you turn to the boy Napoleon and snow-ball battles. Meanwhile, little Mary, like a pretty Angel of Peace standing beside the battle, or like the gentle Good which grows out of the terrible Evil, and stands apart from it and behind the cloud, watchful, eves her brothers earnestly, and sympathizes with all, hailing their loving victories. IDYL OF A WINTER MORNING. 131 All this time you have been indolent with your toilet, and now that it is finished, 3-011 take a more extensive view of the outside world. You live in the country, let us presume — yes, and your place is an old-fashioned one; yonder you see your cattle in their cheerful or cheerless precincts, where they seem so pa- tient beneath projecting eaves of snow on their foretops, chewing the stray wisps of hay which had almost effected a thorough retreat under cover of night aud snow-drift. (If a Bergh- like fellow-feeling for your beasts of burden oc- curs to you just here, and you think you will make that little improvement in the barnyard at once, why, the suggestion will not be un- seasonable.) Then you see your hay-stacks in the field beyond, all a-glisten, like domestic Alps or Apennines, with the sunrise on their summits ; and lo ! the gate-posts have put on a weird human air and aspect in their gro- tesque head-dresses! The kitchen-maid here appears out-of-doors, with a bucket, and tries to find the well. It seems to have been the ]32 IDYL OF A WINTER MORNING. special care of the Snow-Whim (for the wild spirit of the drift needs an apotheosis into capitals and personality) to barricade the well- curb, for around it the white hanks are heaped up highest. At length, the sweep — the old- fashioned well-sweep, which ha- been reli- giously and ridiculously cherished by you in spite of modern pumps and water-pipes — goes up, and a little new snow-storm whirls into the breeze and sunrise, and the bright flakes flutter like innumerable white doves about Sallie's glowing face, as the bucket goes down. Jingle, jingle, jingle — here is a sleigh ! Your enterprising friend and neighbor, Major Will- iams, pioneers the merry company (but he is only going to market) that before the day is pasl shall make music wherever they go: with ch»aks, and shawls, and furs, and blan- kets, and buffalo- robes, and warm hearts, and bright eyes, and song, and shout, and laugh, and love, and happiness, and — sleigh-bells! Now you have just thought, by some un- der-current suggestion, of Sir John Franklin and snow-shoes, of Esquimaux and white IDYL OF A WINTER MORNING. 133 bears (those terrible but easily-melted ghosts that haunt the North), and reindeer, and ice- bergs, and infinite fields of ice under the weird mystery of the Northern lights; and you wonder if American enthusiasm will not yet burn through a North-west Passage, or whether the great Ice-King (whatever that may be) will fold his ermine of silence and majesty about him forever, and never abdicate his throne of solitude at the North Pole. " The open sea in that region," so you muse, "is — at least an open question, and " Your breakfast-bell rings. Your wife puts her hand gently upon your shoulder at the bottom of the stairs. Ah, where summer blooms all the years in closely-wedded hearts, what matter if, on the brows of two who love, it lias been snowing? The sweet soul, the " dear girl," as you call her whose "sphere" has been your smile and her children's happiness, only, for many a year, has been up and down, busy with home, for two hours; and how rosy your children's faces look, as, with glad appetites, they sit [34 1/(17, OF .1 WINTER M0RS1SQ around you, and von see llio Aurora stream- ing up over the snow of your age (some peo- ple grow old, anil why should we deceive you?), from the dream of your childhood that has stolon away into their bright eyes and into the birds'-nests of their hearts. "It snowed, papa," says litt'e Benjamin, with his lips like blossoms, and bis blue eyes five vears old. But he does not mean that you are growing old, NEW-YEAR ADDRESSES. E believe the Carrier's New- Year Ad- dress may now be looked upon as al- most a thing of the Past. At any rate, it has become the exception, rather than the rule, for the leading daily journals to send a yearly greeting to patrons, in that old fash- ion, abroad; only what are called the country newspapers adhere somewhat to the pleasant custom. In the large cities, indeed, the old- fashioned Carrier himself is a departed person- age. A swarm of quick newsboys occupy his place, few of whom become specially identified with any individual journal; — each one repre- sents all the morning and evening papers. It used, moreover, to be a reputable thing for (135) 136 NEW-TEAS ADDRESSES fairly accredited poets to write annual pieces for the purpose of the Carrier's Address. Cotton's poem, " The New Year," quoted by Charles Lamb in one of his essays ("New- Year's Eve"), seems fitted for such a use; and various later British poets wrote verses similar in sentiment and occasion — Cowper, Burns, and Mrs. Barbauld among the rest; while, in Germany, Uhland, with many other singers of the Fatherland doubtless, did the same. In America, there have been several notable poems produced for the newspaper Carrier's offering, on New- Year's morning, — " On his round Through the town." One of these, which has been quite popular, and familiar for a generation in the school- books, is Prentice's "Closing Year," beginning: "'Tis midnight's holy hour — and silence now I- brooding, like a gentle spirit, o'er The still and pulseless world," etc. Another, of more recent date, is Forceythe Willsou's powerful and pathetic ballad, "The NEW-YEAR ADDRESSES. 137 Old Sergeant," which first appeared as the Carrier's !N"ew-Year Address of the Louisville Journal — Prentice's well-known newspaper — January 1, 1863; it opens with these lines: " The Carrier can not sing to-day the ballads With which he used to go Rhyming the glad rounds of the happy New- Years That are now beneath the snow." This poem was never read aloud without tears. Dr. Holmes recited it to many au- diences, in the course of a lecture, during the War of the Rebellion ; while Mr. Emerson is reported to have pronounced it one of the most remarkable poems written in America, and has included it in his collection entitled " Parnassus." John Howard Payne, at an earlier period, if we rightly recollect, also wrote a Carrier's Address for the Louisville Journal. In most of the old-fashioned New- Year Ad- dresses it was the writer's habit, in the person of the Carrier, to touch upon the prominent points of the past year's history, whether of a ]38 NEW-YEAS ADDRESSES. general or local nature, reviewing them briefly, one by one, in style wandering " From grave to gay, from lively to severe." Of course, written with proper spirit, such productions would often be the local literary event of the day or season. The natural moral of the flight of time would be interwoven, and the Address — a song in seeming — not unfrequently turned out a sermon. Embel- lished with the best skill of the printer's art, and made useful with an accompanying alma- nac of the New Year, it was often posted (sometimes framed) in connting-rooms or of- fices, into which there was "No Admission Except on Business," and thus the poet, if not otherwise, reached a certain qualified inimor- tality. But it was not our intention here so much to discourse upon the New- Year's Address in general, as to present, in part or entire, some examples of tie 1 thing itself which happen to be in our possession. The first we shall take up was written for the opening of the year NEW-YEAR ADDRESSES. 139 1861, when the chief subject in the American public mind was the secession movement in the Southern States. It appeared as the Car- rier's Address of the Lousville Evening Bulletin (an evening edition of the Louisville Journal). The tour of the Prince of Wales in the United States under the title of Baron Renfrew (with his visit to Mt. Vernon-and his gracious conduct at the tomb of Washington), the vociferous Charleston Convention, the great affairs in Italy, the world-absorbing Heenan and Savers fist-fight, and the active effort to destroy the American Union, were the principal topics of the year, and naturally showed themselves in the Address. Probably the suggestion of it> title, ''Adam's Birthday," was found in Lamb's designation of iSTew-Ycar's Day as " the nativity of our common Adam." Adam is here represented as addressing the Human Race, his posterity, at their mighty extension break- fast-table, and himself reviewing the Year's events — devoting his chief attention, however, to America. 140 NEW-YEAR ADDRESSES. " There was a jolly harvest here and there, And fruits (this grape is more than I can hear) Ne'er made the Happy Isles more truly blest Than your Hesperides, the un-dragoned West," he remarks, after mentioning the Years de- mise. But human affairs have not Leon in evciy respect harmonious : " Our family matters have been rather so-so; The D 1 visits Eden — Eve, you know so! " Of Italy he proceeds to say : " The giants, that old Etna thundered over, Have had a glorious kicking under cover; Enceladus, in (iarabaldi risen, Hi- called the sleepless Titans forth from prison. — Flower-land of the Hours ! Home of old glories won, Above your mountains shines the olden sun ; Again your daughters, graceful as the vine, Shall dance, blithe ministers of song and wine; Again the Roman race shall spring from Earth, In her own air give Rome a second birth ; Freedom shall clasp her long-lost darlings now; 'Arms and the man' shall wreathe some Virgil's brow ; Art. ] -v. shall keep Earth's heaven their home; — From the Past's waves arise, my Beauty, Rome I The vampire of the ages flies from th Thy lovely shore-, Lavinia, hlussom lice!" NEW-YEAR ADDRESSES. J4J (The reverend Father ceased his tones inspired, — Some later Eve was saying, ' Pa, I 'm tired.') As for the et cetera, read the Morning Clipper ; I have heen ' half-seas-over; ' — so'm a skipper. Heenan and Sayers have made their mark and kissed. (Newspaper fame is noted with 'the fist.') Ah, Heenan, Sayers, you made the nations stare, — Adam was watching in your great P. R. There in America they 've had a high time. They 've kept my wits— what is that about fly-time? The Babel-builders ne'er out-babbled these, (I wished I were a Justice of the Peace! ) First came (bronchitis take those Charleston lungs !) The South Carolina Battle of the Tongues; — A hundred million words were spoken in vain, And order cut seemed Congress come again ! " The reception by President Buchanan, at Washington, of the first Japanese Embassy,— "My bashful boys, who make yourselves at home, Contented in your views of Kingdom Come," is alluded to briefly ; then Adam thus men- tions the Prince of Wales : " Our daughter, Tic, has sent, I 'm pleasr d to say, Her boy to school in Young America. And Albert Edward— heir from dawn to dawn — Through all the forms of Yankee terms has gone. I' m glad to see, ' remembering their relations,' These pleasant personalities of nations; 1 (2 NEW-YEAR .1 DDR I ■ And yet fjwo bono publico), Bweefc misses, Too loath to .-pare this Heir Apparent'* kisses, Above (I '11 quote his mother's poet, now — Alfred the Great with laurels on his brow) ' The grand old Ciardener and his wile,' you know, Smile at the claims of long descent, 1 below ; For, though Prince Albeit (Baron Renfrew)'* race Through loins, and Sir Loins, of old Bulls you'll trace, This giil beside me was, upon my life, First mother of them all — this Gardener's wife; And, verbum S:>p, whene'er your fancy wavers, Beware, nor let it hang on prince's favors. But yet I like, him ; for some days of grace Old-fashioned boyhood blooms upon his face, And, where your banner-stars should proudest wave, Great Britain bowed in him at Vernon's grave." The old gentleman now turns to the great American subject, and makes his closing li — a decidedly Union one. (The editor, we notice, in reprinting the piece, compliments this speech by saying that it " will electrify the heart of every patriot in the land:) " At Vernon's grave. My family out West Your country's father deemed his children blest. I've heard your wrangling, marked your jealousy, (Trust me this drop a tear is, in my eye.) We Lost the old Eden — full of Heaven's first dew ; Behold the Serpent! — will ye lose the new? Beware the tempter — we were tempted. (How? Ah, Eve, the dear bad girl, remembers, now ' I : NEW-YEAR ADDRESSES. 143 I 'm growing solemn;— make your stand a firm one, And take my — that is, hear and heed the sermon." (Here Adam wiped his brow, and thus began, While Eve, beside, proclaimed her Union man): " The air takes voices; from the Fast they rise ; They haunt your sleep — you waken with their cries. From many a bard's, from many a warrior's grave, The imploring hand and voice are lifted, ' Save ! ' The world is old, and Hope has struggled long;— The patriot's death, the poet's prophet-song In vain to man their nobler sense have given, If this New Light, a meteor, shoots from Heaven ! In vain high souls have seen, while great hearts beat, Far-shining victories over old defeat ; In vain have Freedom's martys sunk to rest, Smiling from flames, and, dying, whispered ' West; ' In vain your great assembled Congress there. With their proud scroll in Time's transfiguring air; In vain your battle-glories of the Past, When souls were tried — true metal to the last; In vain your flag, the awe of half the world, On each far sea, and for all men unfurled In vain were Lexington and Concord Plain, And Yorktown Heights, and Waslnngton in vain, — If the Great Constellation's bond be riven, And its stars, flaming, fly apart in Heaven ! Lo, in the East an awful light a-glow, Like a weird painting o'er the life below ; — In that rapt dawn, with sorrow in their eyes, What mighty group of watchers in your skies ! Above the storm, their aureoled brows reprove, With grief, not anger — silence, shame, and love! Lo, from your sacred places rise the grand 144 NEW-YEAS ADDRESSES. And haloed guardians of your hallowed land, Wherever lying, — dust in earth, but yet Voices in council men shall ne'er forget; — Webster's calm looks the waves of discord sun; "Words broken rise: ' Now and forever, One ! ' And over Ashland's folded sod, forever, Clay's spirit utters : 'Never, never, never!' 1 1 ere the Great father ceased. I looked around ; — Silence was listening. There was heard no sound, Save the clock ticking from its oaken cell ; — 1 M fallen asleep, hearing its midnight knell, And slept a moment ; had this confused dream, Mingling the gay and grave, — as visions seem, A medley strange. The city's bells were loud, And the ghost-moon stood on a wreck of cloud. Another piece, in which the writer used, slightly changed, the patriotic lines just quoted for his ahru.pt opening, (" Tlie air takes voices," etc.,) represeuted the Louisville Jour mil, on t lie succeeding New-Year's Day (January 1, 18G2). The War of the Rebellion had then begun, and been in progress many anxious months; the land was full of darkness; there is hut one topic — all lesser subjects, in presence of the Civil War, tire dropped out of Bight. It is entitled "The Nation's New- Year," and is written in the same old-fashioned heroic NEW-YEAR ADDRESSES. 145 couplets, which here, at least, we fancy, have aa overplus of " sound and fury," — the reader may finish the quotation if he likes. The de- parted Year is thus apostrophized : Rise from thy coffin, Eighteen Sixty-One ! Rise from our hearts, with every sunken sun ! Rise with thy awful spirits, Death's and thine, And sweep the stage like Banquo's ghostly line; That we, the long procession hushing through, In camp and cot may hold our still review. — Nay! rather in thy deep sepulcher lie Wrapped in the costliest robes of History, Praised by the poet till the world shall end, The Year of Man, and Freedom's dearest friend ! For, though we trembled at thy coming, and Felt a great earthquake's footsteps walk the land — Our land, most loved — 't was God's own foot-fall broke Deaf slumbers, on our threshold, and we woke ! The great uprising of 1861 is thus pictured : Not when of old the dragon's teeth were sown For armed men, was swifter harvest grown. They rose, the Men ! one-voiced, one-hearted, one In a great lighted purpose, like a sun Of Rivht in every soul, on every face, — " Who guards our Union, guards the human race! " The ice grew fire, and left the mountain's crown, "When April's echoes shook the avalanche down. The awful marches of the People came, Like the volcano's leaping ranks of flame. 146 NEW-YEAS ADDRESSES. They rose, the hot Defenders, swift ;mh, thou New Shadow of Old Time, we meet Thee not, embracing on old thresholds sweet ; We meet thee not, as yonder Year we met, Suppliant, but sentinel with the bayonet. The poem closes with a prayer, which we shall venture to repeat; it is perhaps not more sanguinary than many others of the time, of- fered up from professedly Christian pulpits : i i I idd, remember! Let our battle be True to mankind, and therefore true to Thee! If 't is do selfish hate or pride that now Flames in the heart and darkens on the brow ; If the great Sacrifice our band shall give Through Thy red Priest, be that our Land shall live Worthier, remember us. Our lips are dumb, Unless strong faith, Thy word of life, shall come. ( >h give us faith to feel our cause is just, In Thy <>\vn breath, the bight, our right hands trust. ( >h. give us strength to light the battle through, — The victory Thine, our blood the crimson dew ; NEW-YEAR ADDRESSES. 147 Let the great wrath which stains the skies above, Be but the dawning of Thy Day of Love; And may this year our Nation's New-Year be, With light for man, and endless praise for Thee ! " The last specimen, which we shall give in full, is written in a lighter, and perhaps a more original, vein, although produced at a time, January 1, 18G3, when our country was in greater gloom than even at the beginning of 1862. It appeared as the New-Year's Address of the Newark (1ST. J.) Daily Advertiser. The Proclamation of Emancipation of the same date was expected (President Lincoln had issued his preparatory proclamation in September pre- vious), and General Burnside had just been designated to command the Army of the Po- tomac; — the Old Year, it seems, had some con- fidence in his generalship — at least was willing to give him, or have the New Year give him, a trial. It is, perhaps, unnecessary to say that each of the pieces here noticed was by the same hand. I } N new-year addresses THE CARRIER'S ADDRESS. THE OLD TEAR'S DEATH. Newsl News! The Year is dead. Tic died last night. Just like an old man's faded out his light, In darkness, with hut little human sound; The Hours with muffled footsteps moved around Without, the infinite fields of Heaven were bright With starry blossoms— gardens of the Night — And the wind, sounding like a widow's moan, Or her lost children's wail, was heard alone: Within, the embers breathed in ghostly gloom, And His thin face with terror lit the room. HIS MOURNl RS. Few friends were 'round him: those who in his will Expected something — these are mourners still, And wear the sable cloak of Memory About in sunshine, sighing, " Woe is me ' For he is dead, our loved, our loving friend." But he is in his coffin: there's an end. They shall mourn more to-morrow, when they learn From Time, that gray old lawyer, slow and stern, They were not mentioned by the aforesaid Year In will, or codicil, or anywhere! But hold ! — too fast ! the truth must be revealed : For the great will, at midnight signed and scaled. Leaves no one out, gives each a 'lotted share Of the <>ld Year's wealth — on earth or in the air; And, now I think of it,' 1 '11 briefly state The Year's bequests. For th< ir division — wait. NEW-YEAS ADDRESSES. U'.t BEQUESTS. He left the world (that's clear, for he is gone,) For us to grow older and wiser on ; Sun, moon, and stars, (those old lamps of his youth By which he lived, and loved, and sinned, in sooth,) For us to live and love and sin by, too, (As we have done before, and still shall do;) Lands ready-sowed with wheat, awaiting Spring To touch his autumn seed with magic wing, And the rich fields of Promise, needing plow, But overflowed with milk and honey now; All sorts of buildings: princely tenements, Spacious enough for gouty discontents, Palaces, prisons (any style you please), Castles in Spain and Jersey cottages; Things heavenly, earthly; gifts of Fairy Hours, Blossoms of fruits and miracles of flowers; Horses and cattle on a thousand hills; Granaries, haystacks, vineyards, cotton-mills, Avers' Cherry Pectoral and Brandreth's Pills; — All these,,and sundry million things he mentions In soundest mind, with best of good intentions, He leaves to all, heirs and assigns, forever. — I think, by Jove, the Year was very clever ! The greatest gifts he gave, perchance, to one, He gave to all, with moon and star and sun: These were life, liberty, and the pursuit Of Happiness — that wild goose chase — to boot. CHARACTER OF THE TEAR. The Old Year was not a peaceful Year, for when First born, Mars took him all in arms ; again 150 NEW-YEAR ADDRESSES. By his death couch, with a groat bloody light, The God ld Year was a warrior: far and wide His battles yet may echo, glorified, — Their smoke arisen, changed to marvelous things, Phantoms of shadow, light the dark with wings ; His dreadful shapes of death transformed may rise With heavenly soul, in holy angel guise. In a true cause, we deem, his dearest hours Were crowned in death with bloody laurel flowers; — The cause of Right and Justice evermore He made Irs own, ami — hushed from shore to shore — The world awaited, breathless, for the end. Lo, Freedom knew him as her steadfast friend ! LAST ACTS, WOUDS, ETC. True to his life, at the near touch of D< ath, His warrior passion moved his ebbing breath. He ordered, faint, a general review: " With Abraham's leave, Til look his Generals through.' Willi starry Bhoulders glimmering they came, And each the Year, saluting, knew l>y name, "Some of them use the spy-glass well enough; Perhaps in peace they'd wear for warlike stuff," Said the < >ld Year; " they 've tried their best, no doubt,— I trust that Abraham knows his Man is out." The < 'Id Year paused, and something like a smile Wrinkled his snowy cheek a little while At his gray gayness. Then, in solemn wise, " I thought to wear some triumph in my eyes Asleep," he -aid — "Ah, Burnside, you are here? Lift up the flag and try Another Year ! " NEW-YEAR ADDRESSES. 151 THE DEAD MARCH. Borne like a chieftain from his crimson bed, With a slow music wailing for the dead, lie shall not pass forgotten from the world — (Lo, the dead march, the starry banner furled!) But, blessed by men and women, he shall be Wrapped in the holy shroud of Poesy. NEW YEAlt's DAY. Good morrow, friends, abroad in health and life ; 1 greet you warmly with old memories rife. Whither so eager, diverse-moving fast? — Into the open Future from the Past? I deem, perchance, ye go to learn the will : Be patient, for the seal is sacred still. Patience, to-day : tomorrow, when you deem Least of the affair, some winged power shall gleam Before you bright, alighting in your road ; — An Hour shall bring you what the Year bestowed. postscript. — K. B. Kind Patrons, without jesting, can you guess What the Year left your Carrier ? — His Address ' Ifcoto the ISfshop built his eollefle fn the Woofts. HOW TI1E BISHOP BUILT HIS COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. THE PIONEER lilSUOI'RIC AND FARM-HOUSE SEMINARY. ORTIIINGTON, on the Olentangy, nine miles north of Columbus, is one of the most venerable towns in Ohio. It was founded in 1803, on lands purchased of Hon. Thomas "Worthington, of Chillicothe — fifth governor of the State — by Colonel James Kilbourne, of Connecticut. TThen I last visited the place, seven years ago, a large two-storied brick building, noisy with a public school, was pointed out, across the public square, as that in which Bishop Philander Chase conducted an academy, after (155) 156 BUILDING a COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. taking up his residence at Worthington in 1817. This -was one of several houses built about the year 1808, and stands a little north of St. John's Church, doubtless one of the first church-buildings of any pretensions erected for the use of the Episcopal Church westward of the Allegheny mountains. Those who have read Bishop Chase's auto- biography will recall the story of his coming to Ohio, as related in that work. He came as a missionary, leaving his family to follow him, and made the journey from Hartford (where he gave up a pleasant home and assoeiations for the hardships and privations of a new country), during the winter of 181G-17. From Buffalo (then a small village) westward was almost an unbroken wilderness. On the south- ern shore of Lake Erie no line of public travel had yet been established, and the small lake sis were the only means of common con- veyance. But, when Mr. Chase reached Buf- falo by stage coach from Canandaigua, weeks would have yet to pass before the opening of navigation, and the prospect of delay was BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. 157 insupportable to one of his eager disposition. Private travel upon the ice of Lake Erie was still kept up, but as the season was far ad- vanced, this began to be looked upon as dan- gerous. While inquiring, however, as to the means of going forward, he happened to see "a man standing upright in his sled, with the horses' beads facing the lake." Here was the moment's opportunity, and he took it. He learned that the man was going twelve miles up the lake, and at once engaged to go with him that distance, trusting to Providence for further progress. As Mr. Chase seated him- self, with trunk and valise, in the farmer's sled, a gentleman named Ilibbard, with valise in hand, begged the same privilege. At the end of the twelve miles they were so fortunate as to find another man who promised to take them twenty-five miles further to Cattaraugus Creek, and this distance was passed over before night. Here, however, they found neither house nor shelter, but for an extra payment they prevailed upon the same person to carry them to a house known as Mack's Tavern, 158 BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS where tliey liireil a horse and cutter to take tlicm to the Four Corners, a place within twenty-five miles of the Pennsylvania line. Mr. Chase's description of this part of his journey is graphic and striking. He says in his autobiography : " It was sunrise ere we set off. In getting out on to the lake, we had to pass between several mounds of ice, and sometimes to climb over large cakes, which had been thrown up together by the force of the winds and waves. But the driver knew his way, and our horse was rough shod, and the cutter was strong and well built. The scene before us, as we came out from among the mounds of ice, was exceedingly brilliant, and even sub- lime. Before us, up the lake, was a level ex- panse of glassy ice, from two to three miles wide, between two ranges of ice-mountains, all stretching parallel with the lake shore and with one another, as far as the eye could ex- tend, till they were lost iii Hie distance. On this expanse and on these mountains, on the icicles, which hung in vast quantities and in an infinite variety of shapes from the rocky, BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. 159 lofty, and sharp-angled shore on the left, the rising sun was pouring his beams. Light and shade were so distinct, brilliancy and dark- ness were in such proximity, and yet so blended, as to produce an effect of admiration and praise to the great Creator never before ex- perienced. It would be in vain to express them here. What added to the adoring srrati- tude to God, for having made all things with such consummate skill and splendor, was what appeared as we rode along between these mountains of ice, manifesting God's providen- tial goodness, which went hand in hand with his power and wisdom. The bald-headed eagles sat on these mountains of ice, with each a fish in his claw, fresh and clean, as if just taken from the limpid lake. What noble birds ! How delicious their repast ! ' Whence do they obtain these fish at this inclement season?' said the writer. 'They get them,' said the driver, l from the top of the ice. These were thrown up and deposited by the winds and waves in the storms of last win- ter, and being immediately frozen, have been 100 BUILDING A COLLEGE IS THE WOODS. kept till this spring, when the sun thaws them out for the eagles and ravens, which, at this season, have nothing else to feed on.' As the driver told this simple story of the fish, and the -tonus and the eagles, how elearly ap- peared the providential goodness of God. •And will not He who feedeth the eagles and the ravens, which He hath made to depend on His goodness, feed and support and bless a poor, defenseless, solitary missionary, who goeth forth, depending on His mercy, to preach His holy word, and to build up His Church in the wilderness?' There was an answer of faith to this question more consoling than if the wealth of the Indies had been laid at his feet." After some further experiences on the ice, the travelers reached Conneaut Creek (now Salem), Ohio, whence Mr. Chase made the rest of his journey alone, chiefly on horseback — preaching wherever he found scattered nicra- bers of his church on the way — reaching Worthington early in May, where he at once BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. 161 wrote to his wife, directing her to meet him at Cleveland in the middle of June. Mr. Chase was elected Bishop of Ohio in June of the following year (1818). He had meanwhile settled at Worthington, purchasing several lots fronting upon the public square, and a farm of one hundred and fifty acres, half a mile below, on the Columbus road — the old Sandusky pike — where he made his home. With the exception of about two years spent in Cincinnati as President of the Cin- cinnati College, and a year's absence in Eng- land, Bishop Chase continued to reside upon this farm until the year 1828, and his farm- house, for two years after the incorporation of that institution, was to all intents and pur- poses Kenyon College — it having been at first designed, according to the arrangement made with the beneficiaries in England, to establish the college upon the Bishop's Worthington farm. The life of an Ohio Bishop in those early days was not what would now be thought a desirable one. During the year 1820, Bishop 1G2 BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. Chase, in visiting the infant parishes of his diocese, traveled on horseback 1,271 miles. His services were meanwhile for the most part their own and only reward : his farm was al- most his sole support. In the fall of the above year, on returning home, he used his last dollar to pay a man hired to at- tend his farm, and as he had nothing to pay future wages, he was compelled to take the care of the place into his own hands — that is, as he states it, "thrash the grain, haul and cut the wood, build the tires and teed the stock; all this work he did besides the care of the churches. The whole was deemed a part of the Christian warfare, from which there was no discharge." In connection with this period an interesting circumstance is re- lated. One evening (and this was two years before the first thought of going to England occurred to him), having been at work all day on his farm, he wrote a letter to a friend in the East — Dr. Jarvis, of Boston — in answer to one of inquiry regarding the condition of the Church in Ohio. This letter (wherein, al- BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. 163 though with some hesitation, he made a plain statement of his discouragements) became a little marked with blood from a fresh cut in the Bishop's hand, for which he apologized by saying he had just come in from his work to write it. This friend afterward, in answer to in- quiries from one of the Scottish Bishops, named McFarlane, respecting the condition of the Church in America, forwarded with his own, to explain affairs in Ohio, Bishop Chase's let- ter just as it had come from the lattcr's hands. The daughter of this Scottish Bishop (Miss Duff McFarlane) was then in England, at the death-bed of a gentleman named John Bowd- ler, when she received a letter from her father, inclosing that written by Bishop Chase. She read the letter to the dying man, and was di- rected by him to take from his drawer a purse containing ten guineas, and by the first con- venient opportunity send it to the Ohio Bishop. When the latter was in England he was in- vited to breakfast at the house of one of Miss McFarlane's relatives one morning, after which he was astonished to see the lady produce his 1G4 BUILDISG A COLLEGE J.V THE WOODS. blood-marked Wortliington letter, inquiring if lie were its author, and hand him the ten guineas which it had won from a dying man. Another of many interesting circumstances associated with Bishop Chase's residence at Wortliington, was his act in freeing a negro bought by him many years previous (in 1808), while living at New Orleans. This negro, Jack, was purchased for $500 as a house ser- vant, but, after five months' service, ran away and went, as was supposed, to England. Bishop Chase had long endeavored to forget to regret him, when, some years after settling at AVorthington, he received a letter from a friend at New Orleans, telling of the negro's return, arrest, identification, and imprisonment, and saving that he now awaited the arrival of the legal powers, to be sold for the benefit of his master. " This news," writes the Bishop, "put a new face on an old picture, every fea- ture of which the writer had been endeavoring to forget for eleven years. And now he had reasons, peculiar to his condition, for dismiss- ing it entirely from his mind; for although BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. 165 his once owning the slave Jack, like that of Philemon and other primitive Christians, was the result of providential necessity ; and al- though Jack, like Onesimus, might be consid- ered morally bound to return to his master, yet now, under present circumstances, if his mas- ter were to reclaim and sell him for money, his whole diocese would attribute it to a prin- ciple of covetousness, the great idol which, at the present day, all are so much inclined to worship, and thus his usefulness in Ohio would be destroyed forever. And though this ty- rant — the love of money — rules over the hearts of so many, yet all are very jealous of the af- fections of the clergy in this respect, and lain would starve their bodies to save their souls. The writer saw, or thought he saw, it would be so here; for though his diocese gave him nothing to live on, yet were he to reclaim his servant Jack, or even to sue for the money which the New Orleans Church owed him, and which they have since, in 1840, so honor- ably paid him ($1,500), all would have fallen on his character without mercy, and he would lt',0 BVILDISG A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. have labored among them in vain. Therefore, withafull determination to bury the whole mat- ter in oblivion, he wrote to his friends to eman- cipate his servant Jack, and let him go whither- soever lie pleased; that if he would pay his prison fees and other costs of suit, it would be all his master wanted." This emancipation act, was apparently the result, certainly, of a pretty strong chain of logic, and perhaps, privately, the good Bishop did not credit him- self with any special generosity in conse- quence. He adds, however, in making the record : "And why, the reader will ask, has this grave of oblivion been disturbed here? Why not sutler Jack to rest in his qnict bed? The answer is, because there was more in this than appears. Jack becomes hereafter, in this history of the writer's life, an important per- sonage, and proves, however insignificant in himself, to be one instrument among many of the means, in the hand of Providence, of res- cuing the writer from great distress in Lon- don, and. by consequence, of enabling him to found an institution, now the ornament of the BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. 167 West." This, of course, was Kenyon College. But I shall explain the negro's providential influence in another place. Returning from Worthington to Columbus, I passed the Bishop's old farm, about half a mile south of the town. The farm-house, a low two-storied frame, stands about a hundred and fifty yards back from the Columbus turnpike, directly east from the first toll-gate, with a fine old apple orchard between it and the pub- lic road. After the incorporation of Kenyon College, and its first beginning there, a few additional log buildings for temporary use were erected. These have long since passed away. It was at this old farm-house that the late Chief Justice, Salmon P. Chase, went through bis studies under the direction of his uncle, the Bishop, preparatory to entering Dart- mouth College ; and at about the same time a son of Henry Clay (who Avas instrumental to- ward Bishop Chase's success in enlisting sym- pathy for his purpose in England) was also a pupil in the farm-house seminary. 168 BUILDING A COLLEGE IX THE WOODS. II. KENTON COLLEGE. Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College "has not the universal sentiment of the " Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," but it expresses as no other poem, I believe, has ever yet expressed so well, the feeling one has in revisiting the scenes of school-boy experience, after long absence and the world have inter- vened — when he finds himself, a boy's ghost, in the midst of posterity. And when, ap- proaching Gambier, upon the Mount Vernon road (Gambier is five miles eastward from Mount Vernon), the dusky steeple of Kenyon College w T as seen far off" among the tree-tops, I found myself repeating almost unconsciously — deposing meanwhile the long departed " Elenry" (Henry the Sixth was the founder of Eton) in the fourth line, and substituting the possessive of Bishop Chase, — the first verses of that poem : BUILDING A COLLEGE IX THE WOODS. ]69 " Ye distant spires, ye antique towers, That crown the watery glade, Where grateful Science still adores Iler Chase's holy shade," — although, if a statement of the Rev. Dr. William Sparrow, one of the early Professors of Kenyon, is to he received, Science had not, perhaps, the most assured reason for gratitude in tliis case. Professor Sparrow wrote, that Bishop Chase, upon one occasion, when the propriety of getting philosophical and scien- tific apparatus was urged by a Kentucky gen- tleman who had two sons in the college, an- swered somewhat emphatically that Science was not the object of the institution. And certainly Science was not an original object in the foundation of Kenyon College ; it was Re- ligion — the college as a secular institution was an after-thought and secondary. Science, to be admitted, must administer to Religion. Five years after his consecration, Bishop Chase found himself in a diocese which was as yet a wide wilderness, with but five or six clergy in all; and, after an appeal to the East- 170 BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. era Church for Episcopal missionaries, failed to have his hands lifted up and strengthened. He was disheartened. The graduates of Eastern colleges and of the General Episcopal Theo- logical Seminary, at New York, did not indi- cate any disposition, while they could have good livings and pleasant churches near home, to venture into wild lands, and few young men could be sent from the struggling West to the East for education as ministers ; those few who went were also perhaps disposed to remain. There seemed little hope to the first Western Bishop, zealous for the Church, when one of his addresses to the Ohio Convention of six presbyters and deacons was noticed favorably in a prominent British Church organ. This circumstance, to which his attention was called by his son Philander (who had previously been a teacher in the Worthington seminary, but was recently ordained a minister, and was soon to die of a consumption with which he was then ill), at once suggested to him the feasibility of a Theological Seminary in Ohio, tor the education of a ministry to the manor BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. 171 born, and also a personal mission to England for the purpose of soliciting aid therefor. The thought took immediate shape in action ; — Bishop Chase made up his mind to start for England the coming autumn, it being now the middle of June. As preliminary, however, he addressed a circular letter to the American Bishops, advising them of his plan, and asking their sympathy and countenance in carrying it out. He also asked the prayers of the Church for his success. Before receiving answers to his circular, he started with his family from Cincinnati (where he was then residing as President of the Cincinnati College) in his pri- vate carriage — himself the coachman, for he could afford no other — and so journeyed eight hundred miles to Kingston, New York, where his family was to remain with relatives during his absence in Europe. Arriving at Kingston, he found a letter from Bishop llobart, of New York, emphatically discouraging his zealous purpose — arguing its . impropriety, proclaiming its object unneces- sary and uncalled for, asserting the prior claim 172 BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. of the General Seminary to help from abroad, if any were to be solicited, and indicating plainly his determination to oppose Bishop Chase's efforts (if he should persist in making them) in England, whither he was himself ex- pecting to start at nearly the same time. This was a sort of spiritual bombshell, with the fuse manifestly burning, to Bishop Chase's nearest friends and relatives, and they looked woeful. He was made of other stuff, however, and did not change bis mind. Two other let- ters — from Bishops Ravenscroft and Bowen — were received, approving his purpose and wish- ing him God-speed; other Bishops were silent, and these were presumed to be (as Bishop Ho- bart had informed him, indeed, that they were) against him. Bishop Chase's will was un- moved — he was determined to have bis way. "At length," he writes, " came the 1st of Oc- tober, the day fixed on while in Ohio for his embarkation. There was one clergyman in New York who ventured to accompany him to the ship, for whom in remembrance of this good deed he will never cease to pray. They BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. 173 walked together, while his wife and invalid son rode to White Hall in a coach, in which he embraced for the last time on earth his dar- ling son. . . . Soon the anchor was up and the ship at sea. All the passengers seemed happy, and the writer tried to feel so ; but the remembrance of what he had left be- hind—his sick son, his anxious wife, his help- less children, his suffering diocese, and his an- gry friends— forbade ; and, when he looked on the waters, he knew not who, if any, would welcome him with their greeting; but he was well assured who would attempt to drive him from the English shores, for from his own lips he heard the promise." This last expression doubtless refers to a personal interview with Bishop Hobart, whose name is only indicated by a in Bishop Chase's autobiography. He had previously requested the prayers of the church for a person going to sea, he tells us, adding: "In this he was denied — on what principle he never asked." Bishop Chase landed in England early in No- vember, 1823, and at once found the air full of 174 BUILDING A COLLEGE IX THE WOODS. ill-omens. Every- where he saw indications of what is called the cold shoulder. A paper im- pugning his case, motives, and character, had been printed and circulated, and there was a wide-spread prejudice against him. He had, however, gained a few friends himself, and by means of a letter of introduction written to Lord Gambier, of the Admiralty, by Henry Clay (who had met Lord Gambier during the negotiations at Ghent), he was admitted to the acquaintance of that nobjeman, by whom his cause was earnestly espoused, although he, too, had read and was at first prejudiced by the hos- tile publication. Gradually the opposition be- gan to give way ; other friends were won, and finally a stroke of Providence, as the Bishop chose to look upon it, created a strong current of feeling in his favor. I have mentioned, as an episode in Bishop Chase's Life at Worthington, the freeing of his New Orleans negro servant, Jack, who, after an interval of eleven years, had been arrested and held subject to his master's orders. In 1824, the British Parliament was much divided on BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. 1 75 the proposed abolition of slavery in the West Indies, and whoever showed a favorable dispo- sition toward the enslaved race was sure of a large adherence of friends. At this time a benevolent gentleman named Joseph Butter- worth, a friend in sympathy and acting with Wilberforce, was also a member of Parliament. Through intimate acquaintance with the police, according to Bishop Chase, he knew that the Bishop had been in London ever since he took up his residence in a certain quarter, except during a visit to the north of England. " He knew," Bishop Chase writes, " that he was there unnoticed and unknown, from November till after his return in the spring from the north, and he had thought little of him because others did so. 'And how,' the reader will ask, ' came Mr. Butterworth to think otherwise of the neg- lected being living in No. 10 Furtherstone Buildings, High Holborn ?' Simply because Dr. Robert Dow, of New Orleans, came to town. 'And how could this gentleman in- fluence so sound a judgment as that of Mr. Joseph Butterworth ?' " Dr. Dow, the New 176 BUILDING A COLLEGE IX THE WOODS. Orleans friend, who had written to Bishop Chase regarding his negro servant, and through whom the latter was emancipated, had started to make his home in his native land, Scotland. Wishing to invest some funds, while stopping in London on his way, he had consulted Joseph Butterworth, and in the conversation which followed Mr.B.had inquired, since Dr. Dow had come from America, whether he knew Bishop Chase. Yes, Bishop Chase had once been his pastor at Xew Orleans. Then as to his real char- acter? "Always good," was the answer; — why was it questioned? lie then learned of Bishop Chase's presence in England, and of the peculiar neglect shown him. Dr. Dow ex- pressed surprise. Mr. Butterworth observed that there must be something singular in this gentleman, or he would not have remained voluntarily in the position wherein he was re- garded by the public — Bishop Chase, in order to keep the peace of the Church, having sto- ically refrained from answering the charges printed and circulated to his prejudice. Dr. Dow replied that lie never knew any thing BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. 177 singular in Bishop Chase except in the case oi his emancipating a yellow slave, adding that he hardly presumed that would hurt him in Eng- land, although in New Orleans it had been con- sidered foolish as well as singular. The Doctor then related to Mr. B. the story of the escaped house-servant, and of his emancipation by Bishop Chase. This gained the Bishop a sudden tide of friendship and .favor, which was unac- countable until sometime after, when a let- ter from his old New Orleans physician shed light upon it. In this way, according to the Bishop's interpretation of events, the negro, Jack, became a founder — or a powerful instru- ment and lever in the foundation — of Ivenyon College. Mr. Butterworth had sought Bishop Chase, invited him to his house, introduced him to influential friends, and the Ohio Church stock was at once popular. Miss McFarlane, the Scotch Bishop's daughter, who showed Bishop Chase his own letter written to Br. Jarvis from "Worthington, with the mark of his bloody sweat upon it, also became a valuable friend, securing the favor of Lady Rosse, whose sub- 178 BVILDIXO A COLLEGE IS THE WOODS. Bcription built Rosse Chapel, named after her, at Gambier. Thesuccessof Bishop Chase's foreign mission was now assured. lie returned to America in the early autumn of 1824, with a subscription of about five thousand guineas — a sum much larger in effect then than now. Amongthe names upon the li^t, which included several hundred of the clergy and laity, were some of the most eminent ones in Church and State of the King- dom — such as the Lord Bishops of London, Durham, St. David's, and Chester; the Deans of Canterbury and Salisbury; Lords Kenyon, Gambier, Bexley, and Barhani; the dowager Countess of Rossc, and Miss Hannah More. The subscriptions ranged from one pound upward to over four hundred pounds sterling, and the transmission of the funds awaited only the action of Henry Clay, who was named as an umpire in the selection of a location for the contemplated institution. It had been originally intended to establish the Theological Seminary and College upon Bishop Chase's Worthington farm, he having BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. ]79 agreed to give it for that purpose; but it was provided that if another more desirable loca- tion should be gratuitously offered, then Bishop Chase's land should revert to him. The Theo- logical Seminary of Ohio was begun, however, upon the farm near "Worthington, under an act of incorporation passed by the Ohio Legis- lature, in 1825 ; and in January, 182G, a sup- plementary act created the faculty of a college, under the designation of " The President and Faculty of Kenyon College." Mrs. Betsy Reed, of Putnam, Ohio, meanwhile offered to give a thousand acres of laud situated on Alum Creek, several miles northeast of Worthington, as a seat for the College, and for a time this seemed preferable in the eyes of the Bishop to the "Worthington land. But there was a contest of opinion, among those now become interested, as to the most desira- ble location; Charles Hammond, Rufus King, John Bailhache, Colonel John Johnston, and others — who, I believe, were among the origi- nal Trustees — desiring to place the College near or in one of the larger cities. Cincinnati, 180 BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. Chillicothc, and one or two other places were suggested. Bishop Chase opposed bis will to these, holding it of vital importance that the institution so dear to his soul, and for which he had already sacrificed so much in time, patience, and energy, should he beyond the immediate influence of cities, on wide lands of its own, through which it could have a power by right of the soil, and exercise a strong local influence and government. Col. Johnston criticized this theory, saying that to build up a literary institution from the stump in the woods was a chimerical project; — it would surely fail and become an object of ridi- cule. Presently, after the Bishop had begun to make some clearings on Mrs. Reed's Alum Creek lands, his attention was directed bv Daniel S. Korton and Henry B. Curtis, of Mount Vernon, to a large tract of wild land in Knox county, owned by William Hogg, of Brownsville, Pennsylvania, and this proved so desirable in his eyes that he at once made a contract to purchase it, subject to the approval of the Trustees and of Henry Clay. This BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. 181 purchase, after considerable debate, was finally approved; when Mr. Hogg consented to make one-fourth of the price of the land (eight thous- and acres at three dollars per acre) a free gift, and, for eighteen thousand dollars, conveyed the title to the Trustees of the Theological Seminary of the Diocese of Ohio. This land, occupied by Ivenyon College for over half a century, was a wilderness, but a beautiful one, and as healthy and happy a lo- cation for a college as could be found in the Ohio Valley. In June, 1826, Bishop Chase started with his little army of occupation for the chosen spot, which he named Gambier Hill, after his first powerful and steadfast English friend. " His hired man and his little son, Dudley, were the only persons who accompanied him from Worthington to the promised land on this lonely journey," the heroic Bishop writes, add- ing: "And must it be called lonely? Nay, he felt it otherwise. He experienced a conscious- ness of Divine aid in commencing this great work, which convinced him he was not alone. 132 BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE HOODS. God Mas with him, and, though like Jacob, ho should have nothing but the ground to rest on, and a stone for a pillow, he trusted that God's presence would be his "support." Gam- bier Hill, upon which Bishop Chase fixed the location of the college buildings, is a level ridge running north and south, elevated about one hundred and fifty feet above the Kokosing, which flows from a pretty valley on the east- ern side around its southern base, and, after making a sort of gigantic ox-bow in the wide lowlands to the southeast, disappears far away to the northeast. From its top a variety of as charming landscape is visible as perhaps any outlook in the State affords. The valley of the Ivokosing eastward is the picture of " a smiling land ; " westward are the suggestions of an unconquered wilderness. Oaks predom- inate in the surrounding forest; — how gor- geous I remember them in far-back autumnal seasons ! Here is the picture, drawn by Bishop Chase, of < tambier Hill, at his first occupation: "The whole surface of the hill was then a windfall, bring a great part or it covered with BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. 183 fallen and upturned trees, between and over which had come up a second growth of thick trees and bushes. It was on such a place as this (proverbially impervious even to the hunters after wolves, which made it their co- vert) that the writer pitched his tent, if such it might be called. On the south end or promontory of this hill (near to which, below, ran the road used by the first settlers), grew some tall oak trees, which evidently had es- caped the hurricane in days of yore. Under the shelter of these some boards in a light wagon were taken nearly to the top of the bill ; there they were dropped, and it was with these the writer's house was built, after the brush was with great difficulty cleared away. Two crotched sticks were driven into the ground, and on them a transverse pole was placed, and on the pole was placed the brush, inclining to the ground each way. The ends or gable to this room, or roof shelter, were but slightly closed by some clapboards rived on the spot from a fallen oak tree. The beds to sleep on were thrown on bundles of straw, 184 BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. kept up from the damp ground by a kind of temporary platform, resting on stakes driven deeply into the earth. This was the first habi- tation on Gambier Hill, and it stood nearly on the site where now rises the noble edifice of Kenyon College." Such an "opening" as this would not sur- prise us if made by an adventurous pioneer, with the object of building a rude home in the backwoods, but it appears in a different light when looked upon as the work of a learned Episcopal Bishop, — who, a year be- fore, had been entertained by Lords and La- dies of the English aristocracy, and treated with respect and reverence by high dignitaries of the Church of England, — preparatory to founding an institution which he fondly hoped would in time be a great center of light and culture. What a task-work had this one man set before himself, and how strenuously he wrought to accomplish his purpose! "It is said," Bishop Chase writes in allusion to this seemingly "forlorn advance": "It is said, by those not intimately acquainted with the facts BUILDING A COLLEGE IX THE WOODS. 185 and the nature of things, that the writer might have avoided the difficulties and exposures here described by residing in the nearest vil- lage, or even by taking shelter, for a time, in the little log cabins already erected on the prem- ises, from one to two miles off. Alas ! if such had been his course, no beginning would have been made to the great work. He wanted money to pay a resolute person to go forward in a work like this, if such could he found; he wanted money to pay for his own board in a village four miles off; he wanted money to hire even his common hands and teams, — those he used here being the hands and wagons usually employed on his own farm at Worth- ington. Now, if ever there was a necessit}- for saying come, and not go, to work, that necessity existed here, the donations hitherto collected being all pledged for the lands. The word was said, and, under Providence, to this he owes his final success." The first thing done was to dig a well; and this reminds me that Bishop Chase began his great undertaking with a temperance reform. 186 BVILDIXG A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. He stipulated that no liquor should be used by the men employed in his building. lie feared it might compromise in some way the future College. This caused him some trouble. There was, soon after the beginning, what may be called an incipient whisky rebellion among his hired hands. They at length sent him a petition asking for a glass three times a day, saying, at the close: " We think the expense will be repaid to the institution tenfold." The Bishop appointed a meeting with them, took his seat, embarrassed, upon apiece of elevated timber, told them quietly the story of his life and struggles, moved many of them to tears, and all went to work on the original temper- ance platform ! In a letter to bis wife, written soon after his arrival on the ground, he says : " If you ask how J gel along without money, I answer, the Lord keepeth me. "What do you think of His mercy in sending good Mr. Davis with half a cheese from his mother, and twenty-five dol- lars from his father, presented to me out of pure regard to the great and good work which BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. 187 God enables me to cany on ? Mr. Norton has sent me three hands for a short time. James Meleck came one day, and old Mr. Elliott another. We have built us a tent cabin, and if we had any one to cook for us we should live. It is impossible to make the hands board themselves. We must find them provisions ourselves, or have none to help us. If we can get the poor neighbors to cook a little for us we do well. Judy Holmes has been here for three days, and is now-engaged in surveying the north section. The streets and roads in this, the south section, have been laid out, as far as can be, till we find water. If this can not be obtained here we shall move to some other quarter. Tray send me, by Re- becca, two more beds and bedding similar to those I brought with me. I write you this by a poor, dim hog's-lard lamp, which, shining askance on my paper, will hardly permit me to say how faithfully I am your affectionate husband." Bishop Chase spent the following fall and winter in the Eastern States, soliciting further 188 BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. assistance toward the completion of the work begun by him, issuing there a "Plea on be- half of Religion and Learning in Ohio," from which season of effort about $18,000 were real- ized. In June, 1827, the corner-stone of Ken- yon College was laid, and the neighborhood grow busy with the various workmen. In August of that j'ear the Bishop wrote "to his wife as follows: "The great work progresses slowly but surely. The basement story is now completed. The tall scaffold-poles now rear their heads all around the building. The joist timbers are now taking their places, and the frames of the partition walls below are putting together. The masons are pressing the carpenters, the carpenters the teamsters, and the teamsters the hewers. The whip- sawyers are not able to keep up with the demand in their line. The blacksmiths, two in number, are driven very hard to keep sharp the hammers and picks, repair the chains, mend wagons and make new irons for them, and shoes for twenty-eight cattle in the teams. Our log house, additional to that you saw, BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. 189 will receive its roof to-morrow, and, in the beginning of the week, I trust, will be occu- pied as a dining-room. The stone gothic building, for a Professor's house, must soon be plastered. I go to Mount Vernon to-morrow for a thousand things, and will put this in the post-office for you. We have now nearly sixty hands, all busy and faithfully at work ; an ac- count of each is taken every night." During all this week-day labor, the Bishop tells us, he was never unmindful of his sacred calling as a clergyman, officiating at Gambier, at Mount Vernon, or elsewhere in the neighborhood. Visiting Worthington in October, and finding his wife ill with typhoid fever, he feels the necessity of leaving her (her convalescence, however, had begun), asking her, the next evening afterward, in a letter: "Was this, my desertion of you, from my own incli- nation? No! Nothing but the great duty of overseeing what God hath so miraculously put into my hands could have persuaded me to do this. Even as it is, I feel a pang which I can not describe to you. My eyes fill with ]90 BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. tears when I think how I left you in sickness. But God's will he done ! My exile here is the result of this submission." Soon after he sees the good policy of build- ing a saw-mill — whip-sawyers were not suf- ficient, and the only saw-miller in the vicin- ity demanded exorbitant prices for lumber. The workmen approve, and the work is begun at once, all hands assisting. A dam is nearly completed, a long mill-race across a neck of low land (where a bend of the stream has formed the ox-bow already mentioned) is commenced. The news of this extravagant undertaking travels through the diocese, and the Bishop's plans are pronounced rash and visionary. The digging of the race is begun — the tail-race, indeed, is almost finished; but the earth- scrapers progress slowly. Meanwhile the first story above the basement of the main college building is erected, on one side, as far as the windows. But how about the mill-race? The equinoctial storm is due and dreaded. It ar- rives. The rains fell and the floods came. The Kokosing rose to an unusual height, and, BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. 191 somewhat aggravated by the dam, overflowed the lowlands. As !N"oah from the Ark, the anxious Bishop looked down from Gambier Hill. lie felt that all was lost. The dam could not be seen. The sky, however, cleared ; the waters subsided : the dam was still there, and the head-race was there — a channel of running water already — a special gift of Providence, that saved a large expense of money and labor. " This mark of Providen- dential goodness," writes the Bishop, " was of signal service in building Kenyon College." This miracle of the mill-race won over to the Bishop's side., it seems, the skeptical driver of the local stage-coach, who was hitherto of the opposition, sneering and jesting at the mad college-builder. One clay, shortly after- ward, it is related, his carriage being full and the driver being seated, by its construction, in juxtaposition with the passengers, a conversa- tion was begun, in which the plan of Kenyon College was condemned and ridiculed, and its failure predicted. This was affirmed as the opinion of all in the coach, and then asserted 192 BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. to be that of all people throughout the coun- try. " The Bishop has no friends," they said; '•his plan is hopeless." "You are a little too fast," said the driver; "a little too fast, gen- tlemen, in what you say. Bishop Chase has one friend." "And who is he?" was the common question. "It is one," the driver said, " whom if you knew you would not despise; and knowing his favor to the Bishop, you would no longer speak thus." " And who is he? Who can this friend be?" was the re- iterated question. "Gentlemen," said the driver, solemnly, " God is Bishop Chase's friend, and my proof is the fact that ho caused the late equinoctial rain-storm to dig his mill- race for him, thus saving him the expense of many hundred dollars/' It is hardly worth while to continue in de- tail this story of a heroic persistence: what- ever the results of the college itself have been or may lie, Kenyon College was built ; the cen- tral building was completed With the Bishop's own supervision; Rosse Chapel (endowed by Lady Rosse, and named after her), was begun ; BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. ]93 the College, having been removed from "Worth- ington (where it had been carried on meanwhile upon the Bishop's farm), in 1828, was recog- nized as a living fact — and Bishop Chase was the one man, under God, who, against many and great obstacles, had made it such. His struggle in its behalf was a fight with the Dragon, and he, a true Knight of the Red Cross, came off conqueror. But, if I am rightly informed, Bishop Chase was better fitted to build than to govern. Ko man could have done the task- work he had accomplished without something more than selfish devotion. There may have been a ground-work of personal ambition under- neath his purpose, but it must still have been a noble one, and breathed the true air of re- ligion. Soon after the removal of the Col- lege to Gambier, divisions began to show themselves between the Bishop, who was ex- officio President of the Institution, and the Faculty. Bitter feelings grew up between him and some of the Professors. Perhaps the Bishop, who did not always think it necessary 194 BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. to attend the Faculty meetings, was too free to ignore its judgments and decisions, and make college law a matter of Lis own per- sonal discretion. IT is disposition was not, other things considered, an unfortunate one in planning and building the material struc- ture, but seemed doubtfully fitted to conduct the moral and spiritual institution. I have read some of the various documents printed regarding this matter, and am inclined to think Bishop Chase was in error. He was arbitrary, impetuous, fierce, and unjust, at times. The disagreements at length led to his resignation, in 1820, at a time when his services in the material affairs of the College (whose buildings were still in progress) were thought indispensable. Consequently his re- signation was not accepted by the Diocesan Convention. Another year having passed, and the state of ill-feeling and jealousy yet exist- ing, Bishop Chase again presented his resig- nation to the Convention held that year at Gambler. This time the resignation was ac- cepted, — perhaps contrary to the expectation BUILDING A COLLEGE IA THE WOODS. 195 of the Bishop ; for it is reported that, on the day following, lie shook the dust of Kenyon from his feet, mounted his horse, rode hastily away, and betook himself to the place of a rela- tive in Holmes county, called by him "the Valley of Feace," leaving his family to pack up and follow him at their leisure. He never returned. After having settled for a while in Michigan, he went to Illinois, where, at a place called by him " The Robin's Nest," he founded a new institution known as Jubilee College. A gentleman described " The Rob- in's Nest" to me as a row of three or four little log houses, terminated by a still smaller frame building. This was the characteristic beginning of Jubilee College, of which other- wise I know nothing. Indeed, Bishop Ch:i-c'~ career does not interest me particularly, ex- cept as the founder of Kenyon College, which, I trust, shall yet prove more greatly deserv- ing of his faith and works. He had earned the gratitude of his Church in Ohio by his efforts in its behalf; and, perhaps, there was hardly so much tenderness shown to his tern- 196 BUILDING A COLLEGE IS THE WOODS. perament as ho had earned by his long-suffer- ing heroic endurance and persistent energy. Yet, though in effect banished from the place for which lie wrought and fought so long, Kenyon College is, to-day, with every stone in its every building, his monument and witness. A portrait of him, said to he life-like, painted on the commission of some foreign admirer and friend, while he was in England in 1824, was sent to this country several years ago, and presented to the college. I saw it in the li- brary. It shows some strong points of resem- blance to the late Chief Justice, I think, in his younger days. And I may here remark, by the way, that the remains of the Acland printing-press, purchased for the» use of the Ohio Episcopal College, with a separate sub- Bcription raised among the ladies of the Eng- lish nobility by Lady Acland, wife of Sir Thomas Acland, during the Bishop's mission to England, were pointed out to me in the back door-yard of a little private printing- office carried on in Gambler. I shall not go into a careful further history BUILDING A COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. JOJ of the College. Bishop Chase's record, in connection with it, seems to me unusually in- teresting, and I have merely tried to sketch it with the help of his own autobiography, added to whatever personal knowledge I pos- sessed or could obtain. I may say, however, that the College has had a struggle for life since the old Bishop's exit; and its progress has depended on often-repeated ' ; beggings." (This word was given to me, as the right one, by an accomplished gentleman of Gambier.*) Bishop Mcllvaine also took up one or two subscriptions in England — the first as long ago as 1835 — and several in the United States. The buildings of Kenyon College are as no- ble as those of any institution of learning in America. The college building proper is a large and handsome one, of dark gray sand- stone, one hundred and ninety feet long and *Rev. Alfred Blake, since deceased, a schoolmate and classmate of Chief Justice Chase — born, like him, at Keene, N. H — who, for many years, kept an excel- lent classical school for boys at Gambier. 198 BUILDING .1 COLLEGE IN THE WOODS. four stories high, including the basement, with turrets, pinnacles, and a Lei fry, topped with a spire one hundred and seventeen feet high, in the center. This edifice stands upon Bouthern end of Gambier Hill, fronts northward, and overlooks the valley of the Kokosing for many miles. Half a mile to the north of the college building is Bexley Hall (named after Lord Bexley), erected for the use of the Theological Seminary exclusively. It is an elegant and tasteful structure. Half way hit ween these two buildings, on either side of the main street or avenue, is the town or village of Gambier; a little to the east of which, but hidden by trees, is Milnor Hall, designed for the grammar-school, and named after Lady Milnor. An extensive park in- closes most of the college buildings. Upou the western side of the path through the park is Rosse Chapel — built with the endowment of, and named after, Lady Rosse — a large, low building in sandstone, of Ionic architecture. Nearly opposite, on the eastern side, is Ascension Hall, a fine, large, four-storied L'UILDISQ A COLLEGE IX THE WOODS. 199 edifice, of light- colored freestone. This con- tains the recitation rooms, society apartments, College library, etc. Near the northern en- trance of the park, and on the eastern side, is the Church of the Holy Spirit, completed in 1871, a gift of the members of Ascension Par- ish, New York City, and of their former rec- tor, Bishop Bedell. This is built of free- stone, and is one of the most beautiful ecclesi- astical structures in the West. Although it can not bo said of Kenyon's graduates, as the poet Gray sang of the alumni of Cambridge, in the "realms of empyrean day": " There sit the sainted Sage, the Bard divine, The few whom Genius gave to shine, Through every unborn age and undiscovered clime. Rapt in celestial transport they, Yet hither oft a glance from high They send of tender sympathy, To bless the place, where on their opening soul, First the genuine ardor stole; " for Kenyon has yet sent forth neither a Mil- ton nor a Newton ; nevertheless, among its students or graduates have been Chief Justice 200 BUJLDIXO A COLLEGE IN THE H Chase, whose preparation for Dartmouth Col- lege was made in his uncle the Bishop's farm- house, at Worthington (as already mentioned) ; Edwin M. Stanton, the late Secretary of War; David Davis, late Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court; Henry Winter Davis, so prominent as a Maryland Congress- man, orator and patriot, during the War of the Rebellion ; Hon. Stanley Matthews ; 1 ' dent Rutherford B. Hayes ; with a long list of clergymen, lawyers, and others, scattered throughout the country, and having local dis- tinction and influence. ^Y^P^^