REESE LIBRARY 
 
 < )! rn i: 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 
 
LOTUS-EATING. 
 
LOTUS-EATING: 
 
 SUMMER BOOK, 
 
 BY 
 
 GEOEGE WILLIAM CURTIS, 
 
 AUTIIOR OF " NILE NOTES," " HOWADJI IN SYRIA," ETC. 
 
 ILLUSTRATED BY KENSETT. 
 
 "There a rosemary, that s for remembrance. 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 01* 
 
 NEW YOKK: 
 
 HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, 
 FRANKLIN SQUARE. 
 

 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand 
 eight hundred and fifty-two, by 
 
 HARPER & BROTHERS, 
 
 in the Clerk s Office of the District Court of the Southern District 
 of New York. 
 
OF THE 
 
 SE 
 O 
 IVERSITT 
 
 TO 
 
 CHARLES A. DANA. 
 iZTbe Cfiters 
 
 ORIGINALLY ADDRESSED TO THE EDITOR, 
 
 ARE NOW 
 
 AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED TO THE FRIEND. 
 NEW YORK, June, 1852 
 
Page 
 I. THE HUDSON AND TUB RHINE, 11 
 
 II. CATSKILL, 28 
 
 III. CATSKILL FALLS, . 43 
 
 IV. TRENTON, 59 
 
 V. NIAGARA, .75 
 
 VI. NIAGARA, AGAIN, 89 
 
 VII. SARATOGA, 105 
 
 VIII. LAKE GEORGE. . . . 127 
 
 IX. NAHANT, . . 145 
 
 X. NEWPORT, 163 
 
 XI. NEWPORT, AGAIN, 179 
 
 OF THE 
 
 TJNIVERSITY 
 
THE HUDSON AND THE MINE 
 
Ittbon anJK tije Ejjitu, 
 
 JULY. 
 NEWBURGH ON THE HUDSON. $ 
 
 IIEKE could a man meet 
 the summer more 
 pleasantly than in the 
 fragrant silence of a 
 garden whence have 
 , emanated the most 
 practical and poetic 
 suggestions toward 
 the greater dignity, 
 comfort and elegance 
 of country life ? If the aspect of our 
 
 "" ^x^ 
 
 s landscape yearly improves, in the 
 i Vt </, beauty of the houses, and in tasteful and 
 
 * / ii* I J 
 
 ! | picturesque rural treatment, our enjoyment 
 of it will be an obligation to Mr. Downing. 
 
 Not four days away from the city, I have not yet 
 done roaming, bewildered with the summer s breath, 
 through the garden, smelling of all the flowers, and 
 
12 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 returning to lie upon the lawn, and bask, dreaming, 
 in the July sun. What a cold word is "beautiful" 
 to express the ecstasy which, in some choice moments 
 of midsummer, suddenly overwhelms your mind, like 
 an unexpected and exquisite thought. 
 
 I found a few late spring-flowers this morning, upon 
 the lawn, and welcomed them with Eobert Herrick s 
 Greeting to the Yiolets : 
 
 Welcome, maids of honor, 
 
 You do bring 
 
 In the Spring, 
 And wait upon her. 
 
 She has virgins many. 
 
 Fresh and fair; 
 
 Yet you are 
 More sweet than any. 
 
 You re the Maiden Posies, 
 
 And so graced 
 
 To be placed 
 Fore damask roses. 
 
 Yet though thus respected, 
 
 By-and-by, 
 
 You do lie, 
 Poor girls, neglected. 
 
 As I lay repeating these lines, whose melody is as 
 delicate as the odor of the flowers they sing, I saw 
 the steamer, crowded with passengers, hurrying 
 away from the city. For none more than the Amer 
 icans make it a principle to desert the city, and none 
 less than Americans know how to dispense with it 
 
THE HUDSON AND THE KHINE. 13 
 
 So we compromise by taking the city with us, and 
 the country gently laughs us to scorn. 
 
 Although the day was tropical, on which we left 
 JSTew York, the "Reindeer" ran w T ith us as if we had 
 been mere Laplanders, and our way a frozen plain, 
 instead of the broad, blue river. It is only in the 
 steamer that the Hudson can be truly perceived and 
 enjoyed. In the Indian summer, the western shore, 
 seen from the railroad, is a swiftly unrolling pano 
 rama of dreams ; yet the rush, and roar, and sharp 
 steam-shriek would have roused Rip Van Winkle 
 himself, and the dust would have choked and blinded 
 him as he opened his eyes. The railroad will answer 
 to deliver legislators at Albany, although which 
 " side up" is a little uncertain. But the traveller who 
 loves the law of beauty and pursues pleasure, will 
 take the steamer and secure silence, cleanliness, suf 
 ficient speed, and an unencumbered enjoyment of 
 the landscape. 
 
 If the trains are as thronged as the boats, they do 
 well. It was curious to set forth upon a river-excur 
 sion, surrounded by hundreds bent upon similar sum 
 mer pleasures, and yet see no red hand-book and no 
 state-travelling carriage upon the forward deck, with 
 a state-travelling; countenance of an English milord 
 
 O O 
 
 on the inside, and the ruddy, round cheeks of state- 
 travelling Abigails, in the rumble behind. These are 
 
14 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 Rhenish reminiscences. But they are as much part 
 of a journey up the Rhine as Drachenfels or St. 
 Goar. 
 
 John Bull, upon his travels, is an old joke, as well 
 to himself as others ; and the amusement is never 
 exhausted. Yet he is the boldest and best of travel 
 lers. He carries bottled ale to Nineveh, and black 
 tea to the top of Mont Blanc, and haunts Norwegian 
 rivers with the latest improved angling " flies ; but 
 he carries integrity, heroism, and intelligence, also. 
 His patriotism amounts to prejudice ; yet, if there is 
 any cosmopolitan, it is John Bull. He takes pride, 
 indeed, in asserting his prejudices, and insisting 
 upon his black tea everywhere and in all societies. 
 But his sublime skepticism of any excellence out of 
 England is pleasanter than our crude mixture of 
 boastfulness and subserviency. It was remarkable 
 during the revolutions of 1848, in Europe, that there 
 were no monarchists so absolute as the Americans. 
 They declared, almost to a man, that Europe was not 
 fit for republicanism. As if time would ripen re 
 publics from despotism, so that, like mellow pears, 
 they would fall off without any confusion ; or as if it 
 were the habit of kings to educate their subjects to 
 dispense with royalty. 
 
 But it is still very amusing to see how the English 
 patronize the continent. They ascend the Rhine im- 
 
"TX-v 
 
 UNIVERSITY) 
 
 
 AND T^iL-BSIKKji>- 15 
 
 THE HUDSON 
 
 perturbably. They evidently feel that they arc con 
 ferring much more honor upon the landscape by 
 looking at it, than ever the landscape can give them 
 pleasure. This annual overflow of the continent with 
 Cockneys is the point of Thackeray s "Kickleburys 
 on the Khine" a picture whose breadth is hardly 
 broader than the reality, and which requires you to 
 be a traveller fully to enjoy. 
 
 This was the pith of my chat with Willow as we 
 sped along under the Palisades, and threaded the 
 Highlands. 
 
 Of course these comparisons soon led to the grand 
 question which usually consumes the three hours 
 from Murray-street to West Point the comparative 
 claims of interest in the rivers themselves. 
 
 The first day upon the Khine is an epoch in the 
 traveller s memory. I came out of the Tyrol through 
 Southern Germany to Heidelberg, and on a brilliant 
 July morning took the steamer at Mayence for Bop- 
 part, a few miles above Coblentz, and not far below 
 St. Goar. It was a soft, windless day. I lay in the 
 very bow of the boat, with a Scotch boy going home 
 for the summer from his school in Zurich. All day 
 he buzzed in my ears stories of Switzerland and 
 Scotland, and through his words I saw the misty and 
 snowy grandeur of each. Our way was straight over 
 the gleaming river, by the open spaces of Nassau 
 
LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 arid the sunny slopes of the vineyards of the Schlosa 
 Johannisberger, through the narrow pass of Bingen, 
 where the Highlands of the Ehine begin, and under 
 the Eudesheimer vines and the little castles, it still 
 wound onward, every mile revealing the picture 
 which fancy had so plainly seen, until in the late 
 afternoon I stepped ashore at Boppart. 
 
 On the other side of the river were the ruins of 
 the twin castles of "The Brothers," which every 
 reader of Bulwer s Pilgrims of the Ehine remembers, 
 and crossing in a small boat at twilight, we climbed 
 the conical hills and rambled and stumbled by moon 
 light among the ruins. The feeling of that evening 
 was of the nameless sadness which is always born of 
 moonlight in spots of romantic association. Yet it 
 would not be possible to experience precisely the 
 same thing upon any other than that river. The 
 Ehine has its own character, its own romance ; and 
 Uhland s ballad with which I accompanied the slow 
 dip of the oars, as at midnight we rowed homewards, 
 is the music and the meaning of the Ehine. 
 
 Many a year is in its grave, 
 Since I crossed the restless wave, 
 And the evening, fair as ever, 
 Shines on ruin, rock, and river. 
 
 Then, in this same boat, beside, 
 Sat two comrades, old and tried; 
 
THE HUDSON AND THE KHINE. 17 
 
 One with all a father s truth, 
 One with all the fire of youth. 
 
 One on earth in silence wrought, 
 And his grave in silence sought, 
 But the younger, brighter form, 
 Passed in battle and in storm. 
 
 So whene er I turn my eye 
 
 Back upon the days gone by, 
 
 Saddening thoughts of friends come o er me, 
 
 Friends, who closed their course before me. 
 
 Yet what binds us friend to friend 
 But that soul with soul can blend 7 
 Soul-like were those hours of yore 
 Let us walk in soul once more ! 
 
 Take, boatman, thrice thy fee : 
 
 Take, I give it willingly, 
 
 For, invisible to thce, 
 
 Spirits twain have crossed with me. 
 
 A few evenings afterward I was standing with a 
 fellow-countryman upon the terrace of the castle of 
 Heidelberg, looking out toward the glorious opening 
 of the Neckar valley upon the plain of the Khine, 
 and was severely taken to task by him for my indis 
 creet Rhenish raptures and absolute light-speaking 
 of the Hudson. 
 
 " Of course you don t prefer the Rhine !" exclaimed 
 my friend with patriotic ire. 
 
 I contemplated the height of the terrace from the 
 ground, and accommodated my answer to it. 
 
 "Yes ! c for this night only I think I do. But I 
 
18 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 have no doubt I shall sleep it off. I am sure I shall 
 l>e better in the morning." 
 
 : Strange words they seemed of slight and scorn, 
 
 My true-love sighed for sorrow, 
 And looked me in the face, to think 
 I thus could speak of Yarrow." 
 
 I did not sleep it off, however, that night, at least, 
 for a day or two afterward I returned to the Rhine, 
 and in my friend s absence carried the question clear 
 against the Hudson. 
 
 The difference between the rivers is that of the 
 countries. The Rhine is a narrow belt of turbid 
 water winding among the vineyards that wall it upon 
 each side. In its beautiful reach between Bingen 
 and Bonn, the only beautiful part of the river, except 
 near Lake Constance, it has no shores but vineyarded 
 hillsides, and occasionally a narrow grain field in 
 front of them. There are no trees, no varieties of 
 outline, and the vines, regularly planted and kept 
 short for wine, not left to luxuriate at length, for 
 beauty, are a little formal in their impression. The 
 castles the \vant of which is so lamented upon the 
 Hudson shores are not imposing, but romantic. 
 They are rather small and toy-like, and stand like 
 small sentries upon small hills commanding the en 
 trances to small valleys. 
 
 But they are interesting enough to make their own 
 
THE HUDSON AND THE RHINE. 19 
 
 traditions, even better than those you read in Mur 
 ray s red-book : and the mass of travellers who merely 
 pass in the steamers, when the white glare of noon 
 hardens the hills, as if they were sullen, and would 
 not reveal their charms to a hasty stare, can have 
 but faint idea of the tranquil and romantic beauty 
 of the river. 
 
 A river is the coyest of friends. You must love it 
 and live with it before you can know it. 
 
 "And you must love him, ere to you 
 He will seem worthy of your love." 
 
 The Rhine, after all, is the theme and mistress of 
 romance and song although to many of us, that 
 fame be only traditional. The Rhine songs, both 
 those which directly celebrate its beauty, and those 
 which are ballads of life upon its banks, are among 
 the most sonorous in the songful German literature, 
 
 It is the Rhine wine, pure Rhenish, the blood of 
 the life that blooms along these monotonous hillsides, 
 which is the wine poetic, that routs all the temper 
 ance societies. The foliage of the vine itself is fair 
 and lustrous. It wreatnes the hot hills with a gor 
 geous garland, and makes the day upon the Rhine a 
 festival. Then the old crumbling castles, if vague in 
 fame, are so much the more suggestive, and from one 
 shattered buttress to another, miles away on a dis- 
 
20 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 tant hilltop, the gay vine-garland sweeps, alive now, 
 as much as ever, and by the vivid contrast softens 
 the suggestion and deepens the delight. 
 
 Near St. Goar you glide under the rock of the 
 Lorelei. Henry Heine in one of his tender songs 
 relates its mournful tradition, which is the most 
 beautiful and wildest of the Ehine. "Willow and 
 Xtopher and I sing it nightly as we lie on the lawn 
 here, watching the moonlight streaming upon the 
 river, and to-day Xtopher has translated it without 
 letting the aroma escape. The first line of the last 
 verse is hard to render. The verb in German ex 
 presses the river embracing the boat and sailor, like 
 a serpent with its folds. 
 
 I know not what it presages, 
 
 This heart with sadness fraught, 
 T is a tale of the olden ages, 
 
 That will not from ray thought. 
 
 The air grows cool and darkles, 
 
 The Rhine flows calmly on, 
 The mountain summit sparkles 
 
 In the light of the setting sun. 
 
 There sits in soft reclining 
 
 A maiden wondrous fair, 
 With golden raiment shining, 
 
 And combing her golden hair. 
 
 With a comb of gold she combs it, 
 
 And combing, low singeth she, 
 A song of a strange, sweet sadness, 
 
 A wonderful melody. 
 
THE HUDSON AND THE KHINE. 21 
 
 The sailor shudders as o er him, 
 
 The strain comes floating by, 
 He sees not the cliffs before him, 
 
 He only looks on high. 
 
 Ah! round him the dark waves flinging 
 Their arms, draw him slowly down, 
 
 And this with her wild, sweet singing 
 The Lorelei has done. 
 
 Mendelssohn was to have written an opera upon 
 this story and had already commenced it, but the 
 king of Prussia, who is fond of the classics, ordered 
 the composer, who was the royal director of music, 
 to write an overture and chorusses for the Antigone. 
 We have lost in that opera the companion of Don 
 Giovanni ; in a different kind, of course, for Mozart 
 was all melody, and Mendelssohn had only rhythm. 
 In his music the melody is like a faint perfume in a 
 dreamy south wind. How long must we wait for 
 another Fne-ear to detect and interpret those weird 
 melodies of the Lorelei ? 
 
 These are the genuine delights of the Rhine. 
 They are those of romantic association and sug 
 gestion. They are those which are only possible in 
 an old and storied country. It is not what you see 
 there, but what you feel through what you see, that 
 charms you. The wild grape in our woods is pleas 
 ant from the association with the Rhenish vineyards, 
 and they in turn from their association with the glory 
 
22 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 of the grape in all literature and tradition. The 
 Khine is a lyric, or a ballad. 
 
 Avoid the steamer, if you can, and in some coun 
 try market-boat float at evening or morning along 
 its shores, following the wildest whim of fancy, with 
 Uhland in one pocket and &flascJie of Riidesheimei 
 in the other, dozing away the noon in the coolest 
 corner of some old ruin, and dreaming of Ariadne as 
 you drift, sighing, beneath the moonlighted vine 
 yards. Then you, too, will exasperate some chance 
 friend at Heidelberg, and believe in the Rhine, for 
 that night only. 
 
 I know that romance is in the poet s heart, and 
 not in the outward forms he sees. But there is a 
 technical material of romance the moonlight, a 
 ruin, an Italian girl, for instance which is useful in 
 begetting a romantic mood of mind, as a quotation 
 will often suggest verses that haunt you all day long. 
 And it is in this material that the Rhine is so rich. 
 
 The Hudson, however, is larger and grander. It 
 is not to be devoured in detail. ~No region without 
 association, is, except by science. But its spacious 
 and stately character, its varied and magnificent 
 outline, from the Palisades to the Catskill, are as 
 epical as the loveliness of the Rhine is lyrical. The 
 Hudson implies a continent behind. For vineyards 
 it has forests. For a belt of water, a majestic streajn. 
 
THE HUDSON AND THE RHINE. 
 
 23 
 
 For graceful and grain-golden ed heights it has impos 
 ing mountains. There is no littleness about the Hud 
 son, but there is in the Rhine. Here every thing is 
 boldly touched. What lucid and penetrant lights, 
 what broad and sober shadows ! The river moistens 
 the feet, and the clouds anoint the heads, of regal 
 hills. The Danube has, in parts, glimpses of such 
 grandeur. The Elbe has sometimes such delicately 
 pencilled effects. But no European river is so lordly 
 in its bearing, none flows in such state to the sea. 
 
 Of all our rivers that I know, the Hudson, with 
 this grandeur, has the most exquisite episodes. Its 
 morning and evening reaches are like the lakes 
 of dreams. Looking from this garden, at twilight, 
 toward the huge hills, enameled 
 with soft dark 
 ness, that guard 
 the entrance of 
 the Highlands, 
 nearWestPoint, 
 I " would be a 
 merman bold," 
 to float on the 
 last ray through 
 that mysterious 
 gate to the soft- 
 
 OF THE 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
24: LOTUS-EATING, 
 
 est shadow in Cro Nest, where, if I were a merman 
 bold, I should know the culprit fay was sleeping. 
 Out of that dim portal glide the white sails of sloops, 
 like spectres : they loiter languidly along the bases 
 of the hills, as the evening breeze runs after them, 
 enamored, and they fly, taking my fascinated eyes 
 captive, far arid far away, until they glimmer like 
 ghosts and strand my sight upon the distance. 
 
 These tranquil evening reveries are the seed of 
 such beautiful and characteristic harvests as the 
 Hudson tales of the Sketch Book and Knickerbock 
 er s History. And rubbing those golden grains upon 
 his eyes, Darley has so well perceived the spirit of 
 the river, that in a few simple forms, in the vignette 
 of his illustrations of Rip ~V r an Winkle, he has seized 
 its suggestion and made it visible. JSTor will any 
 lover of the Hudson forget its poet, Joseph Hodman 
 Drake, who in his " Culprit Fay," shows that the 
 spirits of romance and beauty haunt every spot upon 
 which falls the poetic eye. If a man would touch 
 the extremes of experience in a single day, I know 
 not how it could be better done, than by stepping 
 upon a steamer, after a long bustling morning in 
 Wall-street^ and reading the " Culprit Fay" by 
 moonlight upon the piazza of the hotel at West Point, 
 looking up the river to Cro Nest. 
 
 It was a happy fortune for the beauty of the river 
 
THE HUDSON AND THE KHINE. 25 
 
 that steam did not drive away the sails. It was 
 feared that the steamers would carry all the freight, 
 and so bereave the river of the characteristic and 
 picturesque life of the white-sailed sloops. But econ 
 omy was on the side of beauty this time, and it was 
 found cheaper to carry heavy freights by sail, as of 
 old. So the sloops doze and dream along, very 
 beautiful to behold from the banks, and sometimes, 
 awakened as they enter the Highlands by a sudden 
 stoop from some saucy gust coquetting with the hills, 
 they bend and dip, and come crowding toward us 
 through the grim mountain gate, like a troop of 
 white-winged pilgrims fluttering and flying from the 
 Castle of Giant Despair. 
 
 You see I have heard the Hudson Syrens : per 
 haps some faint, far-off strain of that lullaby of 
 silence that soothed old Hip to his mountain nap. 
 And while I smell Florida and the Tropics, as I sit 
 under the branching magnolia, it goes clear and 
 clean against the Rhine. But when, leaving the 
 garden, and sitting under the foliaged trellises of the 
 piazza, we see the moon rise over the opposite moun 
 tains the ghost of the summer day drawing the 
 outline of the Warwick vase more delicately in 
 shadow upon the sward than ever the skilful artist 
 carved it in marble, then a glimpse of Grecian 
 beauty penetrates and purifies the night; while, 
 
 B 
 
26 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 within doors, Willow s hands dream upon the keys 
 of the piano, and singing, sad and sweet enough to 
 silence the Lorelei, completes the discomfiture of the 
 Rhine. 
 
 In the moonlight and the music Xtopher and I are 
 out 
 
 " Such stuff as dreams are made of," 
 until 
 
 " From tower on tree- top high, 
 
 The sentry elf his call has made, 
 A streak is in the eastern sky, 
 
 Shapes of moonlight ! flit and fade ! 
 The hill-tops gleam in morning s spring, 
 The sky-lark shakes his dappled wing, 
 The day-glimpse glimmers on the lawn, 
 The cock has crowed and the fays are gone !" 
 
C A T 8 K I L L 
 
II 
 
 JULY. \ 
 THE MOUNTAIN HOUSE. $ 
 
 HE " New World" is a filagree 
 frame-work of white wood sur 
 rounding a huge engine, which is 
 much too conspicuous. I am 
 speaking, by-the-by, of the 
 Hudson steamer ; and yet, 
 perhaps, the symbol holds 
 for the characteristic expression of the nation. For 
 just so flimsy and overfine are our social arrange 
 ments, our peculiarities of manner and dress, and 
 just so prominent and evident is the homely practical 
 genius that carries us forward, with steam-speed, 
 through the sloop-sluggishness of our compeers. 
 
 A sharp-faced, thought-furrowed, hard-handed 
 American, with his anxious eye and sallow complex 
 ion, his nervous motion and concentrated expression, 
 and withal, accoutred for travelling in blue coat 
 with gilt buttons, dark pantaloons, patent leather 
 
30 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 boots, and silk vest hung with charms, chains, and 
 bits of metal, as if the Indian love of lustre lingered 
 in the Yankee, is not unlike one of these steamers, 
 whose machinery, driving it along, jars the cut glass 
 and the choice centre-tables and crimson-covered 
 lounges, and with a like accelerated impetus, would 
 shiver the filagree into splinters. 
 
 Yet for all this the " New World" is a very pleas 
 ant place. It has a light, airy, open and clean deck, 
 whence you may spy the shyest nook of scenery upon 
 the banks, and a spacious cabin, where you do not 
 dine at a huge table, with eager men plunging their 
 forks into dishes before you, and their elbows into 
 your sides, but quietly and pleasantly as at a Parisian 
 cafe. What an appalling ordeal an American table 
 d hote is ! What a chaos of pickles, puddings and 
 meats ! and each man plunging through every thing 
 as if he and the steamer were racing for victory. 
 The waiters, usually one third the necessary num 
 ber, rush up and down the rear of the benches, and 
 cascades of gravies and sauces drip ominously along 
 their wake. It is the seed-time of dyspepsia, and 
 Dickens in that an ti- American novel, which none of 
 us can read without feeling its injustice, has yet de- 
 ecribed, only too well, an American ordinary. 
 
 Who can wonder that we are lantern-jawed, lean, 
 sickly and serious of aspect, when he has dined on a 
 
CATSKILL. 31 
 
 steamer or at a great business hotel? We laugh 
 very loftily at the Khine dinners in which the pud 
 ding and fish meet in the middle of the courses. 
 But a Ehine dinner upon the open, upper deck of the 
 steamer, is quiet and orderly and inoffensive, while 
 one of our gregarious repasts must needs offend every 
 man who has some regard for proprieties and some 
 self-respect. 
 
 And Oatskill? 
 
 Yes, we are rapidly approaching, even while we 
 sit on deck and our eyes slide along the gentle green 
 banks, as we meditate American manners and the 
 extremes that meet in our characteristics. Beyond 
 Poughkeepsie a train darts along the shore, rattling 
 over the stories on the water s edge, and rolling with 
 muffled roar behind the cuts and among the heavy 
 foliage. So nearly matched is our speed, that until 
 the locomotive ran beside us, I did not know how 
 rapid was our silent movement. But there is heat 
 and bustle and dust in the nervous little train, which 
 winds along, like a jointed reptile^ while with our 
 stately steamer there is silence, and the cool, con 
 stant patter of the few drops, where our sharp prow 
 cuts the river. 
 
 A little above Poughkeepsie the river bends, and 
 the finest point is gained. It is a foreground of cul 
 tivated and foliaged hills of great variety of outline, 
 
32 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 rising as they recede, and ranging, and towering at 
 last along the horizon, in the Catskill mountains. It 
 was a brilliant day, and the heavy, rounding clouds 
 piled in folds along the line of the hills taking, at 
 length, precisely their own hue, and so walling up 
 the earth with a sombre, vaporous rampart, such as 
 Titans and fallen angels storm. As we glided 
 nearer, keen flashes darted from the wall of cloud, 
 and as if riven and rent with its sharpness, the heavy 
 masses rolled asunder; then more heavily piled 
 themselves in dense darkness, fold overlying fold, 
 while the startled wind changed, and rushed down 
 the river, chilled, and breathing cold before the storm. 
 
 "No longer a wall, but a swiftly advancing and de 
 vastating power, the storm threw up pile upon pile 
 of jagged blackness into the clear, tender blue of the 
 afternoon, and there was a wail in the hurried gusts 
 that swept past us and over us, and the river curled 
 more and more into sudden waves, which were foam- 
 tipped, and scattered spray. 
 
 "We were now abreast of the mountains, and far 
 behind them the storm had burst. Down the vast 
 ravines that opened outward toward the river, I saw 
 the first softness of the shower skimming along the 
 distant hillsides, moister and grayer, until they were 
 merged in mist. Deep into those solemn mountain 
 forests leaped the lightning, and the echo of its 
 
CATSKILL. 
 
 33 
 
 wrathful roar surged and boomed among the hills, 
 and dashed far up the cliffs and dark hemlock slopes, 
 and crashed over the gurgling brooks, where was 
 none to hear but the trees and the streams, and they 
 were undismayed, and in the shuddering breeze of the 
 pauses the trees rustled and whispered to the streams, 
 and the streams laughed to themselves the strange, 
 sweet, mystical laughter that Undine laughed. 
 
 "They roll their nine-pins still, among the Cats- 
 kill," said Olde. 
 
 " And there s a ten-strike," interposed Swans- 
 downe, as a mighty bolt burst among the hills, but 
 still toward the inner valleys, for the slope toward 
 the river yet stood in cold, dark, purple distinctness. 
 
 The breeze was cool and strong as we landed at 
 
84 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 Catskill. We were huddled ashore rapidly, the 
 board was pulled in, and the " New World" disap 
 peared. I proposed riding up to the Mountain House 
 on the outside of the coach, but Olde smiled and 
 said, "I shall go inside." 
 
 Now Olde loves scenery as well as any man, poet 
 or painter, but he holds that a drenching rain de 
 stroys both the beauty of the scene and the capacity 
 for enjoyment of the seer, and while I stood with my 
 hand upon the door, my common sense thoroughly 
 convinced, as well by his action as by his words, but 
 my carnal heart lusting after the loveliness of the 
 cloud-crowned and shower-veiled mountains, there 
 came another ten-strike that suddenly shook a cloud 
 to pieces over our heads and down it came. 
 
 "I think I shall go inside, too," said I, as I stum 
 bled up the steps and closed the door. 
 
 During the first eight miles of the inland drive 
 toward the Mountain House, I enjoyed the prospect 
 of six travellers, four stained leather curtains, and 
 the two wooden windows of the door. It was not 
 cool inside the coach, but without, the wind was in 
 high frolic with the rain, and through the slightest 
 crevice the wily witch dashed us with her missiles, 
 cold and very wet. Then the showers swept along a 
 little, and we threw up the curtains and breathed 
 fresh air, and about three miles from the Mountain 
 
CATSKILL. 35 
 
 House, where the steep ascent commences, Olde and 
 Swansdowne and I jumped out of the stage and 
 walked. The road is very firmly built, and is fortu 
 nate in its material of a slaty rock, and in the luxu 
 riance of foliage, for the tangled tree-roots hold the 
 Boil together. 
 
 The road climbs at first in easy zigzags, and pres 
 ently pushes straight on through the woods, and 
 upon the side of a steep ravine ; the level-branched 
 foliage sheering regularly down, sheeting the moun 
 tain side with leafy terraces. Between the trunks 
 and down the gorges we looked over a wide but 
 mountainous landscape, and as we ascended, the air 
 became more invigorating with the greater height 
 and the coolness of the shower. Two hours before 
 sunset we stood upon the plateau before the Moun 
 tain House, 2,800 feet above the sea. 
 
 There is a fine sense of height there, but all moun 
 tain views over a plain are alike. You stand on the 
 piazza of the Mountain House and look directly down 
 into the valley of the Hudson, with only a foreground, 
 deep beneath you, of a lower layer than that on 
 which you stand, with its precipice of pine and hem 
 lock. The rest stretches then, a smooth surface tc 
 the eye, but hilly enough to the feet, when you are 
 there, to an unconfined horizon at the north and 
 south, and easterly to the Berkshire hills. 
 
36 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 Through this expanse lies the Hudson, not v p ery 
 sinuous, but a line of light dividing the plain. In 
 the vague twilight atmosphere it was very effective. 
 Sometimes the mist blotted out individual outlines, 
 and the whole scene was but a silver-gray abyss, 
 and the hither line of the river was the horizon, 
 and the stream itself a white gleam of sky beyond. 
 Then the distance and the foreground were mingled 
 in the haze, a shining opaque veil, wherein the 
 river was a rent, through which beamed a remote 
 brightness. Or the vapors clustered toward the 
 south and the stream flowed into them, flashing 
 and far, as into a terrene cloud-land. All the coun 
 try was chequered with yellow patches of ripe grain, 
 and marked faintly with walls and fences, and 
 looked rather a vast domain than a mountain-ruled 
 landscape. 
 
 Whoever is familiar with mountain scenery will 
 know what to anticipate in the Catskill view. The 
 whole thing is graceful and generous, but not sub 
 lime. Your genuine mountaineer (which I am not) 
 shrugs his shoulder at the shoulders of mountains 
 which soar thousands of feet above him and are still 
 shaggy with forest. He draws a long breath over 
 the spacious plain, but he feels the want of that true 
 mountain sublimity, the presence of lonely snow- 
 peaks. 
 
CATSKILL. 37 
 
 And as we always require in scenery of a similar 
 class, similar emotions, there is necessarily a little 
 disappointment in the Catskill. They are hills rather 
 than mountains. Bat, as they have the fame of 
 mountains, you are recalling your Alpine impres 
 sions, all the way up. It is not very wise, perhaps, 
 but it is very natural and rather unavoidable. Yet, 
 when the night falls, the silence and coolness of your 
 lofty home, impart the genuine mountain tone to 
 your thoughts. Then you begin to acknowledge the 
 family resemblance, and to remember Switzerland. 
 
 When I was on the Faulhorn, the highest point 
 in Europe upon which a dwelling-house is placed, 
 and that inhabited for three months only in the year, 
 I stepped out in the middle of the night, and as I 
 looked across the valley of Grindelwald and saw the 
 snow-fields and ice -precipices of all the Haras 
 never trodden and never to be trodden by man - 
 shining cold in the moonlight, my heart stood still 
 as I felt that those awful peaks and I were alone in 
 the solemn solitude. Then I felt the significance of 
 Switzerland, and knew the sublimity of mountains. 
 
 And do you remember, said Olde, how deli 
 cately the dawn touched those summits with cool, 
 bright fingers, and how their austerity burned and 
 blushed under that caressing, until the sunrise over 
 whelmed them with rosy flame, and they flashed 
 
38 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 perfect day far over Switzerland ; and hours after 
 ward, when day was old upon the mountain tops, 
 how gentlemen-travellers turned in their beds in the 
 valley inns, and said, " Hallo, Tom, the sun is 
 rising?" 
 
 The Mountain House is really unceremonious. 
 You are not required to appear at dinner in ball 
 costume, and if you choose, you may scramble to the 
 Falls in cowhide boots and not in varnished pumps. 
 The house has a long and not ill-proportioned Corin 
 thian colonnade, wooden of course, and glaring white. 
 The last point, however, is a satisfaction from below, 
 for its vivid contrast with the dark green forest re 
 veals the house from a great distance upon the river. 
 The table is well supplied, but Olde and Swansdowne 
 were forced to throw themselves upon the compassion 
 of the chambermaid, (I would s&yFemme-de-Chambre) 
 if a single eye, slopping shoes, and a thick, cotton 
 handkerchief pinned night-cap-wise over the head, 
 would possibly allow that suggestive word,) and to 
 submit that a towel of the magnitude of a small 
 inouchoir, (they did not say mouchoir,) was not large 
 allowance for two full-grown men. The dame ? s an 
 swer had gravity and instance. 
 
 " Gentlemen, how can I give you what we have 
 not?" 
 
 A written placard around the house announced 
 
OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY) 
 CATSKILL. 
 
 that dancing music could be had at the bar. But 
 none wished to polk and how music could be made 
 in that parlor, which seemed to have been dislocated 
 "by some tempestuous mountain ague, remains a mys 
 tery to me. There are eight windows, and none of 
 them opposite to any of the others; folding-doors 
 which have gone down the side of the room in some 
 wild architectural dance, and have never returned, 
 and a row of small columns stretching in an inde 
 pendent line across the room, quite irrespective of 
 the middle. It is a dangerous parlor for a nervous 
 man. 
 
 We sat on the edge of the precipice, looking off 
 into the black abyss of night. Swansdowne told wild 
 tales of crazy men in lonely nooks of Scotland, and 
 Olde talked of Italy. They were pleasant days, he 
 said, which shall return no more. 
 
 " My eyes are full of childish tears, 
 
 My heart is idly stirred, 
 For the same sound is in my ears, 
 That in those days I heard. 
 
 " Thus fares it still in our decay, 
 
 And yet the wiser mind 
 Mourns less for what age takes away 
 That what it leaves behind." 
 
 - 
 
CATSKILL FALLS 
 
III. 
 
 V 
 
 JOLT. 
 
 DID not see the 
 sun rise from 
 \ the Catskill. 
 Therefore my 
 more cun 
 ning way 
 |lll\ would be to 
 give you a 
 florid history 
 all the sunrises that I 
 have seen from famous 
 3, omitting mention of the 
 3, yawns, and, in general, very 
 ameliorated admiration of such early 
 spectacles. 
 
 Quite unwittingly I was conscious of 
 no sunrise that bright Sunday morning 
 
4A LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 upon the Catskill ; yet I was not scornful of it but 
 only sleepy. 
 
 Not scornful, for still flashes along the heights of 
 memory many a Swiss sunrise. That of the Righi, 
 for instance, with the groups of well- whiskered Eng 
 lishmen and well-booted Americans, gathered upon 
 the Culm, and wrapt in coats, cloaks, blankets, and 
 comforters as if each had arisen, bed and all, and 
 had so stepped out to enjoy the spectacle. A wooden 
 horn was blown, much vague sentiment was uttered, 
 and the exceeding absurdity of the crowd interfered 
 with the grandeur of the moment. 
 
 But beyond these and above them were the peaks 
 of the Mid-Alps, celestial snow-fields, smooth and 
 glittering as the sky, and the rugged glaciers sloping 
 into unknown abysses, Niagaran cataracts frozen in 
 foam forever. There were lesser mountains in the 
 undulating mass of the panorama, green and grace 
 ful, or angular with sharp cliffs, sheering perpendic 
 ularly away, or gently veering into the glassy calm 
 ness of cold lakes, in which the night had bathed 
 and left its blackness. There was the range of 
 the Jura, dusky and far, and the faint flash of 
 the Aar in the morning mist, and among these aw 
 ful mountains, and upon them, spots of fame, po 
 etic and patriotic, each one the home of a thousand 
 traditions, each the melody of myriad household 
 
CATSKILL FALLS. 45 
 
 songs. It was the region of William Tell all around 
 me. 
 
 The keen, cool breath of early morning smote me, 
 as with the heroic spirit of the story, and the senti 
 ments and memories of the spot brightened into sig 
 nificance with the increasing dawn. And as we stood 
 there, too shivering to be sentimental for the breath 
 which lives " with death and morning on the silver 
 horns," blew every feeling away that was not gen 
 uine and fair far over the hushed tumult of peaks 
 which thronged to the utmost east, came the sun, 
 sowing those sublime snow-fields with glorious day. 
 The light leaped from peak to peak, the only thing 
 alive, glad and gay, worthy to sport with those 
 worthy mates, until the majestic solemnity of the mo 
 ment yielded to the persuasive warmth of day, and 
 our hearts yearned for the valley. 
 
 Do you remember in Tennyson s "Princess," the 
 "small, sweet idyl," which she read? 
 
 Come down, maid, from yonder mountain height; 
 
 What pleasure lives in height, (the shepherd sang,) 
 
 In height and cold, the splendor of the hills ? 
 
 But cease to move so near the heavens, and cease 
 
 To glide a sunbeam by the blasted pine, 
 
 To sit a star upon the sparkling spire, 
 
 And come, for Love is of the valley, come, 
 
 For Love is of the valley, come thou down, 
 
 And find him by the happy threshold, he, 
 
 Or hand in hand with plenty in the maize, 
 
 Or red with spurted purple of the vats, 
 
46 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 Or fox-like in the vine; nor cares to walk 
 With Death and Morning on the Silver Horns; 
 Nor wilt thou snare him in the white ravine, 
 Nor find him dropt upon the firths of ice, 
 That huddling slant in furrow cloven falls, 
 To roll the torrent out of dusky doors : 
 But follow: let the torrent dance thee down, 
 To find him in the valley; let the wild 
 Lean-headed eagles yelp alone, and leave 
 The monstrous ledges there to slope, and spill 
 Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke, 
 That like a broken purpose waste in air: 
 So waste not thou: but come; for all the vales 
 Await thee; azure pillars of the hearth 
 Arise to thee; the children call, and I 
 Thy shepher.l, pipe, and sweet is every sound, 
 Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet ; 
 Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn, 
 The moan of doves in immemorial elms, 
 And murmuring of innumerable bees. 
 
 Remembering these things, when I came down and 
 found Olde and Swansdowne under the Corinthian 
 colonnade, I did not feel as if I had seen nothing, 
 although I had lost the Catskill sunrise, which, they 
 told me, was a magnificent effect of slanting light 
 over a level floor of fleecy clouds, much more mag 
 nificent, indeed, than any polar ocean could be, ex 
 cept those that poets see. 
 
 It was a clear, crystal morning ; and after break 
 fast those who were disposed, repaired to the village 
 of Catskill, twelve miles away, to church. I believe 
 there were not very many. Some of the rest of us 
 looked mountain ward. The more distant hills foi 
 
CATSKILL FALLS. 47 
 
 there are none lost in mist so far as to seem most 
 distant were sharply drawn, purply cold, and 
 rounded with foliage up the sides. Over the sum 
 mit we went, and down the purple glen, toward the 
 throbbing heart of the Catskill. 
 
 " And on that morning thro the grass. 
 
 And by the steaming rills, 
 We travelled merrily to pass 
 A day among the hills." 
 
 The road to the Falls is most unromantically dis 
 tinguishable. A coach load was to follow, but we 
 scorned coaches mighty mountaineers that we were ! 
 and went cheerily along past the lake, dark and cold 
 enough to have a dreary tradition, while the vibrant, 
 liquidly-gurgling song of the wood-thrush poured 
 through the trees, and a solitary, flaming golden-rod 
 nodded autumn to us as we passed. It is a walk 
 through the woods a wood-road to a finger-post that 
 says curtly, "To the Falls;" and then down into a 
 dell to a very new and very neat white house and a 
 bar-room, with a balcony over the abyss. 
 
 The proprietor of the .bar-room is also the genius 
 of the Fall, and drives a trade both with his spirits 
 und his water. In fact, if your romantic nerves can 
 stand the steady truth, the Catskill Fall is turned on 
 to accommodate poets and parties of pleasure. 
 
 The process of " doing" the sight, for those who 
 
4:8 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 are limited in time, is very methodical. You leave 
 the hotel and drive in a coach to the bar-room. You 
 " refresh." You step out upon the balcony, and look 
 into the abyss. The proprietor of the Fall informs 
 you that the lower plunge is eighty feet high. It ap 
 pears to you to be about ten. You laugh incredu 
 lously he smiles in return the smile of a mens con- 
 scia recti. u Would you step down and have the 
 water turned on?" You do step down a somewhat 
 uneven but very safe staircase. You reach the bot 
 tom. " Look ! now it comes !" and the proud cascade 
 plunges like a freed force into the air and slips, 
 swimming in foam, away from your gaze. 
 
 You would gladly stay all day. But the sage of 
 the party looks at his watch remembers dinner 
 deems it time to think of returning ; and you climb 
 the staircase step upon the balcony throw a last 
 look into the abyss down the blue mistiness of the 
 winding valley whose repose leads your thought far 
 into eternal silence and summer, and mounting the 
 coach you are boxed up again and delivered at the 
 Mountain House just as the dinner-bell rings. 
 
 This is ludicrous. But most of us are really only 
 shop-keepers, and natural spectacles are but shop- 
 windows on a great scale. People love the country 
 theoretically, as they do poetry. Very few are heroic 
 enough to confess that it is wearisome, even when 
 
CATSKILL FALLS. 49 
 
 they are fatigued by it. The reason of which reluct 
 ance I suppose to be a lurking consciousness that we 
 ought to love it, that we ought to be satisfied and 
 glad among the hills and under the trees, and that if 
 we are not, it is because the city has corrupted us 
 because the syren has sung away our strength. The 
 distaste which many clever persons feel for Words 
 worth, may often be traced to a want of sympathy 
 with his intense and personal enjoyment of nature. 
 It is incredible to them, and seems inflated if not false. 
 
 This want of direct pleasure and exhilaration in 
 nature is a matter of regret, as would be the want of 
 love for flowers. A man who has it is never friend 
 less. The wildest or rarest day flushing the land 
 scape with its own character, is his companion and 
 his counsellor. "The mountains are a feeling," the 
 streams are books that babble without nonsense, and 
 the coming and going of the year, as he marks it 
 upon the budding and fading leaf, is the swelling 
 and dying of celestial music in his heart. Happily 
 no man is always insensible. He cannot always es 
 cape the electrical shock of natural grandeur and 
 beauty. A noble landscape, a cataract, a mountain, 
 impresses him imperially, but as vaguely and blind 
 ly as a great hero surprises pedlers and pettifoggers. 
 
 Olde and Swansdowne and I, citizens too, de 
 scended the perpendicular staircase to the rock pave- 
 
 C 
 
50 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 ment, which, hollowed into a basin in the centre, 
 receives the first long fall. You may picture the 
 general effect of the scene from below by fancying a 
 mountain stream followed up the natural valley be 
 tween two mountains, until it is checked by an 
 abrupt rocky precipice, stretching from one hillside 
 to the other directly across the ravine, and half-con- 
 cavely pointing down the valley. Directly over the 
 centre of the parapet of this rocky wall flows the 
 Fall. At first it is only the surplus of a dammed 
 mill-stream, (I beg pardon,) but beyond the mill and 
 the dam, nature has claimed her own again, and 
 reels the slight stream away, a thread of airy silver, 
 wreathing into rainbow spray. 
 
 Indeed, so slight is the Fall, when not turned on, 
 but only dripping through the gate, that there is but 
 a single shoot of watery arrows in Indian file, an 
 appearance which any observer of cascades will un 
 derstand. It is about the volume of the Swiss Staub- 
 bach, when it has fallen some four hundred of its 
 nine hundred feet toward the green lawns of Lauter- 
 brunnen, which it moistens as spray and never 
 reaches as a fall, except during a " spell of weather," 
 the dissolution of spring, or some other time unseen 
 of Dr. Syntax, and the hunters of the picturesque. 
 
 The first effect of the Catskill Fall is very simple 
 and beautiful. Seen from the highest platform. 
 
CATSKILL FALLS. 51 
 
 after you have descended and are looking up, it has 
 a quiet grandeur, even, which declines into pictti- 
 resqueness when you pass below the second broken 
 fall that pours away into the gorge, whence it steals 
 off, singing, between the heavily wooded hillsides. 
 The great rock, over which flows the first fall, is 
 hollowed out, a little above the level of the basin 
 into which it plunges, and you can walk, stooping a 
 little, quite around and behind the thin, flickering 
 fall. It has a delicate spray of its own, too, when 
 the wind scatters it into the sunlight which touches 
 it into diamond dust ; and very gracious was the 
 sun that morning, for when, after our arrival below, 
 the coaches arrived above, and the parties descend 
 ed, the ladies glided and shrank along under the 
 rock a motley troop of white ladies of Avenel, if 
 you will, except that for her the fall parted, and she 
 did not stoop but droop and as they came around, 
 where the wind had waved the cascade in spray to 
 cool them, the sun flashed suddenly from behind 
 the fleecy clouds, and arched them with a rain 
 bow. What could the Catskill do more for them, 
 since it could not part like the Fall of Avenel, 
 and frame them in living silver, as they passed 
 beneath ? 
 
 They all came down to the level of the second fall, 
 and there, clustered upon the rocks, we awaited the 
 
52 
 
 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 u turning on," or rather the artificial spring and imi 
 tative effects of snow-melting upon the mountains, 
 produced by our friend of the " Refreshment Sa 
 loon," whose little building perched upon the cliff, 
 at the very point of the fall, with its friendly basket 
 far overhanging the ravine upon an outstretched 
 pole, like that of an old well, is extremely effective 
 and recalls vaguely those desert convents from whose 
 high walls hang baskets, the sole communication 
 with the world, except through posterns bolted and 
 barred. 
 
 The fall swelled suddenly, and 
 ! in a moment, a downward vol- 
 |/ley of flashing arrows of light, 
 " plunged into the basin beneath. 
 It flaked into spray as it fell, 
 rfand sheeted the basin near it 
 ^. with foam, and the mist 
 ^steamed up into the concave 
 abyss, and clouded it, as if to 
 Ji veil the fall in its most majestic 
 Y moment. It was of the same 
 ? character still, but developed in 
 to fulness ; and the second fall, pouring 
 over a crescent of rock brilliantly greened with grass 
 and light foliage, and of picturesquely broken outline, 
 overflowed at crevices and points unseen before, and 
 
CATSKILL FALLS. 53 
 
 a graceful group of rills danced attendance upon 
 each side of the chief fall. 
 
 Down to the basin of this we descended, and com 
 manded both cascades. But my pen commands no 
 colors, and the neutral tint of words will not glow 
 with the flashing water and the rich, serious green 
 of the banks of foliage, nor seize the movement of 
 the clouds June clouds, that swam fleecily back 
 ward directly over the cascade, adding the sympathy 
 of motion in the moist blue sky to that of the falling 
 water. This was a rare and exquisite effect. The 
 round, white clouds hung low, and as they swept 
 swiftly backward, seemed to pass through the very 
 narrow dent of rock which the cascade had worn, as 
 if its own spray had curled into compact clouds, and 
 was so hurrying back again to feed the fountain. 
 
 The groups of loiterers exhausted words but not 
 delight, and after resting a little upon the rocks, 
 climbed the cliff again homeward. We lingered be- 
 iow. Swansdowne with rapid pencil was tracing the 
 general outline of the appearance of the full fall. 
 Okie arid I were lying at length gossiping of Switz 
 erland, and watching the shifting splendors of the 
 day, and the fall, as the gate was closed, gradually 
 dwindled, wasting from that full-bodied maturity > 
 and sinking again into infantine weakness and un 
 certainty. 
 
64: LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 There is a feeling of life in moving water, and the 
 poets call it living water, when it flows freshly and 
 clear. Therefore, we could not watch it, as if pining 
 away, without a little regret, not at the loss of our 
 own pleasure, but at its loss of life. Its song in the 
 ravine behind us grew fainter, subsiding at last int( 
 a uniform, gentle gurgling. Whether a solitary in 
 a slouched hat upon the hillside below us, with tab 
 lets in hand, was measuring that murmur into verse 
 I shall never know. But certainly the music of the 
 Bong I shall never forget. 
 
 Sunday stillness brooded over the day. Sweet 
 and sacred it was like the memory of George Her 
 bert, and his was the hymn we sang that Sunday at 
 the Catskill Falls. 
 
 Sweet day ! so cool, so calm, so bright ; 
 
 The bridal of the earth and sky : 
 The dew shall weep thy fall to-night; 
 For thou must die. 
 
 Sweet rose! whose hue, angry and brave, 
 
 Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye; 
 Thy root is ever in its grave ; 
 And thou must die. 
 
 Sweet Spring! full of sweet days and roses; 
 
 A box where sweets compacted lie ; 
 My music shows ye have your closes: 
 And all must die. 
 
 Only a sweet and virtuous soul, 
 Like seasoned timber never gives : 
 
CATSKILL FALLS. 55 
 
 But, though the whole world turn to coal, 
 Then chiefly lives. 
 
 We walked down the stream for a mile after 
 wards, and I advise every one to do the same, crossing 
 at the usual place, and stumbling over the rocks a 
 little at first, but at last pushing smoothly on. The 
 path leads you to a pleasant opening where the 
 water polishes a broad pavement, and where bits of 
 the picturesque abound. With his delicately sensi 
 tive artistic eye, Swansdowne glanced among the 
 trees, arid from time to time, announced "a Ken- 
 sett," as a broad bit of mossed rock, or a shapely 
 stretch of trees with the mountain outline beyond, 
 recalled the poetic accuracy and characteristic sub 
 jects of that artist. 
 
 And so, finding the stones, poems and pictures, as 
 well as sermons, we voted, of course, to finish the 
 day at the Fall. A neat and well-cooked dinner in 
 the very small and clean new house near the pictu 
 resque bar-room, (seen from below,) consoled us for 
 the loss of the Mountain House ordinary, and, as we 
 dined, a wind furious enough for November, a very 
 cataract of a wind, dashed and swept along the 
 mountain-sides, and Swansdowne and I did privately 
 shiver, (it was the 20th of July,) until we sallied 
 forth and clornb down the rock again to the first 
 platform. 
 
66 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 The water was unchained for us, and the lilies in 
 the extremest depths of the ravine that grow beyond 
 the edge of the usual flowing, were folded once more 
 before sunset in its crystal caresses. The western 
 light streaming up the ravine was of tenderer tone 
 than that of morning, and our thoughts grew tender 
 er too. Our chat was of Italy now, no longer of 
 Switzerland, and the tranquil sunset closed over a 
 day that will sing as pleasantly through memory as 
 the stream through the solitary dell. 
 
 " To-morrow to fresh fields and pastures new." 
 
TRENTON, 
 
IV. 
 
 JULY. 
 
 Longfellow s delicious proem to the 
 Waif he invokes the singing of a song 
 of rest. Sometimes, urges the 
 poet, let us escape the battle cry 
 and the bugle call, and repose 
 that we may the better wrestle. 
 
 Such songs have power to quiet 
 
 The restless pulse of care, 
 And come like the benediction 
 
 That follows after prayer. 
 
 Trenton is that summer song of rest. 
 
 Only lovely images haunt its remembrance, beau 
 tiful as the Iris which, in some happy moment of the 
 ramble through the ravine, spans the larger or lesser 
 fall. Beauty and grace are its praises. You hear 
 them from those who are either hurrying to the 
 grandeur of Niagara, or from those who, return 
 ing, step aside at Utica to enjoy the music of the 
 
60 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 greater cataract, softened here at Trenton into an 
 exquisite echo. 
 
 It matters little when you see these Falls, whether 
 before or after Niagara. The charm of Trenton is 
 unique, and you will not scorn the violets and lilies 
 because you knelt to the passion-flowers and roses. 
 In the prime of a summer which, from the abundant 
 rains, is singularly unworn and unwithered, a day 
 at Trenton, because of its rare and picturesque, but 
 harmonious, attractions, is like a feast of flowers. In 
 some choice niche of memory you will lay it aside, 
 not as a sublime statue nor a prophetic and solemn 
 picture, but as a vase most delicate, symmetrical if 
 slight, and chased with pastoral tracery. 
 
 From Albany its Campagna-like suburbs once 
 passed a pleasant day made pleasant pictures of 
 the broad, rich, tranquil landscape. The country 
 gained, possibly, in tenderness of aspect that 1 
 glanced at it in the intervals of reading Hawthorne s 
 " Seven Gables," and as the heat increased, the mo 
 notonous clatter of the cars grew soothing as the airy 
 harpsichord of the fair Alice, dead centuries ago, and 
 persuaded my mind into Clifford s vague and dreamy 
 mood. Floating thus along the fascinating verge of 
 slumber, I opened my eyes upon the placid pictu- 
 resqueness of the actual landscape, and anon closed 
 them to behold, instantly, the enchanted scenery of 
 
TRENTON. 61 
 
 sleep. It was a meet approach to Trenton, a passage 
 through a dream-frescoed corridor, pierced with win 
 dows that looked into the real world. In every gar 
 den, as we hurried on, wherever was an old tree and 
 a hint of the "moated grange," (they are not many 
 on that railroad,) I looked to see the soft-souled Clif 
 ford, Alice Pyncheon, and the high-hearted Hepzi- 
 bah, seated in the shadow and wondering at the 
 world. 
 
 But when the petulant bell rang two o clock at 
 Utica, dreams vanished, and I emerged into a crowded 
 and confused station, and was whirled among por 
 ters, luggage, barrows, rival coachmen, bells, gongs, 
 and steam, to the hotel. The regular coach to Tren 
 ton had left upon the arrival of the preceding train, 
 but there were several white-hatted individuals of 
 extremely conciliatory and persuasive manners, who 
 launched instantly into extravagant praises of various 
 stages, wagons, and other carriages, all offering the 
 most delightful and easy method of reaching the 
 Falls. 
 
 But it was singular to an inquiring mind to remark 
 that whenever you descended to particulars, as to 
 hours, and numbers, and carriages, these romances 
 instantly reeled away into the most astonishing 
 vagueness, and while you fancied one moment that 
 you heard the noise of the fall, the next it was a 
 
62 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 very indistinguishable and quite inaudible object 
 in the vista of a prolonged perspective. The fact 
 was that these men who manifested so laudable 
 an interest in your getting to Trenton, comfortably 
 and speedily, wished only to secure your promise to 
 go, and would "arrange" afterward. Remember 
 that when you come, and act accordingly. 
 
 It was clear that nothing could be done until after 
 dinner, which was despatched, and while I quietly 
 consumed a noxious weed, and patiently awaited my 
 prospects, a short, thick-set, English-looking gentle 
 man crossed the passage and suggested to my fancy 
 that "Two horsemen might have been seen slowly 
 mounting a hill." But before I proceeded further in 
 the natural reflections of the moment, my co-Trentoni- 
 ans appeared in the shape of a party of twelve ; just a 
 coach-load with their luggage, and my own coach- 
 prospects began to dwindle dolefully. Then came 
 the tug of war, and truly " no pent-up Utica" con 
 tracted tlie powers of those rival coach-agents, for I 
 never heard so sharp a struggle for a freight. 
 
 The landlord was forced to interfere, while I and 
 the "two horsemen" stood aside, I, for my part, 
 wincing at every moment of the tranquil summer 
 afternoon wasted from Trenton. Presently there was 
 a lull in the war, but no victory, and when a quiet 
 man led me quietly aside, and asked my views of a 
 
TRENTON. 63 
 
 little open wagon, and a separate and rapid drive to 
 Trenton, I found they entirely coincided with his, 
 and within a few moments I was rolling across the 
 spacious, sunny plain of the Mohawk. 
 
 But mark the chances of life, nor dream of doing 
 " an old stager." My private conveyance, the quiet 
 suggestion of my quiet man, was the property of 
 the very agent who had first accosted me, and who, 
 as I thought, had dropped me from mind as a mere 
 single passenger. Not he. Given, a party of twelve 
 together, on the one hand, and a party ol one upon 
 the other, to furnish a coach to the first, at $ ! and 
 a wagon to the other, at $ ! ! was his problem, 
 and it was solved. Genius had made this man an 
 emperor of nations ; fate had placed him in author 
 ity over horses and hunters of the picturesque. 
 
 My charioteer was a fine boy of sixteen. He 
 whipped along over the plank-road, and gossipped of 
 the horses, the people, and the places we passed. 
 He was sharp-eyed and clear-minded a bright boy, 
 who may one day be President. As we were slowly 
 climbing the hill 
 
 "Have you heard Jenny Lind, Sir?" inquired my 
 Antinous of the stables. 
 
 "Yes, often." 
 
 " Great woman, Sir. Don t you think so 2" 
 
 "I do." 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
64. LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 "She was here last week, Sir. Get-up, Charlie 1" 
 
 "Did YOU hear her?" I asked. 
 
 "Yes, Sir, and I drove with her to the Fallsthat 
 is, Tom Higgins drove, but 1 sat on the box." 
 
 "And was she pleased?" 
 
 "Yes, Sir; only when she was going to see the 
 falls, every body in the hotel ran to the door to look 
 at her, so she went back to her room, and then 
 slipped out of the back door. But there was some 
 thing better than that, Sir." 
 
 "What was that P 
 
 "She gave Tom Higgins fifty dollars when he 
 drove her back. But there was something still bet 
 ter than that, Sir :" 
 
 "Indeed ! what was that ?" 
 
 " Why, Sir, as we came back, we passed a little 
 wood, and she stopped the carriage, and stepped out 
 with the rest of the party, and me and Tom Higgins, 
 and went into the wood. It was towards sunset and 
 the wood was beautiful. She walked about a little, 
 and picked up flowers, and sung, like to herself, as 
 if it were pleasant. By-and-by she sat down upon 
 a rock and began to sing aloud. But before she 
 stopped, a little bird came and sat upon the bough 
 close by us. I saw it, Sir, with my own eyes, the 
 whole of it and -when Jenny Lind had done, he be 
 gan to sing and shout away like she did. While he 
 
TRENTON. 65 
 
 was singing she looked delighted, and when he 
 stopped she sang again, and oh! it was beautiful, 
 Sir. But the little bird wouldn t give it up, and he 
 sang again, but not until she had done. Then Jenny 
 Lind sang as well as ever she could. Her voice 
 seemed to fill the woods all up with music, and when 
 it was over, the little bird was still a while, but tried 
 it again in a few moments. He could n t do it, Sir. 
 He sang very bad, and then the foreign gentlemen 
 with Jenny Lind laughed, and they all came back 
 to the carriage." 
 
 We had left the plank-road and were approaching 
 the hotel at the falls through fine maple woods. It 
 was pleasant to hear the boy s story. Was it a poor 
 prelude to Trenton? I had not dreamed that the 
 romance of the Poet s Lute and the Nightingale 
 should be native to Oneida county no less than to 
 Greece, and that its poet should be my callow chario 
 teer, who may one day be president. When I sat at 
 my window afterward and in the fading twilight 
 looked over the maple woods, and heard the murmur 
 of Trenton Falls, I wondered if the bird ever reached 
 its nest, or was found dead in the woods without a 
 gun-shot wound. 
 
 There is no better hotel than that at Trenton. It 
 is spacious, and clean, and comfortable, and the table 
 justifies its fame. Moreover, it is painted dark and 
 
66 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 not white, and stands very modestly on the edge of 
 the woods that overhang the ravine of the Falls 
 Modestly, although it is high, for the glaring, white 
 caravanseries, our summer palaces of pleasure, wear 
 the flaunting aspect of being no better than they 
 should be. Happy were we, were they always as 
 good! 
 
 Poets fancies only, should image the Falls, they 
 are so rich and rare a combination of quiet pictu- 
 resqueness of beauty, and a sense of resistless force 
 in the rushing waters. You descend from a lofty 
 wood into a long, rocky chasm, which the Germans 
 would call a Grund^ for it is not a valley. It is 
 walled and pavemented with smooth rocks, and the 
 thronging forest fringes the summit of the wall. 
 Over this smooth pavement slips the river, in those 
 long, swift, still, foamless bounds, which vividly 
 figure the appalling movement of a titanic serpent. 
 The chasm almost closes up the river, and you see a 
 foamy cascade above. Then, as if the best beauty 
 and mystery were beyond, you creep along a narrow 
 ledge in the rockside of the throat of the gorge, the 
 water whirling and bubbling beneath, and reach the 
 first large Fall. A slight spray enfolds you as a bap 
 tism in the spirit of the place. A broad ledge of the 
 rock here offers firm and sufficient foothold while 
 you gaze at the Falls. Before you is a level parapet 
 
TRENTON. 
 
 G7 
 
 of rock, and the river, after 
 sliding very shallowly over the x v ; 7 ,j 
 broad bed above, concentrates 
 mainly at one point for a fall, and 
 plunges in a solid amber sheet. 
 
 Close by the side of this you climb, 
 and pass along the base of the overhang 
 ing mountain, and stooping under the foot of an im 
 perial cliff, stand before the great Fall, which has 
 two plunges, a long one above, from which the river 
 sheers obliquely over a polished floor of rock, and 
 again plunges. The river bends here, and a high, 
 square, regular bank projects from the cliff, smooth 
 EG a garden terrace, and perpetually veiled and soft- 
 
68 LOTUS-EATING 
 
 ened by the spray. It is one of the most beautiful 
 and boldest points in the long ravine, and when the 
 late light of afternoon falls soft upon it, there is a 
 strange contrast in your feelings as visions of Boc- 
 cacio s garden mingle with the wildness of American 
 woods. 
 
 Upon the cliff above this great Fall is a little house 
 where the weary may rest, and those who find 
 "water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink," 
 may pledge the spirit of Trenton, in that kind, if not 
 that quality, of nectar which Boccacio himself would 
 have desired. Here, under the densely-foliaged trees 
 sit musing above the Fall, and watch the broad stream 
 concentrate as it nears the verge ; and then from the 
 deep dark indigo of the pool collected there, see it 
 pour itself away, a fall of brilliant amber, into the 
 light streaming warmly frori the west up the ravine. 
 As you, musing, gaze, your own fancy will flow from 
 the sombreness of serious thought, and pour itself 
 away in a spray of romance and reverie, far through 
 the golden gloom of the past and the bright-hued 
 hope of the future that streams toward you like the 
 light from the west. 
 
 You will recall the European falls of fame ; you 
 will hear once more the glad Yelino " cleave the 
 wave-worn precipice," and mark the dark eyes of 
 Italian girls, who steal to your side as you listen, 
 
TRENTON". . oy 
 
 and say, as if the dark eyes whispered it, " un bai- 
 occho, Signore." You will see the Sibylline temple, 
 high-crowning the cliff at Tivoli, and once more, over 
 the sea-surface, but silent and motionless, of the 
 Campagna, your eye will rest upon St. Peter s dome, 
 rising mountain-like from the plain, and Beatrice 
 d Este will glide a pallid phantom, along the marble- 
 floored, cypress-gloomed terraces of the villa. The 
 thousand Alpine cascades of Switzerland will nicker 
 through your memory, slight avalanches of snow- 
 dust, shimmering into rainbow-mist, and the Ehine, 
 beneath your back window in the hotel at Schaff- 
 hausen, will plunge once more over its little rocky 
 barrier, sending its murmur far into the haunted 
 depths of the Black Forest beside you. Or, farther 
 and fainter still, the rapids of the Nile and the rills 
 of Lebanon will rush and gurgle, as you did not 
 dream to hear them again, nor will your fancy rest 
 until it sinks in the oriental languor of the banks of 
 Abana and Parphar, rivers of Damascus. 
 
 Wild is the witchery of water, and the spell en 
 chanted, which its ceaseless flowing weaves. Such 
 pictures were in that amber Fall. Such echoes an 
 swered those silver cadences. Such names, and 
 places, and memories are now the synonymes of 
 Trenton. But for you and for others it may sing 
 different songs. An organ of many stops, it discour- 
 
70 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 ses sweet music in all. J^ot like the any harpsichord 
 of the fair Alice, dead centuries ago, tuned to a sin 
 gle strain, but like the heart of the young Phoebe, 
 gushing gaily or gravely, according as the sun or 
 shadow ovcrswept it. 
 
 There is something especially pleasant in the tran 
 quil, family-like character of the house at Trenton. 
 It is by far the best hostelry of the kind that I have 
 encountered in my summer wandering ; and, lying 
 away from any town or railroad, the traveller seems 
 to have steppe;! back into the dayn when travelling 
 was an event and not a habit, and when the necessity 
 of moderation in speed imposed a corresponding 
 leisure in enjoyment. Doubtless the railroad makes 
 us move mentally, as well as physically, with more 
 rapidity. The eye sees more in life, but does the 
 heart feel more, is experience really richer ? Haste 
 breeds indigestion, but happiness lies, first of all, in 
 health. 
 
 The man who in the quiet round of life has made 
 friends with every object of the landscape he knows, 
 who sees its changes, and sympathizes with them, 
 and who has learned from a single tree what men 
 have exhausted all libraries and societies without 
 finding he is of better, because of profounder, ex 
 perience than his friend who has raced over half the 
 world in a twelve-month, and whose memory is only 
 
TKENTON. 71 
 
 a kaleidoscope. A mile horizontally on the surface 
 of the earth does not cany you one inch toward its 
 centre, and yet it is in the centre that the gold mines 
 are. A man who truly knows Shakspeare, only, is 
 the master of a thousand who have squeezed the cir 
 culating libraries dry. 
 
 Do not fail to see Trenton. It is various-voiced. 
 It is the playing of lutes on the moonlight lawn as 
 Stoddard delicately sings. It is well to listen for it 
 in the pauses of the steam-shriek of our career. For 
 if once your fancy hears its murmur, you will be as 
 the boatman who catches through the roar of the 
 Ehine, the song of the Lorelei, and you too, will be 
 wan to delicious repose. 
 
 "But thou, who dids t appear so fair 
 
 To fond imagination, 
 Dost rival in the light of day, 
 
 Her delicate creation: 
 Meek loveliness is round thee spread, 
 
 A softness still and holy: 
 The grace of forest charms decayed, 
 
 And pastoral melasicholy. 
 
 " The vapors linger round the height ; 
 
 They meet and soon must vanish : 
 One hour is theirs, nor more is mine, 
 
 Sad thought, which I would banish, 
 Bat that I know, where er I go, 
 
 Thy genuine image. Yarrow, 
 "Will dwell with me, to heighten joy, 
 
 And cheer my mind in sorrow." 
 
NIAGARA. 
 
V. 
 
 AUGUST. 
 
 HE Rapids before 
 Niagara are not of 
 water only. The Cat 
 aract is the centre of 
 a vortex of travel a 
 maelstrom which you 
 " 1 scarcely suspect until you 
 are swimming round in its intense 
 , /") swiftness, and feel that you are 
 drawn nearer and closer, every mo- 
 ment, to an awful and unimagined 
 Presence. 
 
 The summer-bird of a traveller who skims up the 
 Hudson dippingly, wending Niagara- ward, if he has 
 never seen the Falls, and has heard of them all his 
 life, loiters along his way, quite unimpressed by the 
 anticipation of his bourne, whose image has lost 
 
76 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 much of its grandeur in his mind by the household 
 familiarity of the name. It is somewhat so with 
 Switzerland after a residence in Europe. You ap 
 proach half languidly, more than half suspicious that 
 the fixed stare of the world has melted the glaciers, 
 and the snow sifted along inaccessible, rocky crevi 
 ces, or at least has sadly stained them, and that even 
 the Alps have been lionized into littleness. But 
 Borne choice evening, as if the earth had suddenly 
 bared her bosom to the glowing kiss of the dying 
 day, you behold from Berne or Zurich the austere 
 purity of the snow- Alps, incredibly lofty, majestic 
 and awful, and the worship of remembrance is for 
 ever after, living and profound. 
 
 So I came sauntering along through "Western New 
 York, (sauntering by steam ! and yet the mind may 
 loiter, may remain fast and firm behind, although 
 the body flies,) and turned aside with my presidential 
 Antinous at Trenton, nor once paused to listen 
 through its graceful whisper for the regal voice be 
 yond. In the ravine of Trenton you meet some 
 chance friend returning from the great cataract, and 
 sit with him upon the softest rock, where you can 
 well watch the beautiful amber-fall the while, and 
 curiously compare, at the last moment, your own fan 
 cies, with the daguerrean exactness of his fresh im- 
 pression. But, after all, it is only curiously. You 
 
NIAGARA. 77 
 
 dream and wonder vaguely, and comparisons are 
 constantly baffled by the syren singing of the falling 
 waters which will have no divided love. Allured by 
 the beauty in whose lap you lie, your friend s present 
 praises are much sincerer and more intelligible than 
 his remembered raptures. 
 
 Such a friend I met and we discussed Niagara. 
 But as he told his story, I was placing the stairs here, 
 and towers there, about the rocks ; and the great 
 sheet and the little sheet were before us ; and Goat 
 Island smiled greenly in the bold, beautiful bank, 
 which, like a verdured terrace, hung toward the 
 stream from an enchanted palace in the pines ; and 
 when the tale was told, I had a very pleasant, if 
 somewhat incongruous, fancy of Niagara, as a kind 
 of sublimed Trenton. 
 
 And still, with memory clinging to the amber 
 skirts of Trenton, I rushed along on a day that veiled 
 the outline of the landscape with scudding gusts of 
 mist, through the most classical of all American re 
 gions through Rome, and Manlius, and Syracuse, 
 and Camillus, and Marcellus ; ruthlessly on, through 
 "Waterloo, Geneva, East Vienna, Rochester, Cold 
 "Water, Chili, (natural neighbors !) Byron, Attica 
 and Darien ; then drew breath enough to wonder, 
 that with such wealth of names inherited from the 
 Indians, we so tenaciously cling to the glories of old 
 
78 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 fames to cover the nakedness of our newness, and 
 saw, at the same moment that we had left classical- 
 ity, that we had overtaken a name peculiar to our 
 continent, and had arrived at Buffalo ! 
 
 Why not Bison, Ox, or Wild Horse ? And this, 
 too, with the waves breaking along the shore of Lake 
 Ontario, a majestic and melodious Indian name, 
 hitherto unappropriated to a city. No wonder that 
 the Buffalo sky thundered and lightened all night, 
 from sheer vexation at its loss. I awoke at midnight 
 
 & 
 
 to the music of a serenade that was vainly striving 
 to soothe the tempest, and later, the angry clash of 
 fire-bells stormed against the storm. But it was not 
 comforted or subdued. Still, in the lull of the music, 
 and the pauses of the bells, I heard it muttering and 
 moaning as it glared: "I, that am Buffalo, might 
 have been Ontario." 
 
 But the storm wept itself away, and I awoke at 
 morning to find myself upon the verge of the interest 
 and excitement which immediately precedes all great 
 events. During the previous day I had smiled rather 
 loftily at the idea of excitement in approaching Ni 
 agara ; but when my luggage was checked, and I 
 bought a ticket for "Niagara Falls," and stepping 
 into the cars, knew that I should not alight until I 
 heard the roar and saw the spray of the cataract ; 
 then the eense of its grandeur, of its unique sublim- 
 
NIAGARA. 79 
 
 ity, which I perfectly knew, though I had never seen, 
 came down upon me, and smote me suddenly with 
 awe as when a man who has loitered idly to St. 
 Peter s, grasps the leathern curtain to push it aside, 
 that he may behold the magnificence whose remem 
 bered lustre shall illuminate every year of his life. 
 It is remarkable that the anti-romance of a rail 
 road is a mere prejudice. The straight lines piercing 
 the rounding landscape are essentially poetic, and 
 the fervid desire of sight and possession which fires 
 the mind upon approaching beloved or famous places 
 and persons, takes adequate form in the steam-speed 
 of a train which, straight as thought and swift aa 
 hope, cleaves the country to the single point. In the 
 wild woods we do not insist upon the prosaic charac 
 ter of the railroad, because we wish to hurry through ; 
 and no one, I believe, not even the poets, sigh for the 
 good old times of staging from Albany to Niagara. 
 But, in Europe, in lands of traditional romance, it 
 appears at first very differently. A railroad to 
 Yenice ! " Heaven forefend !" said I, as I lumbered 
 easily out of Florence in a vettura, comfortably ac 
 complishing its thirty miles a 4 ay. " Heaven fore- 
 fend !" said I still, as we climbed the Apennines, 
 and descending, rolled into quaint, arcaded Bologna, 
 and listened beneath Eaphael s St. Cecilia, to hear 
 if no spirit of a sound trembled from the harp-strings. 
 
80 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 " Heaven forefend !" said I still, as we jogged along 
 the Lombard post-roads, green and golden, and glit 
 tering with the swaying of vines in the languid wind, 
 hanging from grave, stiff old poplars, like beautiful, 
 winning, bewildering arms of loveliness, caressing 
 whole perspectives of solemn quaker papas, and fes 
 tooning the road as if the summer were a festival of 
 Bacchus, and a jolly rout of bacchanals had but now 
 reeled along to the vintage. " Heaven forefend !" 
 said I, as we tramped through the grassy streets of 
 Ferrara, mouthing uncertain verses from Tasso, and 
 utterly incredulous of Byron s fable of songless gon 
 doliers beyond : and still, " Heaven forefend !" said 
 I, as by the many-domed cathedral of St. Antony, we 
 mingled in the evening Corso, and straining our eyes 
 for the University of Padua, alighted at the hotel, 
 thirty or forty miles from Venice. But when, the 
 next morning, I opened my eyes, and, eschewing the 
 cud of dreams, said to myself, " You are thirty miles 
 from Yenice," I sprang up like one whose marriage- 
 morn has dawned, and cried aloud, "Thank God, 
 there is a railroad to Yenice !" 
 
 Nor could the speed of that railroad more than 
 figure the eagerness of my desire, as it swept us 
 through the vineyards. Nor did the dream of Yenice 
 fade, but deepen rather, for the strange contrast of 
 that wild speed, and its eternal, romantic rest. 
 
NIAGARA. 81 
 
 I had the same eagerness in stepping upon the cars 
 at Buffalo. "Within a certain circumference every body 
 is Niagarized, and flies in a frenzy to the centre as til 
 ings to the magnet. Before the train stopped, and 
 while I fancied that we were slackening speed for a 
 way-station I, listening the while to the pleasant 
 music of words, that weaned my hearing from any 
 roar of waters a crowd of men leaped from the cars, 
 and ran like thieves, lovers, soldiers, or what you will, 
 to the " Cataract," as the conductor said. I looked upon 
 them at once as a select party of poets, overwhelmed 
 by the enthusiastic desire to see the Fall s. It was 
 an error : they were " knowing ones," intent upon the 
 first choice of rooms at the " Cataract House." I 
 followed them, and found a queue, as at the box-office 
 of the opera in Paris a long train of travellers wait 
 ing to enter their names. Not one could have a room 
 yet, (it was ten o clock,) but at half-past two every 
 body was going away, and then every body could 
 be accommodated. 
 
 And meanwhile ? 
 
 Meanwhile, Niagara. 
 
 Disappointment in Niagara seems to be affected, 
 or childish. Your fancies may be very different, but 
 the regal reality sweeps them away like weeds and 
 dreams. You may have nourished some impossible 
 idea of one ocean pouring itself over a precipice into 
 
 D* 
 
82 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 another. But it was a wild whim of in experience ^ 
 and is in a moment forgotten. If, standing upon the 
 bridge as you cross to Goat Island, you can watch 
 the wild sweep and swirl of the waters around the 
 wooded point above, dashing, swelling and raging, 
 but awful from the inevitable and resistless rush, and 
 not feel that your fancy of a sea is paled by the chaos 
 of wild water that tumbles toward you, then you are 
 a child, and the forms of your thought are not precise 
 enough for the profoundest satisfaction in great nat 
 ural spectacles. 
 
 Over that bridge how slowly you will walk, and 
 how silently, gazing in awe at the tempestuous sweep 
 of the rapids, and glancing with wonder at the faint 
 cloud of spray over the American Fall. As the 
 sense of grandeur and beauty subdues your mind, 
 you will still move quietly onward, pausing a mo 
 ment, leaning a moment on the railing, closing your 
 eyes to hear only Niagara, and ever, as a child says 
 its prayers in a time of danger, slowly, and with 
 strange slowness, repeating to yourself, " Niagara ! 
 Niagara !" 
 
 For although you have not yet seen the Cataract, 
 you feel that nothing else can be the crisis of this 
 excitement. Were you suddenly placed blindfolded 
 where you stand, and your eyes were unbandaged, 
 and you were asked, " What shall be the result of all 
 
NIAGARA. 83 
 
 this ?" the answer would accompany the question, 
 "Niagara!" 
 
 Yet marvellous calmness still waits upon intense 
 feeling. " It was odd," wrote Sterling to a friend, 
 " to be curiously studying the figures on the doctor s 
 vaistcoat, while my life, as I thought, was bleeding 
 rom my lips." We must still sport with our emo 
 tions. Some philosopher will die, his last breath 
 sparkling from his lips in a pun. Some fair and 
 fated Lady Jane Grey will span her slight neck with 
 her delicate fingers, and smile to the headsman that 
 his task is easy. And we, with kindred feeling, turn 
 aside into the shop of Indian curiosities and play 
 with Niagara, treating it as a jester, as a Bayadere, 
 to await our pleasure. 
 
 Then, through the woods on Goat Island solemn 
 and stately woods how slowly you will walk, again, 
 and how silently ! Ten years ago, your friend carved 
 his name upon some tree there, and Niagara must 
 now wait until he finds it, swollen and shapeless with 
 time. You saunter on. It is not a sunny day. It 
 is cloudy, but the light is moist and rich, and when 
 you emerge upon the quiet green path that skirts the 
 English Rapids, the sense of life in the waters the 
 water as a symbol of life and human passion fills 
 your mind. Certainly no other water in the world is 
 watched with such anxiety, with such sympathy. 
 
04 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 The helplessness of its frenzied sweep saddens your 
 heart. It is dark, fateful, foreboding. At times, as 
 if a wild despair had seized it and rent it, it seethes, 
 and struggles, and dashes foam-like into the air. Not 
 with kindred passion do you regard it, but sadly, 
 with folded hands of resignation, as you watch the 
 death struggles of a hero. It sweeps away as you 
 look, dark, and cold, and curling, and the seething 
 you saw, before your thought is shaped, is an eddy 
 of foam in the Niagara River below. 
 
 As yet you have not seen the Fall. You are com 
 ing with its waters, and are at its level. But groups 
 of persons, sitting upon yonder point, which we see 
 through the trees, are looking at the Cataract. We 
 do not pause for them ; we run now, down the path, 
 
NIAGARA. 85 
 
 along the bridges, into the Tower, and lean far over 
 where the spray cools our faces. The living water 
 of the rapids moves to its fall, as if torpid with ter 
 ror ; and the river that we saw, in one vast volume 
 now pours over the parapet, and makes Niagara. 
 It is not all stricken into foam as it falls, but tho 
 densest mass is smooth, and almost of livid green. 
 
 Yet, even as it plunges, see how curls of spray 
 exude from the very substance of the mass, airy, 
 sparkling and wreathing into mist emblems of the 
 water s resurrection into summer clouds. Looking 
 over into the abyss, we behold nothing below, we 
 hear only a slow, constant thunder ; and, bewildered 
 in the mist, dream that the Cataract has cloven the 
 earth to its centre, and that, pouring its waters into 
 the fervent inner heat, they hiss into spray, and 
 overhang the fated Fall, the sweat of its agony. 
 
NIAGARA, AGAIN 
 
VL 
 
 AUGUST. 
 
 RETHUSA arose 
 From her couch of snows 
 In the Acroceraunian Mountains 
 From cloud and from crag 
 With many a jag, 
 
 ^Shepherding her bright fountains, 
 She leapt down the rocks, 
 With her rainbow locks 
 Streaming among the streams : 
 Her steps paved with green 
 The downward ravine, 
 Which slopes to the Western gleams : 
 And gliding and springing, 
 She went ever singing 
 In murmurs as soft as sleep: 
 
 The earth seemed to love her, 
 And heaven smiled above her, 
 As she lingered toward the deep. 
 
 SHELLEY would wonder, could he know that these 
 lines of his were quoted at Niagara. But Niagara is 
 DO less beautiful than sublime, although I do not re 
 member to have heard much of its beauty. It even 
 
90 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 suggests the personal feeling implied in such verses, 
 and which, at a distance, seems utterly incompatible 
 with the grandeur of the spot. 
 
 Nature has her partialities for places as well as 
 persons, and as she thrones the Goethean or Web- 
 Bterian intellect upon " the front of Jove himself," 
 so she is quite sure to adorn the feet of her snowy 
 Alps with the lustrous green of vineyards, the stately 
 shade of chestnuts, or the undulating sweep of lawn- 
 like pastures. Here at Niagara she enamels the 
 cliffs with delicate verdure, and the luminous gloom 
 of the wood upon Goat Island invites to meditation 
 with cathedral solemnity. 
 
 Nothing struck me more than the ease of access to 
 the very verge of the cataract. Upon the narrow 
 point between the large and small American falls 
 you may sit .upon the soft bank on a tranquil after 
 noon, dabbling your feet in the swiftly slipping 
 water, reading the most dreamy of romances, and 
 soothed by the huge roar, as if you were the vice 
 gerent of the prophet, and the flow of the cool, 
 smooth river but the constant caressing of troops of 
 slaves, and the roar of the Cataract but hushed 
 voices singing their lord to sleep. 
 
 But if in your reading you pause, or if the low rip 
 ple of talk subsides, in which your soul was laved, 
 as your frame in the gurgling freshness of wood- 
 
NIAGAKA. 91 
 
 streams, and your eyes are left charmed upon the 
 current or if your dream dissolves and you behold 
 the water, its own fascination is not less than that of 
 the romance. It flows so tranquilly, is so unimpa- 
 tient of the mighty plunge, that it woos and woos 
 you to lay your head upon its breast and slide into 
 dreamless sleep. 
 
 Darkling, I listen ; and. for many a time, 
 
 I have been half in love with easeful death- 
 Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme 
 
 To take into the air my quiet breath: 
 
 Now more than ever seems it rich to die, 
 To cease upon the midnight with no pain, 
 
 While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad 
 
 In such an ecstacy ! 
 Still wouldst thou sing and I have ears in vain 
 
 To thy high requiem become a sod. 
 
 So sang Keats to the nightingale which sang to 
 him, and whoever w T as really so enamored could ill 
 resist the seduction of the stream at the Falls. For 
 in its might subsides all fear. It is a force so resist 
 less, that it would need only a slight step, the merest 
 overture of your will. If Niagara were in France, I 
 am confident the Frenchmen would make suicide 
 pic-nics to the Cataract. Unhappy lovers would take 
 express trains, and their " quietus make "where their 
 dirge would be endless. The French, of course, 
 would add the melo-dramatic character of such an 
 ending to its intrinsic charms, and even John Bull 
 
92 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 might forego the satisfaction of a leap from the Duke 
 of York s column for a Niagaran annihilation. 
 
 As you sit, chatting and wondering, upon the bench 
 at this point, you are sure to hear the sad romance of 
 two years since. A young man caught up a child 
 and swung it to and fro over the water onlj- a few 
 feet from the precipice, laughing gaily and feign 
 ing fright, when suddenly the child sprang from his 
 arms into the rapid. lie stepped in instantly, for the 
 water near the shore is not more than two feet deep, 
 and caught her again in his arms. But the treach 
 erous stones at the bottom were so slippery with the 
 constant action of the water, that, although he could 
 resist the force of the stream, he could not maintain 
 his foothold, and was swept with the child in his 
 arms, and his betrothed mistress watching him from 
 the bank, directly over the fall. The man who told 
 me the story was a musician and had still a low tone 
 of horror in his voice ; for he said that, as the young 
 man came to the Point, he told him there was to be 
 a dance that evening and that he must have his 
 music ready. They had scarcely parted, his words 
 were yet ringing in his ears, when he heard a curd 
 ling shriek of terror, and knew that "somebody had 
 gone over the Falls." 
 
 Niagara has but one interest, and that absorbs all 
 attention. The country around is entirely level, and 
 
NIAGARA. 
 
 covered with woods and 
 grain fields. It is 
 very thinly pop- _ s 
 ulated ; civi- ^ 
 lization seems to 
 have made 
 small inroad 
 upon the pri- 
 meval grand 
 eur of the spot. 
 Stand ins: __ 
 
 m 
 
 Island and looking up | 
 the stream the wooded / 
 
 banks stare back upon , jj } 
 
 - I / ; 
 you as in a savage si- \\ 
 
 lence of folded arms and 
 
 scornful eyes. They are not 
 
 fair woods, but dark forests. 
 
 They smite you only with a sense of magnificent 
 
 space, as I fancy the impression of Rocky Mouri 
 
 tain scenery, but which is akin to that of chaos. 
 
 From the spot where stood the young English her 
 mit s cottage, upon Goat Island, you front the Cana 
 da shore. But the name dies along your mind 
 almost without echo, even as your voice might call 
 into those dark forests, but melt from them no human 
 
94 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 response. Canada! The name is a mist in the 
 mind. Slowly and vaguely a few remembrances 
 shape themselves. Shadowy and terrible traditions 
 of hopeless and heartless Indian wars, which tapped 
 the choicest veins of French and English blood, but 
 gave no glory in return, half tell themselves in the 
 mind, like the croning of a beldame in the chimney 
 corner. 
 
 Slowly from tfie red mist of that vague remem 
 brance rise the names of Wolfe and Montgomery and 
 Montcalm, heroes where heroism little availed, for 
 the Indian element mingled in the story, and where 
 the Indian is, there nobility and chivalry are not. 
 You look across the rapids upon a country which has 
 made no mark in history ; where few men love to 
 live, except those who have little choice ; where the 
 towns are stagnant and few ; upon a country whose 
 son no man is proud to be, and the barrenness of the 
 impression somewhat colors your feelings of Niagara, 
 for the American shore is wild too, although the 
 zealous activity of the little village at the Falls, and 
 the white neatness of Lewiston, below, relieve the 
 sense of desolation upon the distant banks. 
 
 The beauty of Niagara is in its immediate neigh 
 borhood. It is upon Goat Island upon the cliffs 
 over which hangs the greenest verdure in the trees 
 that lean out ind against the Rapids, as if the forest 
 
NIAGARA. 
 
 95 
 
 were ena 
 mored of 
 the waters, 
 
 and which overhang and V 
 dip, suffering their youngest^ 
 arid softest leaves to thrill in i- 
 the trembling frenzy of the toucht\ 
 of Niagara. It is in the vivid con 
 trast of the repose of lofty trees and 
 the whirl of a living river and in the^l! 
 contrast, more singular and subtle, of twinkling, 
 shimmering leaves, and the same magnificent mad 
 ness. It is in the profuse and splendid play of col 
 ors in and around the Cataract, and in the thousand 
 evanescent fancies which wreathe its image in the 
 mind as the sparkling vapor floats, a rainbow, around 
 the reality. It is in the flowers that grow quietly 
 along the edges of the precipices, to the slightest of 
 
96 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 which one drop of the clouds of spray that curl from 
 the seething abyss is the sufficient elixir of a long 
 and lovely life. 
 
 Yet for we must look the Alpine comparison 
 which is suggested to every one who knows Switzer 
 land, fairly in the face the Alps are more terrible 
 than Niagara. The movement and roar of the Cata 
 ract, and the, facility of approach to the very plunge, 
 relieve the crushing sense of awfulness which the 
 silent, inaccessible, deadly solitudes of the high Alps 
 inspire. The war of an avalanche heard in those 
 solemn heights, because beginning often and ending 
 beyond the point that human feet may ever tread, is 
 a sound of dread and awe like that of the mysterious 
 movement of another world, hoard through the si 
 lence of our own. 
 
 Besides, where trees grow, there human sympathy 
 lingers. Doubtless it is the supreme beauty of the 
 edges of Niagara, which often causes travellers to 
 fancy that they are disappointed, as if in Semiramis 
 they should see more of the woman than of the queen. 
 But, climbing the Alps, you leave trees below. They 
 shrink and retire. They lose their bloom and beauty. 
 They decline from tenderness into toughness ; from 
 delicate, shifting hues into sombre evergreen dark 
 er and more solemn, until they are almost black, 
 until they are dwarfed ; and scant and wretched, and 
 
NIAGARA. 97 
 
 are finally seen no more. With the trees, you leave 
 the sights and sounds and sentiments of life. The 
 Alpine peaks are the r.agged edges of creation, half 
 blent with chaos. Upon them, inaccessible forever, 
 in the midst of the endless murmur of the world, 
 antemundane silenca lies stranded, like the corse of 
 an antediluvian upon a solitary rock-point in the sea. 
 Painfully climbing toward those heights you may 
 feel, with the fascination of wonder and awe, that 
 you look, as the Chinese say, behind the beginning. 
 
 But if the Alps are thus death, Niagara is life ; 
 and you know which is the more terrible. It is a 
 life, however, which you are to observe in many 
 ways from below, from above, from the sides, from 
 the suspension bridge, and, finally, you must steam 
 up to its very front, and then climb down behind it. 
 
 These two latter excursions are by no means to be 
 omitted. The little steamer leaves the shore by the 
 suspension bridge, and, gliding with effort into the 
 current of the river, you remember that there is the 
 Cataract before and the whirlpool behind, and sheer 
 rocky precipices on each side. But there is only gay 
 gossip and pleasant wonder all around you, the 
 morning is mild, and the Falls flash like a plunge 
 of white flame. Slowly, slowly, tugs the little boat 
 against the stream. She hugs the shore, rocky- 
 hearted, stiff, straight, prim old puritan of a shore 
 
 E 
 
95 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 that it is, although it is wreathed and crowned with 
 graceful foliage. 
 
 Presently comes a puff of cool spray. Is it a 
 threat, a kiss, or a warning from our terrible bourne ? 
 The fussy little captain exhorts every body to wrap 
 in a water-proof cloak and cap; we shall else be 
 Boaked through and through, as we were never soaked 
 by shower before. But some of us, beautiful daugh 
 ters of a mother famously fair, love our looks, and 
 would fain enjoy every thing without making our 
 selves less lovely. 
 
 "Pooh, pooh!" insists our captain, "I wouldn t 
 give three cents for them ere bunnets, (our choice 
 travelling hats !) if they once get wet." 
 
 So we consent to cloaks, but we positively decline 
 India-rubber caps, especially after an advance to six 
 cents by a gallant friend upon the captain s bid for 
 our " bunnets." The men must shift for themselves. 
 Here we are in the roar and the rush and the spray. 
 Whew ! it drives, it sweeps, and the steady thunder 
 of the Cataract booms, cramming the air with sound. 
 Only a few of us hold the upper deck. Nor are we, 
 who have no mantles, all unprotected, for shawls 
 wont to protect flowers from the summer wind, now 
 shield us from the spray of Niagara. 
 
 We sweep along upon our leaf, which quivers and 
 skims the foam sweep straight into the blinding 
 
NIAGARA. 99 
 
 white, thick, suffocating mist of the Cataract, strain 
 our eyes, as we gasp, for the curve of the Fall, for 
 the parapet above, and in a sudden break of the 
 cloud, through which breathes cold the very air of 
 the rush of waters, we catch a glorious glimpse of 
 a calm ocean pouring white and resistless from the 
 blue sky above into the white tilouds below, and be 
 hold the very image of that Mind s process whose 
 
 might 
 
 l - Moves on 
 
 His undisturbed affairs. 
 
 I glance backward upon the deck, which is raked 
 by the scudding gusts of spray, and see a line of wet 
 men crouching together, like a group of Esquimaux, 
 with their faces upturned toward the Fall. They sit 
 motionless, and staring, and appalled, like a troop in 
 Dante s Inferno. But straight before us good God ! 
 pilot, close under the bow there, looming through the 
 mist ! Are you blind ? are you mad ? or does the 
 Cataract mock our feeble power, and will claim its 
 victims ? A black rock, ambushed in the surge and 
 spray, lowers before us. We are driving straight 
 upon it we all see it, but we do not speak. We 
 fancy that the boat will not obey that the due fate 
 shall reward this terrific trifling. Straight before us, 
 a boat s length away, and lo ! swerving with the cur 
 rent around the rock, on and farther, with felicitous 
 
LOO LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 daring, the little "Maid of the Mist" dancer up to 
 the very foot of the Falls, wrapping herself saucily 
 in the rainbow robe of its own mist. There we trem 
 ble, in perfect security, mocking with our little Maid 
 the might of Niagara. For man is the magician, 
 and as he plants his foot upon the neck of mountains, 
 and passes the awful Alps, safely as the Israelites 
 through the divided sea, so he dips his hand into 
 Niagara, and gathering a few drops from its waters, 
 educes a force from Niagara itself, by which he con 
 fronts and defies it. The very water which as ste-am 
 was moving us to the Cataract, had plunged over it 
 as spray a few hours before. 
 
 Or go, some bright morning down the Biddle 
 staircase, and creeping aloug under the cliff, change 
 your dress at the little house by the separate sheet 
 of the American Fall. The change made, we shall 
 reappear like exhausted firemen, or Swampscot fish 
 ermen. Some of us will not insist upon our " bun- 
 nets" bnt will lay them aside and join the dilapidated 
 firemen and fishermen outsid-e the house, as Bloom- 
 erized Undines, mermaids, or naiads. A few de 
 scending steps of rock, and we have reached the 
 perpendicular wooden staircase that leads under the 
 Fall. Do not stop do not pause to look affrighted 
 down into that whirring cauldron of cold mist, where 
 the winds dart, blinding, in arrowy gusts. Now we 
 
NIAGARA. 101 
 
 see the platform across the bottom now a cloud of 
 mist blots it out. And it roars so ! 
 
 Come, Fishermen, Mermaids, Naiads, Firemen 
 and Undine, down ! down ! Cling to the railing ! 
 Lean on me ! Thou gossamer blossom which the 
 softest summer zephyr would thrill, whither will 
 these mad gales beneath the Cataract whirl thee ! 
 We are here upon the narrow platform ; it is railed 
 upon each side, and the drops dash like sleet, like 
 acute hail, against our faces. The swift sweep of 
 the water across the floor would slide us also into the 
 yawning gulf beyond, but clinging with our hands, 
 we move securely as in calm airs. And now look 
 up, for you stand directly beneath the itrching water, 
 directly under the fall. The rock is hollowed, and 
 the round pebbles on the ground rush and rattle with 
 the slkling water as on the sea-beach. You leave 
 the platform, you climb between two rocks, and slid 
 ing along a staging, unstable almost as the water, 
 yet quite firm enough, you stand directly upon the 
 rocks, and Niagara plunges and tumbles above you 
 and around you. 
 
 There at sunset, and only there, you may see three 
 circular rainbows, one within another. For Niagara 
 has unimagined boons for her lovers rewards of 
 beauty so profound that she enjoins silence as the 
 proof of fidelity. 
 
102 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 Returning, there is an overhanging shelf of roek 5 
 and there, except that it is cold and wet, you sit se 
 cluded from the spray. It is a lonely cave, curtained 
 from the sun by the Cataract, forever. And if still 
 your daring is untamed, you may climb over slippery 
 rocks in the blinding mist and the deafening roar, 
 and feel yourself as far under the Great American 
 Fall as human foot may venture. 
 
 I must stop. If you have been at Niagara, what 
 1 have written may recall it, but can hardly paint, 
 except to remembrance, the austere grandeur and 
 dreamy beauties which are its characteristics. Youi 
 few days there are days upon the river bank, walk 
 ing and wondering. Your frail fancies of it are 
 swallowed up as they rise, like chance flowers flung 
 upon its current. Many a man to whom Niagara 
 has been a hope, and an inspiration, and who has 
 stood before its majesty awe-stricken and hushed, 
 secretly wonders that his words describing it are not 
 pictures and poems. But any great natural object 
 a cataract, an Alp, a storm at sea are seed too vast 
 for any sudden flowering. They lie in experience 
 moulding life. At length the pure peaks of noble 
 aims and the broad flow of a generous manhood 
 betray that in some happy hour of youth you have 
 seen the Alps and Niagara. 
 
SARATOGA. 
 
VII. 
 
 
 AUGUST. 
 
 ILT thou be a nun, Sophie? 
 
 Nothing but a nun 1 
 Is it not a better thing 
 With thy friends to laugh and sing * 
 To be loved and sought 1 
 
 To be wooed and won 1 
 Dost thou love the shadow, Sophie 1 
 Better than the sun 1 
 
 ROMANCE is the necessary 
 association of watering-places, because they are the 
 haunts of youth and beauty seeking pleasure. When 
 on some opaline May day you drive out from Naples 
 to Baise, the Saratoga of old Rome, and in the golden 
 light of the waning afternoon drink Falernian while 
 you look upon the vineyards where it ripened for 
 Horace, your fancy is thronged with the images of 
 Romance, and you could listen to catch some echo 
 of a long silent love-song, lingering in the air. 
 
 It is a kind of sentimentality inseparable from the 
 
106 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 spot a pensive reverie into which few men are loth 
 to fall : for its atmosphere is " the light that never was 
 on sea or land." Yet romance, like a ghost, eludes 
 touching. It is always where you were, not where 
 you are. The interview or the conversation was 
 prose at the time, but it is poetry in memory. 
 
 Thus persons of poetic feeling speak of people and 
 events as if they were the figures of a romance and 
 are laughed at for seeing every thing through their 
 imagination. But why is it not as pleasant to see 
 through imagination as through scepticism? Why, 
 because people are bad, should I be faithless of the 
 virtues of a beautiful woman ? 
 
 Life is the best thing we can possibly make of it. 
 It is dull and dismal and heavy, if a man loses his 
 temper : it is glowing with promise and satisfaction 
 if he is not ashamed of his emotions. Young America 
 is very anxious to be a man of the w r orld. He has 
 heard that in England a gentleman is a being of 
 sublime indifference, who has exhausted all varieties 
 of experience who has, in fact, opened the oyster 
 of the world. So Young America cultivates non 
 chalance with the ladies, and cannot help it if he 
 does know every thing that is worth knowing. To 
 every man of thought and perception he is the miser 
 able travesty of a human being, whose social life is 
 an injustice and an insult to every woman. 
 
SARATOGA. 107 
 
 He does not see that indifference is satiety- that 
 it is the weakness of a man whom circumstances 
 have mastered, and not the sensitive calmness, like a 
 lake s surface, of profound and digested experience. 
 What is the charm of a belle but her purely natural 
 manners ? And they are charming, not in themselves, 
 but because they harmonize with her nature and 
 character. Yet if another person imitates her man 
 ners in the hope of being a belle, the result is at once 
 ludicrous and painful. But such musings, however 
 suggested by the place, I fancy you will consider the 
 sand barren in which Saratoga lies. 
 
 The romance of a watering-place, like other ro 
 mance, always seems past when you are there. Here 
 at Saratoga, when the last polka is polked, and the 
 last light in the ball-room is extinguished, you saun 
 ter along the great piazza, with the " good night" of 
 Beauty yet trembling upon your lips, and meet some 
 old Habitue*, or even a group of them, smoking in 
 lonely arm-chairs, and meditating the days departed. 
 
 The great court is dark and still. The waning 
 moon is rising beyond the trees, but does not yet 
 draw their shadows, moonlight-mosaics, upon the 
 lawn. There are no mysterious couples moving in 
 the garden, not a solitary foot-fall upon the piazza. 
 A few lanterns burn dimly about the doors, and the 
 light yet lingering in a lofty chamber reminds you 
 
108 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 that some foim, whose grace this evening has made 
 memory a festival, is robing itself for dreams. 
 
 If courtly Edmund Waller were with you, it woi Jd 
 not be hard to tempt him to step with you across the 
 court to serenade under that window, with the most 
 musical and genuine of his verses. 
 
 GD, lovely Rose! 
 Tell her who wastes her time and me, 
 
 That now she knows, 
 When I resemble her to thee, 
 How sweet and fair she seems to be. 
 
 Tell her that s young, 
 And shuns to have her graces spied, 
 
 That hadst thou sprung 
 In deserts where no men abide, 
 Thou must have uncommended died. 
 
 Small is the worth 
 Of beauty from the light retired; 
 
 Bid her come forth, 
 Suffer herself to be desired, 
 And not blush so to be admired. 
 
 Then die ! that she 
 The common fate of all things rare 
 
 May read in thee 
 How small a part of time they share, 
 That are so wondrous sweet and fair. 
 
 He not being at Saratoga this year you are con 
 tent with looking across the court and remembering 
 his song. The moonlight softens your heart as did 
 the golden days at Baise. You, too, seat yourself in 
 a lonely arm-chair, and your reveries harmonize with 
 
SARATOGA. 10$ 
 
 tbe melancholy minor of the old Habitud s reflections. 
 You speak to him, musingly, of the " lovely Kose A 
 who wastes her time and you. 
 
 "Yes," he responds, "but you should have seen 
 Saratoga in her mother s days." 
 
 And -while the moon rides higher, and pales from 
 the yellow of her rising into a watery lustre, you 
 hear stories of blooming belles, who are grandmoth 
 ers now, and of brilliant beaux, bald now and gouty. 
 These midnight gossips are very mournful. They 
 will not suffer you to leave those, whose farewells yet 
 thrill your heart, in the eternal morning of youth, but 
 compel you to forecast their doom, to draw sad and 
 strange outlines upon the future to paint pictures 
 of age, wrinkles, ochre-veined hands and mobcaps 
 until your Saratoga episode of pleasure has sombreed 
 into an Egyptian banquet, with your old, silently- 
 smoking, and meditative Habitud for the death s 
 head. 
 
 Nor is it strange that you should then repeat to 
 him Charles Lamb s " Gipsy s Malison," with its fan 
 tastic, Egyptian-like sternness. 
 
 Suck, baby, suck, mother s love grows by giving. 
 Drain the sweet founts that only thrive by wasting ; 
 Black manhood comes, when riotous, guilty living 
 Hands thee the cup that shall be death in tasting. 
 
 Kiss, baby, kiss, mother s lips shine by kisses, 
 
 Choke the warm breath that else would fall in blessings; 
 
110 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 Black manhood comes, when turbulent, guilty blisses 
 "Tends thee the kiss that poisons mid caressings. 
 
 Hang, baby, hang, mother s love loves such forces, 
 Shame the fond neck that bends still to thy clinging. 
 Black manhood comes, when violent lawless courses 
 Leave thee a spectacle in rude air swinging. 
 
 In fact, after a few such midnights, even the morn 
 ing sunshine cannot melt away this Egyptian char 
 acter from the old Habitues. As yoTi cross the court, 
 after breakfast, to the bowling alley, with a bevy so 
 young and lovely, that age and mob-caps seem only 
 fantastic visions of dyspepsia, and, of hearts that 
 were never young, you will see them sitting, a solemn 
 reality of " black manhood," along the western piaz 
 za, leaning back in arm-chairs, smoking perhaps, 
 chatting of stocks possibly, a little rounded in the 
 shoulders, holding canes which are no longer foppish 
 switches, but substantial and serious supports. They 
 are the sub-bass in the various- voiced song, the pro 
 saic notes to the pleasant lyric of Saratoga life. 
 
 They are not really thinking of stocks, nor are 
 they very conscious of the flavor of their cigars, but 
 they watch the scene as they would dream a dream. 
 As the sound of young voices pulses toward them on 
 the morning air, as they watch the flitting forms, the 
 cool morning-dresses, the gush of youth overflowing 
 the sunny and shady paths of the garden, they are 
 old Habituds no longer; they are those gentlemen, 
 
SARATOGA. Ill 
 
 gallant and gay, dancing in the warm light of bright 
 eyes toward a future gorgeous as a sunset, gos&ipping 
 humorously or seriously, according as the light of 
 eyes is sunshine or moonlight, and it is themselves as 
 they were, with their own parties, their own loves^ 
 jealousies and scandals, moving briskly across the 
 garden to the bowling alley. 
 
 "We pass, butterflies of this summer, and the 
 vision fades upon their eyes. It was only the image 
 of dead days, only the Fata Morgana of the en 
 chanted islands they shall see no more, only the 
 ghosts of grace and beauty, that witched the world 
 for their youth. 
 
 " The mossy marbles rest 
 On the lips that they have pressed 
 
 In their bloom, 
 
 And the names they loved to hear 
 Have been carved for many a year 
 
 On the tomb." 
 
 We stroll down the street to Congress Hall, we 
 make a pilgrimage to the piazza, which was the 
 Saratoga of our reading and romance to Congress 
 Hall, across whose smooth-columned piazza we pass, 
 to pay the tribute of our homage to the spot where 
 so much love beat in warm hearts and blushed in 
 beautiful cheeks. For when Saratoga was first 
 fashionable, Congress Hall was the temple of fashion. 
 
 If you observe, while "we youth" (as Falstaff 
 
112 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 would say, were he an old Habitue*,) are grieving 
 that the romance is gone, and are regretting its going 
 to the companion of our promenade, and are sitting, 
 meditative and melancholy, with the Habitue s at 
 midnight, we are all the while, and therein, tasting 
 quite as sparkling a draught of romance as ever our 
 revered grandparents quaffed. And no sooner have 
 the doors of the " United States" clanged awful upon 
 our departure, than sad and sweet faces of remem 
 brance look from all the windows, and in the young, 
 feminine fancy, when Saratoga is once left behind, 
 the great hotel stands shining like a transfigured 
 palace of fairy. 
 
 Ee assured, Saratoga is still a golden-clasped, il 
 luminated romance for summer reading. Young 
 men still linger, loth to fly, and when the trunk must 
 be packed, they yet sit gossipping upon the edge of 
 the bed, and were you under it, you would hear how 
 every Tom Thumb, or Prince Riquet with the tuft, 
 was the most chivalric and resistless of King Arthurs ; 
 what innumerable fair-haired Preciosas were wonder 
 ing at the same wonderful Arthurs ; and how many 
 a Fatima has been rescued, or at least was clearly 
 ready to be rescued, from unpolking, stock-jobbing, 
 mercantile old Blue Beards. Then, gorged with ex 
 perience, blase* of the world, patronising and endur 
 ing life, the royal Arthurs, scorning the heaps of 
 
SARATOGA. 113 
 
 broken hearts they leave behind, transfer themselves 
 and their boots to a new realm of conquest at New 
 port, and reduce the most impregnable heart with a 
 Redowa, or a fatally fascinating Schottish. 
 
 But while we laugh at Saratoga, its dancing, dress 
 ing, and flirtation, it is yet a " coign of vantage 5 for 
 an observing eye. It is not all dress and dancing. 
 Like every aspect of life, and like most persons, it is 
 a hint and suggestion of someting high and poetic. 
 It is an oasis of repose in the desert of our American 
 hurry. Life is leisurely there, and business is amuse 
 ment. 
 
 It is perpetual festival. The " United^ 
 States" is the nearest hit we 
 Americans can make to Boc^ 
 
 ,>" 
 
 cacio s garden. It is a spa- -^ 
 cious house, admirably ^ 
 kept, with a stately pi 
 azza surrounding a 
 smooth green lawn, 
 constantly close-shaven, : 
 and shadowed with 
 lofty trees. Along that 
 stately piazza we pass to the ball- rr 
 room, and cross that lawn under those trees to the 
 bowling-alley, and the place of spirits. We rise and 
 breakfast at any time. Then we chat a little and 
 
114 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 bowl till noon. If you choose, yon may sit apart and 
 converse, instead of bowling, upon metaphysics and 
 morals. At noon, we must return to the parlor and 
 practice the polka which we have not danced since 
 yesterday midnight. There are sofas and comforta 
 ble chairs strewn around the room, and, if you have 
 reached no metaphysical conclusion, in the bowling- 
 alley, you may wish to - continue your chat. We 
 ladies must go shopping after the polka, and we mere 
 men may go to the bath. Dinner then, in our semi- 
 toilettes, feeing Ambrose and Anthony to get us 
 something to eat, and watching the mighty Morris, 
 in an endless frenzy of excitement, tearing his hair, 
 whenever a plate, loud-crashing, shivers on the floor. 
 After dinner the band plays upon the lawn, and 
 we all promenade upon the piazza, or in the walks 
 of the court, or sit at the parlor windows. We dis 
 cuss the new arrivals. We criticise dresses, and 
 styles, and manners. We discriminate the arctic 
 and antarctic Bostonians, fair, still, and stately, with 
 a vein of scorn in their Saratoga enjoyment, and the 
 languid, cordial, and careless Southerners, far from 
 precise in dress or style, but balmy in manner as a 
 bland southern morning. We mark the crisp cour 
 tesy of the ]STew Yorker, elegant in dress, exclusive 
 in association, a pallid ghost of Paris without its 
 easy elegance, its lonhommie, its gracious savior 
 
SARATOGA. 115 
 
 faire^ without the 3piritueL sparkle of its conveisa- 
 tion, and its natural and elastic grace of style. We 
 find that a Parisian toilette is not France, nor grace, 
 nor fascination. "We discover that exclusiveness is 
 not elegance. 
 
 But while we mark and moralize, the last strain of 
 Lucia or Ernani has died away, and it is 5 o clock. 
 A crowd of carriages throngs the street before the 
 door, there is a flutter through the hall, a tripping 
 up and down stairs, and we are bowling along to the 
 lake. There is but one drive : every body goes to 
 the lake. And no sooner have we turned by the 
 Congress Spring, than we are in the depths of the 
 country, in a long, level reach of pines, with a few 
 distant hills of the Green Mountains rolling along 
 the horizon. It is a city gala at the hotel, but the 
 five minutes were magical, and among thre pines 
 upon the road we remember the city and its life as a 
 winter dream. 
 
 The vivid and sudden contrast of this little drive 
 
 with the hotel, is one of the pleasantest points of 
 
 Saratoga life. In the excitement of the day, it is 
 
 like stepping out on summer evenings from the glar- 
 
 ng ball-room upon the cool and still piazza. 
 
 There is a range of carriages at the Lake. A se 
 lect party is dining upon those choice trouts, black 
 bass and young woodcock various other select par- 
 
116 
 
 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 ties are scattered about upon the banks or on the 
 piazza, watching the sails and sipping cobblers. The 
 descent to the Lake is very steep, and the smooth 
 water is dotted with a few boats gliding under the 
 low, monotonous banks. The afternoon is tranquil, 
 the light is tender, the air is soft, and the lapping 
 of the water upon the pebbly shore is haply not so 
 musical as words spoken upon its surface. 
 
 In the sunset we bowl back again to the hotel. 1 
 saw most autumnal sunsets at Saratoga, cold and 
 gorgeous, like the splendor of October woods. They 
 were still and solemn over the purple hills of the 
 horizon, and their light looked strangely in at the 
 windows of the hotel. Many a belle, just arrived 
 from the drive and about to consider the evening" 
 
SARATOGA. 117 
 
 dressing, paused a moment at the window, stood re 
 splendent in that dying light, and a shade of melan 
 choly touched her lithe fancies, as a cloud dims the 
 waving of golden grain. Who had stood there to 
 dress for a Saratoga ball years ago ? Who should 
 stand there, dressing, years to come ? This Saratoga, 
 dreamed of, wondered at, longed for where to be a 
 belle was the flower of human felicity whose walks, 
 drives, hops, moonlight talks and mornings should 
 be the supreme satisfaction had it fulfilled its 
 promise ? 
 
 This moment not Waller should speak to her but 
 Wordsworth, with pensive music : 
 
 Look at the fate of summer flowers, 
 Which blow at daybreak, droop ere even-song : 
 And, grieved for their brief date, confess that ours 
 Measured by what we are and ought to be, 
 Measured by all that, trembling, we foresee, 
 Is not so long ! 
 
 If human life do pass away, 
 Perishing, yet more swiftly than the flower, 
 Whose frail existence is but of a day : 
 What space hath Virgin s beauty to disclose 
 Her sweets, and triumph o er the breathing rose, 
 Not even an hour ! 
 
 The deepest grove whose foliage hid 
 The happiest lovers Arcady might boast, 
 Could not the entrance of this thought forbid : 
 be thou wise as they, soul-gifted maid ! 
 Nor rate too high what must so quickly fade, 
 So soon be lost ! 
 
118 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 Then shall Love teach some virtuous youth 
 " To draw out of the object of his eyes" 
 The whilst on thee they gaze in simple truth, 
 Hues more exalted, " a refined form," 
 That dreads not age, nor suffers from the worm, 
 And never dies ! 
 
 She comes at last. The sun has set, and with it 
 those weird fancies, those vague thoughts that 
 streamed shapelessly through her mind like these 
 long, sad vapors through the twilight sky. Nor, for 
 that moment, is the belle less gay, though more beau 
 tiful, nor is Saratoga less charming. 
 
 Music flows towards us from the ball-room in lan 
 guid, luxurious measures, like warm, voluptuous arms 
 wreathing around us and drawing us to the dance. 
 When we enter the hall we find very few people, but 
 at the lower end a sprinkling of New Yorklings are 
 in their heaven. 
 
 Dancing is natural and lovely as singing. The 
 court of youth and beauty with the presence of 
 brilliantly dressed women, and an air smoothed and 
 softened with delicate and penetrating perfumes, and 
 the dazzling splendor of lights, is a song unsung, a 
 flower not blossomed, until you mingle in movement 
 with the strain until the scene is so measured by 
 the music that they become one. This has been said 
 so finely by De Quincey that I cannot refrain from 
 enriching my pages with the quotation : 
 
SARATOGA. 119 
 
 " And in itself, of all the scenes which this world 
 offers, none is to me so profoundly interesting, none 
 (I say deliberately) so affecting, as the spectacle of 
 men and women floating through the mazes of a 
 dance ; under these conditions, however, that the 
 music shall be rich and festal, the execution of the 
 dancers perfect, and the dance itself of a character 
 to admit of free, fluent and continuous motion. * * * 
 And wherever the music happens to be not of a light, 
 trivial character, but charged with the spirit of festal 
 pleasure, and the performers in the dance so far 
 skilful as to betray no awkwardness verging on the 
 ludicrous, I believe that many persons feel as I feel 
 in such circumstances, viz. : derive from the spectacle 
 the very grandest form of passionate sadness which 
 can belong to any spectacle whatsoever. * * * 
 From all which the reader may comprehend, if he 
 should not happen experimentally to have felt, that a 
 spectacle of young men and women flowing through 
 the mazes of an intricate dance, under a full volume 
 of music, taken with all the circumstantial adjuncts 
 of such a scene in rich men s halls, the blaze of lights 
 and jewels, the life, the motion, the sea-like undula 
 tion of heads, the interweaving of the figures, the ana- 
 kuJdosis, or self-revolving, both of the dance and the 
 music ; never ending, still beginning, and the con 
 tinual regeneration of order from a system of motions 
 
120 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 which seem forever to approach the very brink of 
 confusion ; that such a spectacle, with such circum 
 stances, may happen to be capable of exciting and 
 sustaining the very grandest emotions of philosophic 
 melancholy to which the human spirit is open. TI e 
 reason is in part that such a scene presents a sort of 
 masque of human life, with its whole equipage of 
 pomps and glories, its luxuries of sight and sound, 
 its hours of golden youth, and the interminable rev 
 olution of ages hurrying after ages, and one genera 
 tion treading over the flying footsteps of another, 
 whilst all the while the overruling music attempers 
 the mind to the spectacle, the subject (as a Ger 
 man would say) to the object, the beholder to the 
 vision. And although this is known to be but one 
 phase of life of life culminating and in ascent yec 
 the other and repulsive phasis is concealed upon the 
 hidden or averted side of the golden arras, known 
 but not felt or is seen but dimly in the rear, crowd 
 ing into indistinct proportions. The effect of the 
 music is to place the mind in a state of elective- 
 attraction for every thing in harmony with its own 
 prevailing key." 
 
 I do not know how far others will acknowledge tho 
 justice of this brilliant passage, but to me it gave a 
 thrill of satisfaction when I read it, as the expression 
 of what is often felt in such circumstances. The secret 
 
OFTHE 
 
 UNIVERSITY) 
 
 of the feeling is in the entire harmony of the music 
 and the movement it is that the dancing is the visi 
 ble form of the infinite and subtle suggestions of the 
 music. Who that has felt the extreme pathos of 
 Strauss s Waltzes but has known them seem to the 
 sensitive imagination, excited by the grace and beau 
 ty of women and the odorous brilliancy of a thronged 
 hall, passionate love-lyrics? "Nor will you be sur 
 prised, if you have been haunted by their sadness as 
 you listened, and especially as you danced to them, 
 to hear that the best are Bohemian and Hungarian 
 songs, wrought into the form of a waltz. The nation 
 al songs of all people being always in a minor key. 
 This is a day at Saratoga, and all days there. It 
 is a place for pleasure. The original aim of a visit 
 thither, to drink the waters, is now mainly the excuse 
 of fathers and of the Habitue s, to whom, however, 
 summer and Saratoga are synonymous. It is our 
 pleasant social exchange. There we step out of the 
 worn and weary ruts of city society, and mingle in a 
 broad field of various acquaintance. There we may 
 scent the fairest? flowers of the south and behold the 
 beauty which is ours, of which we have a right to be 
 proud in Italy and Spain, but which is really less 
 familiar to most of us northerners than Spanish or 
 Italian beauty. There, too, men mingle and learn 
 from contact and sympathy a sweeter temper and a 
 
 F 
 
122 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 more Catholic consideration, so that the summer 
 flowers we went to wreathe may prove not the gar 
 land of an hour, but the firmly linked chain of an 
 enduring union. 
 
 If you seek health, avoid it if you can ; or if you 
 must drink the waters there, take rooms in some other 
 house, not in the " United States," where you will be 
 tortured with the constant vision of the carnival of 
 the high health you have lost. Youth, health and 
 beauty are still the trinity of Saratoga. No old belle 
 ever returns. No girl who was beautiful and famous 
 there, comes as a grandmother to that gay haunt. 
 The ghosts of her blooming days would dance a dire 
 ful dance around her in the moonlight of the court. 
 Faces that grew sad, and cold, and changed, would 
 look in at her midnight window. Phantoms of prom 
 enades, when the wish was spoken rather than the 
 feeling, would make her shudder as she hurried 
 along the piazza. The dull aching sense of youth 
 passed forever would become suddenly poignant, as 
 she glanced upon the gay groups, gay as she was 
 gay, young and fair no more than -she had been. 
 Worst of all, if in some lonely path she met gray- 
 haired, dull-eyed and tottering upon crutches, the 
 handsome and graceful partner of her first Saratoga 
 season. 
 
 You will not linger long. A week with Calypso is 
 
SARATOGA. 123 
 
 all that a wise Telemachus will allow himself. But 
 ho will not be unjust to its character nor deem it all 
 folly. And if, after dinner, you walk slowly through 
 the garden with Robert Herrick toward the railroad, 
 by the music and the groups who listen to it, he, 
 watching their youth and beauty, will say to them in 
 farewell, as he did 
 
 TO BLOSSOMS. 
 
 Fair pledges of a fruitful tree. 
 
 Why do you fall so fast 1 
 
 Your date is not so past, 
 But you may stay yet here awhile 
 To blush and gently smile, 
 
 And go at last. 
 
 What! were ye born to be 
 
 An hour or halfs delight, 
 
 And so to bid good night ? 
 T was pity nature brought ye forth 
 Merely to show your worth, 
 
 And lose you quite. 
 
 But you are lovely leaves, where we 
 
 May read how soon things have 
 
 Their end, tho ne er so brave : 
 And after they have shown their prido 
 Like you, awhile, they slide 
 
 Into the grave. 
 
LAKE GEORGE 
 
IT ith 
 
 AUGUST. 
 
 N hour upon the railroad brings you 
 ~ from Saratoga to the Moreau Sta 
 tion. Here you climb a stage 
 coach to roll across the country to 
 sfLake George. It is a fine strip of land 
 scape variously outlined, and with glimpses 
 beautiful distance. The driver pointed out to 
 us the tree under which Jane McCrea was murdered 
 by the Indians a lovely spot, meet for so sad a tra 
 dition. Between us and the dim-rolling outline of 
 the Green Mountains were the windings of the Hud- 
 Bon, which here, in its infancy, is a stream of fine 
 promise, and rolled our fancies forward to its beauti 
 ful banks below, its dark highlands, its glassy reaches, 
 and the forms of friends on lawns and in gardens 
 along its shores. 
 
 We dined at Glen s Falls, which we visited. They 
 
L28 I^OTUS-EATING. 
 
 are oppressed by the petty tyranny of a decayed 
 dynasty of saw-mills, and the vexed river rages and 
 tumbles among channelled rocks, making a fine spec 
 tacle of the Trentonian character. Then we bowled 
 along through a brilliant afternoon toward the Lake. 
 The road is one of the pleasantest I remember. And 
 particularly on that day the grain-fields and the 
 mountains were of the rarest delicacy of tone and 
 texture. Through the trees, an hour from Glen s 
 Falls, I saw a sheet of water, and we emerged upon 
 a fine view of the Lake. 
 
 An azure air, of which the water seemed only a 
 part more palpable, set in hills of graceful figure 
 and foliage, and studded with countless isles of ro 
 mantic beauty such a picture as imagination touches 
 upon the transparent perfection of summer noons, 
 was my fancy of Lake George. 
 
 It was but partly true. 
 
 Caldwell is a hamlet at the southern end of the 
 Lake. It is named from an eccentric gentleman, 
 (illiberal obstinacy is always posthumously beatified 
 into eccentricity) who owned the whole region, built 
 a hotel on the wrong spot, determined that no one else 
 should build anywhere, and ardently desired that 
 no more people should settle in the neighborhood ; 
 and, in general, infested the southern shore with a 
 success worthy of a mythological dragon. Instead, 
 
LAKE GEORGE. 129 
 
 therefore, of a fine hotel at the extremity of the Lake, 
 commanding a view of its length, and situated in 
 grounds properly picturesque, there is a house on one 
 side of the end, looking across it to the opposite 
 mountain, and forever teasing the traveller with won 
 der that it stands where it does. 
 
 The hotel is kept admirably, however, and tho 
 faults of position and size are obviated, as far as pos 
 sible, by the courtesy and ability of the host. But 
 the increasing throng of travel justifies the erection 
 of an inn equal in every manner to the best. This 
 year the little hamlet was but the " colony" of the 
 hotel, and a mile across the Lake, on the opposite 
 shore, was a small house for the accommodation of 
 the public. 
 
 Lake George is a strange lull in excitement after 
 Saratoga. Its tranquillity is like the morning after 
 a ball. There is nothing to do but to bowl or to sit 
 upon the piazza, or to go fishing upon the Lake. It 
 is a good place to study fancy fishermen, who have 
 taken their piscatory degrees in "Wall and Pearl- 
 streets. Most of the visitors are guests of a night, 
 but there are also pleasant parties who pass weeks 
 upon the Lake, and listen to the enthusiastic stories 
 of Saratoga as incredulously as to Syi en-songs ; to 
 whom Saratoga is a name and a vapor, incredible as 
 the fervor of a tropical day to the Russian Empress 
 
130 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 in her icy palace ; parties of a character rare in our 
 country, who do not utterly surrender the summer to 
 luxurious idleness, but steal honey from the flowers 
 as they fly. 
 
 And if, strolling upon the piazza, while the moon 
 paves a quivering path across the water, along which 
 throng enchanted recollections, a quiet voice asks if 
 Como s self is more lovely, you are glad to say to one 
 who understands it, your feelings of the difference 
 between European and American scenery. We were 
 watching the water from the piazza, over the low 
 trees in the garden, when the empress said to me, 
 "Now is it not more beautiful than Como?" It was 
 an unfortunate question, because the Lake of Como 
 is the most beautiful lake the traveller sees, and be 
 cause the details of comparisons were instantly forced 
 upon my mind. 
 
 Lake George is a simple mountain lake upon the 
 verge of the wilderness. You ascend from its banks 
 westward and plunge into a wild region. The hills 
 that frame the water are low, and when not bare 
 for fires frequently consume many miles of wood 
 land on the hillsides covered with the stiffly out 
 lined, dark and cold foliage of evergreens. Among 
 these are no signs of life. You might well fancy the 
 populace of the primeval forest yet holding those re 
 treats. You might still dream in the twilight that il 
 
LAKE GEOKGE. 131 
 
 were not impossible to catch the ring of a French 01 
 English rifle, or the wild whoop of the Indian ; sure 
 that the landscape you see, was the same they saw, 
 and their remotest ancestors. 
 
 From the water rise the rocks, sometimes solitary 
 and bearing a single tree, sometimes massed into a 
 bowery island. 
 
 The boat-boys count the isles of the Lake by the 
 days of the year, and tell you of three hundred and 
 sixty-five. It is a story agreeable enough to hear, 
 but wearisome when the same thing is told at every 
 pretty stretch of islanded water. In the late after 
 noon or by moonlight it is pleasant to skim the quiet 
 Lake to the little Tea Island, which has a tree-shel 
 tered cove for harbor, and on which stands a ruined 
 temple to T. But whether bohea, or gunpowder, or 
 some more mysterious divinity, the boat-boys reluct 
 to say, and you must rely on fancy to suggest. I 
 only know, that as we pushed aside the branches 
 that overhang the cove and climbed to the Island 
 and the Temple, we had no sooner set foot upon its 
 floor, and gazed dreamily forth over the Lake, which 
 the moon enchanted, than the slow beat of oars 
 pushed through the twilight, and directly across the 
 moon-paven path of the water shot a skiff with fe 
 male figures only. 
 
 The throb of oars approached, and singing voices 
 
132 
 
 LOTUS-EATING, 
 
 mingled with the beat. The boat drove silently into 
 the black shadow of the cove, the singing ceased, and 
 a hushed tumult of low laughter trembled through 
 the trees. For that moment I was a South Sea Isl 
 ander, a Typeean, a Herman Melville, and down the 
 ruined steps I ran to catch a moonlight glimpse of 
 Fayaway, but saw only the rippling brilliance of the 
 rapidly fading boat. Therefore I know not what 
 forms they were, nor the moonlight mysteries of Lake 
 George, nor of the little T Island, 
 
 "What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape, 
 Of Deities, or Mortals, or of both." 
 
 Another day we spread our sails and flew four 
 miles up the Lake to Diamond Island. It has a little 
 stony beach, on which crystals are found, and here 
 also are ruins, but of nothing more stable than Eobin 
 Hood s temples. A faded bower, spacious enough 
 for the pavilion of the loveliest May Queen, and ro< 
 
LAKE GEORGE. 133 
 
 mantic enough for a trap of Fancy to catch reveries, 
 is the ruin of the Island. 
 
 The brisk wind that blew us rapidly thither drooped 
 as it passed the faded bower, and the lake lapped 
 idly against the stones as we embarked for Caldwell. 
 We drifted homewards in gusts and calms, while a 
 gorgeous sunset streamed from behind the western 
 mountains. It faded into pensive twilight, the very 
 hour of Wordsworth s lines 
 
 How richly glows the water s breast 
 Before us, tinged with evening s hues, 
 While, facing thus the crimson West, 
 The boat her silent course pursues. 
 And see how dark the backward stream, 
 A little moment past so smiling! 
 And still, perhaps, with faithless gleam, 
 Some other loiterers beguiling. 
 
 Such views the youthful bard allure, 
 
 But heedless of the following gloom, 
 
 He dreams their colors shall endure, 
 
 Till peace go with him to the tomb. 
 
 And let him nurse his fond deceit, 
 
 And what if he must die in sorrow, 
 
 Who would not cherish dreams so sweet, 
 
 Though grief and pain may come to-morrow. 
 
 All this was pleasant, but all this does not make a 
 lake as beautiful as Como. Here, at Lake George, 
 is no variety of foliage. The solemn evergreens 
 emphasize the fact of a wild primeval landscape- 
 
 Were there brilliant, full-foliated chestnuts, or lus- 
 
 * LiBft,.^.. 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 trous vines, to vary the monotony of hue, or spiring 
 cypresses and domed stone pines to multiply differ 
 ent forms, or long reaches of terraced shore, the 
 melancholy monotony of impression, which is now so 
 prominent, would be alleviated. The scene is too 
 sad and lonely. The eye is tortured by the doomed 
 ranks of firs and hemlocks, that descend like resigned 
 martyrs to the shore. It is not sublime, it is not the 
 perfection of loneliness, it is not the best of its kind. 
 Yet in the August moonlight the empress asked me 
 if it was not more beautiful than Como. 
 
 Consider Como. That strip of water blends the 
 most characteristic Swiss and Italian beauty. From 
 the dark and awful shadow of the Snow- Alps which 
 brood over its northern extremity, the lake stretches 
 under waving vines and shimmering olives, (that 
 look as if they grew only by moonlight, said Mrs. 
 Jameson s niece,) under orange terraces, and lem 
 ons and oleanders, under sumptuous chestnuts and 
 funereal cypresses and ponderous pines and all that 
 they imply of luxurious palaces, marble balusters, 
 steps, statues, vases and fountains, undei these and 
 through all the imagery of ideal Italy, deep and far 
 into the very heart of Southern Italian loveliness. 
 And on the shores near the town of Como, among 
 the garden paths or hills that overhang the villas, 
 you may look from the embrace of Italy straight at 
 
LAKE GEOKGE. 135 
 
 the eternal snow-peaks of Switzerland as if on the 
 divinest midsummer day your thought could cleave 
 the year and behold December as distinctly as June. 
 
 Lake Como is the finest combination of natural 
 sublimity and beauty with the artistic results which 
 that sublimity and beauty have inspired. This is 
 the combination essential to a perfect and perma 
 nently satisfactory enjoyment in landscape. We 
 modern men cannot be satisfied with the satisfaction 
 of the savage, nor with that of any partial nature 
 and education. 
 
 The landscape must be lonely as well as lovely, if 
 it is not sublime. We have a right to require in 
 scenery the presence of the improvement which 
 Nature there suggested. In the Alps, in Niagara, 
 in the Sea, Nature suggests nothing more. They 
 are foregone conclusions. No colossal statue carved 
 from a cliff, or palace hewn from a glacier, are more 
 than curious. Nor can you in any manner improve 
 or deepen by Art the essential impression of natural 
 features so sublime. 
 
 "When I speak of what Art can do for the land 
 scape, you will not suppose that I wish Nature to be 
 put in order, or that there should be only landscape 
 gardens. The wide flowering levels of the Western 
 Prairies, rolling in billows of golden blossoms upon 
 the horizon, have a supreme and peculiar beauty. 
 
136 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 which no human touch can improve, and the lonely 
 lakes of the Tyrol, dark withdrawn under cliffs that 
 do not cease to frown, charmed in weird calm which 
 never the scream of wild fowl vexes, these, like the 
 Alps and the Ocean, and Niagara, are beyond the 
 hope of Art. 
 
 But it is different when Nature gives no landscape 
 material, when the forms of hill and shore are mo 
 notonous or unimportant of themselves, yet suggest 
 a latent possibility of picturesque effects. 
 
 This is not irreverent meddling with Nature, it is 
 only following her lead. Has no one observed how 
 often the absence of water in the landscape leaves 
 the landscape dead? Was never a castle so placed 
 upon hill or by river side that it grieved the eye of 
 taste ? What I say aims only at removing the occa 
 sion of such grief. The inextricable mazes of a forest 
 are not imposing when you are entangled among 
 them. A boundless forest is only sublime when the 
 eye commands it by overlooking it. The forest is 
 only the rude grandeur of the block ; but the groves 
 and gardens which wait upon the civilizing footsteps 
 that unravel those mazes are the graceful statue 
 and the fine result. 
 
 So when the Empress said to me, " Is it not more 
 beautiful than Como?" I said, no. Yet it is impossible 
 not to perceive the great capabilities of Lake George. 
 
LAKE GEORGE. 
 
 1ST 
 
 The gleam of mar-/ 
 ble palaces, or ^ 
 of summer re- C^ 
 treats of any genuine^ 
 beauty, even Jzzfz^z 
 a margin of-J 
 
 grain-goldened . 
 
 shore, or ranges 
 whispering rushes beneath 
 stately terraces indeed, any 
 amelioration of Nature by [I 1 
 Art, would perfect the loveliness 
 Lake George, and legitimate the I 
 press s praises. At present it is in 
 vested with none of that enchanted atmosphere of 
 romance in which every landscape is more alluring. 
 Its interest and charm is the difference between an 
 Indian and a Greek, between pigments and a picture. 
 
 Do not suppose that I am maligning so fair an 
 object as the lake, even while I regard it as a good 
 type of the quality of our landscape, compared with 
 the European. Space and wildness are the proper 
 praises of American scenery. The American in Eu 
 rope, with the blood of a new race and the hope of a 
 proportioned future tingling in his veins, with a pro 
 found conviction that Niagara annihilates all other 
 scenery in the world, and with a decided disposition 
 
138 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 to assert that Niagara is the type of the country, pro 
 claims the extent of that country as the final argu 
 ment in the discussion of scenery and bears down 
 with inland seas and the Father of Waters, and pri 
 meval forests and prairies and Andes, to conclude 
 his triumph. 
 
 In the general vague vastness of the impression 
 produced, this is a genuine triumph. But it is a 
 superiority which appeals more to the mind than to 
 the eye. The moment you travel in America the 
 victory of Europe is sure. For purposes of practical 
 pleasure we have no mountains of an alpine sublim 
 ity, no lakes of the natural and artificial loveliness 
 of the European, although one of ours may be large 
 enough to supply all the European lakes. We have 
 few rivers of any romantic association, no quaint 
 cities, no picturesque costume and customs, no pic 
 tures or buildings. We have none of the charms 
 that follow long history. We have only vast and 
 unimproved extent, and the interest with which the 
 possible grandeur of a mysterious future may invest 
 ft. One would be loth to exhort a European to visit 
 America for other reasons than social and political 
 observation, or buffalo hunting. We have nothing 
 so grand and accessible as Switzerland, nothing so 
 beautiful as Italy, nothing so civilized as Paris, noth 
 ing so comfortable as England. The idea of the 
 
LAKE GEOKGE. 189 
 
 great western rivers and of lakes as shoreless to the 
 eye as the sea, or of a magnificent monotony of grass 
 or forest, is as impressive and much less wearisome 
 than the actual sight of them. 
 
 But a charm which is in the variety and the detail, 
 as much as in the general character, is only appreci 
 able by the eye, and that, of course, is the triumph of 
 European scenery. The green valleys of Switzerland 
 which relieve and heighten, by contrast, the snowy 
 sublimity of the mountains ; the Madonna shrines in 
 vineyards and the pretty paraphernalia of religion 
 in Italy ; the cultivated comfort of the English land 
 scape, in whose parks each tree stands as if it knew 
 itself to be the ornament and pride of ancestral 
 acres, and the artificial grotesqueness of the French 
 chateaux all these you must see if you would know, 
 and your final impression is of a fine aggregate with 
 beautiful and characteristic details. 
 
 Then we have no coast scenery. The Mediterra 
 nean coast has a character which is unequalled. 
 The sea loves Italy and laves it with beauty. It has 
 an eternal feud with us. Our shores stretch, shrink 
 ing in long, low flats, to the ocean, or recoil in bare, 
 gray, melancholy rocks. Our coast is monotonous 
 and tame in form, and sandy and dreary in sub- 
 stance. Trees reluct to grow ; fruit yearns for the 
 interior ; a sad dry moss smooths the rocks and 
 
140 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 solitary spires of grass shiver in the wind. But the 
 Italian sea is mountain-shored ; and all over the 
 mountain sides the oranges grow, and the tropical 
 cactus and vines wave, and a various foliage fringes 
 the water. You float at morning and evening on the 
 Gulf of Salerno, or the Bay of Naples, and breathe 
 an orange-odored air. The vesper bell of the con 
 vent on the steep sides of the Salerno mountains 
 showers with pious sound the mariners below. They 
 wartch the campanile as they sail, and a sweetness of 
 which their own gardens make part, follows their 
 flight. You can fancy nothing more alluring than 
 these coasts, and nothing more mysterious and im 
 posing than the mountains of Granada looming large 
 through the luminous mist of the Spanish shore. 
 This last is the scenery of Ossian. 
 
 All this implies one of the grandest and most 
 beautiful natural impressions, and one of which our 
 own sea-coast is totally destitute. And it is only an 
 illustration of the absolute superiority of European 
 scenery, in very various ways. The tendency of 
 American artists toward Europe as a residence, is 
 based not only upon the desire of breathing a social 
 atmosphere, in which Art is valued, or of beholding 
 the galleries of fame, but also upon the positive want 
 of the picturesque in American scenery and life. 
 Water, and woods, and sky are not necessarily pictu- 
 
LAKE GEOKGE. 141 
 
 resque in form, or combination, or color, and here 
 again, there must be beautiful details, and the human 
 impress of Art upon them, to satisfy the sense that 
 craves the picturesque. 
 
 I sat one evening on the cliffs at Newport with 
 Mot Notelpa, a friend who wears the onyx ring, of 
 which Sterling has written so good a story and as 
 we were discussing America, Mot, the gentleman of 
 two hemispheres, said to me : " America is only a 
 splendid exile for the European race." The saying 
 was no less forcible than fine, but I have no room to 
 follow its meaning here. He did not say or mean 
 that it was a pity to be born an American, or deny 
 the compensation which gives us our advantages. 
 
 No man who has traversed Europe with his eyes 
 and mind open has failed to see that as our great 
 natural advantage is space, so our great social and 
 political advantage is opportunity, and every young 
 man s capital the chance of a career. But the race 
 as a unit, cultivated to the point of Art, is exiled, 
 wherever the laws of Nature postpone Art. 
 
 You may be sure that I said no such thing to the 
 Empress, as in the moonlight she provoked the com 
 parison. 
 
 But the "No" of my reply meant all that. And 
 when, the next morning, we steamed in a stiff gale 
 from Caldwell to Crown Point, the unhumanizcd 
 
142 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 solitude of the shores accorded well with the dusky 
 legends of Indian wars that haunt the Lake. 
 
 Lake George should be the motto of a song rather 
 than the text of a Germon, I know. But it is beauti 
 ful enough to make moralizing poetry. It is the 
 beauty of a country cousin, the diamond in the rough, 
 when compared with the absolute elegance and fas 
 cination of Como. !Nbr will I quarrel with those 
 whom the peasant pleases most especially if they 
 have never been to court. 
 
NAHANT, 
 
OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 IX. 
 
 SEPTEMBER. 
 
 H ! which were best, to roam or rest 1 
 The land s lap or the water s breast 7 
 To sleep on yellow millet-sheaves, 
 Or swim in lucid shallows, just 
 
 Eluding water-lily leaves, 
 An inch from Death s black fingers, thrust, 
 To lock you, whom release he must; 
 Which life were best on Summer eves ? 
 
 NAHANT is a shower of little brown cottages, fallen 
 upon the rocky promontory that terminates Lynn 
 Beach. 
 
 There is a hotel upon its finest, farthest point, 
 which was a fashionable resort a score of years since. 
 But the beaux and belles have long since retreated 
 into the pretty cottages whence they can contemplate 
 the hotel, which has the air of a quaint, broad-pi- 
 azzad, sea-side hostelry, with the naked ugliness of a 
 cotton factory added to it, and fancy it the monu 
 rnent of merry, but dead old days 
 
 G 
 
146 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 The hotel is no longer fashionable. Nahant is no 
 more a thronged resort. Its own career has not been 
 unlike that of the belles who frequented it, for al 
 though the hurry and glare and excitement of a 
 merely fashionable watering-place are past, there 
 has succeeded a quiet, genial enjoyment and satis 
 faction, which are far pleasanter. Some sunny morn 
 ing, when your memory is busy with Willis s sparkling 
 stories of ISfahant life a quarter of a century ago, and 
 with all the pleasant tales you may have collected in 
 vour wanderings, from those who were a part of that 
 life, then step over with some friend, whose maturity 
 may well seem to you the flower of all that the poet 
 celebrated in the bud, and she will reanimate the 
 spacious and silent piazza with the forms that have 
 made it famous. And ever as you stroll and listen, 
 your eyes will wander across the irregular group of 
 cottages, and prohibit your fancying that the ro 
 mance is over. 
 
 This is a kind of sentiment inseparable from spots 
 like this. They concentrate, during a brief time, so 
 many and such various persons, and unite them so 
 closely in the constant worship and pursuit of a com 
 mon pleasure, that the personal association with the 
 spot becomes profound ; and when the space is very 
 limited, as at Nahant, even painful. It is not sur 
 prising, therefore, that many who loved and fre- 
 
NAHANT. 147 
 
 quented Nahant years ago, now recoil from it, and 
 only visit it with the same fascinated reluctance with 
 which they regard the faded love-tokens of years so 
 removed that they seem to have detached themselves 
 from life. This will explain to you much of the sur 
 prise with which Bostonians listen to your praises of 
 Nahant. "Is any thing left?" say their smiles and 
 looks ; " it is a cup we drained so long ago." 
 
 Yet no city has an ocean-gallery, so near, so con 
 venient and rapid of access, so complete and satis 
 factory in characteristics of the sea, as Boston in 
 Kahant. 
 
 You step upon the steamer in the city and in less 
 than an hour you land at Nahant, and breathe the 
 untainted air from the "boreal pole," and gaze upon 
 a sublime sea-sweep, which refreshes the mind as the 
 air the lungs. You find no village, no dust, no com 
 motion. You encounter no crowds of carriages or 
 of curious and gossiping people. ~No fast men in 
 velvet coats are trotting fast horses. You meet none 
 of the disagreeable details of a fashionable watering- 
 place, but a sunny silence broods over the realm of 
 little brown cottages. They stand apart at easy dis 
 tances, each with its rustic piazza, with vines climbing 
 and blooming about the columns, with windows and 
 doors looking upon the sea. 
 
 In the midst of the clusters, where roads 
 
148 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 stands a small Temple, a church of graceful propor 
 tions, but -unhappily clogged with wings. It is the 
 only Catholic Church I know, for all services are 
 held there in rotation, from the picturesque worship 
 of the Roman faith to the severest form of Protes 
 tantism. The green land slopes away behind the 
 Temple to a row of willows in a path across the 
 field, whence you can not see the ocean, and it is so 
 warm and sheltered, like an inland dell, that the 
 sound of the sea comes to it only as a pleasant 
 fancy. 
 
 This pretty path ends in the thickest part of the 
 settlement. But even here it has no village air. It 
 is still, and there are no shops, and the finest trees 
 upon the promontory shadow the road that gradually 
 climbs the hill, and then, descending, leads you across 
 little Nahant to Lynn Beach. The area of Nahant 
 is very small. From almost any cottage porch you 
 survey the whole scene. But it has these two great 
 advantages for a summer sojourn ; an air of entire 
 repose, for there seems to be no opportunity or con 
 venience for any other than a life of leisure, and the 
 perpetual presence of the sea. 
 
 At Nahant you can not fancy poverty or labor. 
 Their appearance is elided from the landscape. Tak 
 ing the tone of your reverie from the peaceful little 
 Temple and glancing over the simple little houses, 
 
NAHANT. 149 
 
 with the happy carelessness of order in their distri 
 bution, and the entire absence of smoke, dust, or din, 
 you must needs dream that Pericles and Aspasia 
 have withdrawn from the capital, with a choice court 
 of friends and lovers, to pass a month of Grecian 
 gaiety upon the sea. The long day swims by nor 
 disturbs that dream. If haply upon the cliffs at sun 
 set, straying by "the loud-sounding sea," you catch 
 glimpses of a figure, whose lofty loveliness would 
 have inspired a sweeter and statelier tone in that old 
 verse, you feel only that you have sowi Acpasia, and 
 Aspasia as the imagination beholds her, and are not 
 surprised ; or a head wreathed with folds of black 
 splendor varies that pure Greek rhythm with a Span 
 ish strain, or cordial Saxon smiles and ringing 
 laughter dissolve your Grecian dream into a western 
 reality. 
 
 For its sea, too, Nahant is unsurpassed. You can 
 not escape the Ocean here. It is in your eye and in 
 , your ear forever. At Newport the Ocean is a luxury, 
 You live away from it and drive to it as you drive 
 to the Lake at Saratoga, and in the silence of mid 
 night as you withdraw from the polking parlor, you 
 hear it calling across the solitary fields, \vailing over 
 your life and wondering at it. At Nahant the sea is 
 supreme. The place is so small that you can not 
 build your house out of sight of the Ocean, and to 
 
150 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 watch the splendid play of its life, is satisfaction and 
 enjoyment enough. Many of the cottages are built 
 directly on the rocks of the shore. Of course there 
 are few trees, except the silver poplar, which thrives 
 luxuriantly in the salt air, and which, waving in the 
 fresh wind and turning its glistening leaves to the 
 sun, is like a tree in perpetual blossom. Flowers are 
 cherished about some of the houses, and they have 
 an autumnal gorgeousness and are doubly dear and 
 beautiful on the edge of the salt sea waste. 
 
 The air which the ocean breathes over the spot is 
 electrical. ~No other ocean - air is so exhilarating. 
 After breakfast at Nahant, said Mot, I feel like 
 Cceur de Lion, and burn to give battle to the Sara 
 cens. But the brave impulse ends in smoke, and 
 musing and chatting, and building castles in the 
 clouds, you loiter away the day upon the piazza, end^ 
 ing by climbing about the cliffs at sunset or galloping 
 over the beach. Thus the ocean and the cliffs are 
 the natural glories of Nahant, and the sky which you 
 see as from the deck of a ship, and which adequately 
 completes the simple outline of the world as seen 
 from those rocks. 
 
 The cliffs are imposing. They are the jagged 
 black edges of rock with which the promontory tears 
 the sea. Chased by the tempests beyond, the ocean 
 dashes in and leaping upon the rocks lashes them 
 
NAHANT. 
 
 151 
 
 with the fury of its scorn. In a great gale the whole 
 sea drives upon Nahant. 
 
 One day the storm came, sullen and showery from 
 the East, scudding in blinding mists over the sea, 
 breaking towards the blue, struggling, wailing, 
 howling, losing the blue again, with a sharper chill 
 in its breath and a drearier dash of the surf. Then 
 
 
 an awful lull, an impenetrable mist, and the hoarse 
 gathering roar of the ocean. The day darkened, and 
 sudden sprays of rain, like volleys of sharp arrows, 
 rattled gustily against the windows, and dull, boom 
 ing thunder was flattened and dispersed in the thick 
 moisture of the air. But in the gust and pauses of 
 the wind and rain, the bodeful roar of the sea was 
 
152 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 constant and increasing. The water was invisible, 
 except in the long flashing lines of surf that moment 
 ly plunged from out the gray gloom of the fog, and 
 that surf was like the advancing lines of an unknown 
 enemy flinging itself upon the shore. Behind was 
 the mighty rush of multitudinous waters, but more 
 awful to imagination than any mere natural sound 
 could be, for all the dead and lost, all who sailed 
 and never came to shore, all who dreamed, and 
 hoped, and struggled, and went down, and a world 
 of joy with them ; all their woe was i^Ae Ocean s 
 wail, the death shriek of as much happi^Rs as lives. 
 So the storm gathered terribly over the sea, in terror 
 commensurate with the sea s vastness, and beat upon 
 Nahant like a hail of fire upon a besieged citadel. 
 The next day, as children seek upon a battle-field, 
 the buttons and ornaments that adorned the heroes, 
 there were figures bending along the shore, to find 
 the delicate, almost impalpable mosses, which the 
 agony of the sea tosses up, as fragments of song 
 drop from the torture of the heart. The mosses are 
 pressed and cherished in volumes, each of which is a 
 book of songs of the airiest fancies of the aptest 
 symbols of the delicatest dreams of the sea. Noth 
 ing in nature is more touching and surprising, noth 
 ing more richly reveals her tenderness than these 
 fair-threaded and infinitely various sea-weeds and 
 
NAHANT. 153 
 
 mosses. They are the still, small voices, in which is 
 the Lord. 
 Longfellow has sung all this in wave-dancing music : 
 
 So when storms of wild emotion, 
 
 Strike the Ocean 
 Of the poet s soul, ere long 
 From each cave and rocky fastness, 
 
 In its vastness, 
 Floats some fragment of a Song. 
 
 From the far off Isles enchanted, 
 
 Heaven has planted 
 With the golden fruit of Truth ; 
 From the flashing surf, whose vision 
 
 Gleams Elysian 
 In the tropic clime of Youth. 
 
 From the strong will and the endeavor, 
 
 That forever 
 
 Wrestles with the tides of Fate ; 
 From the wreck of Hopes far-scattered, 
 
 Tempest-shattered, 
 Floating waste and desolate. 
 
 Ever-drifting, drifting, drifting, 
 
 On the shifting 
 
 Currents of the restless heart ; 
 Till at length in books recorded, 
 
 They, like hoarded 
 Household words, no more depart. 
 
 Nahant would not satisfy a JSTew Yorker, nor, in 
 deed, a Bostonian, whose dreams of sea-side summer 
 ing are based upon Newport life. The two places 
 are entirely different. It is not quite true that New 
 port has all of Nahant and something more. For 
 
154 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 the repose, the freedom from the fury of fashion, is 
 precisely what endears Nahant to its lovers, and the 
 very opposite is the characteristic of Newport. 
 
 Nahant is northern in character, and Newport is 
 southern. The winds blow cool over Nahant, and 
 you think of the North Sea, and Norsemen, and Vi 
 kings, and listen to the bracing winds as to Sagas. 
 
 Yet, if a man had any work to do, Nahant opens 
 its arms to him, and folds him into the sweetest si 
 lence and seclusion. It has no variety, I grant. You 
 stroll along the cliffs, and you gallop upon the beach, 
 and there is nothing more. But he is a Tyro in the 
 observation of Nature, who does not know that, by 
 the sea, it is the sky-scape and not the landscape in 
 which enjoyment lies. If a man dwelt in the vicinity 
 of beautiful inland scenery, yet near the sea, his 
 horse s head would be turned daily to the ocean, for 
 the sea and sky are exhaustless in interest as in beau 
 ty, while, in the comparison, you soon drink up the 
 little drop of satisfaction in fields and trees. The 
 sea externally fascinates by its infinite suggestion, 
 and every man upon the sea-shore is still a Julian or 
 a Maddalo : 
 
 "because the sea 
 
 Is boundless as we wish our souls to be." 
 
 Besides, it is always the ocean which is the charm 
 
NAHANT. 155 
 
 of othei shore resorts, that have more variety thag 
 Nahant. Even at Newport the eye is unsatisfied 
 unti] it rests upon the sea, and as sea-side scenery 
 with us is monotonous, there is rather more of the 
 same thing at Newport than a greater variety. The 
 genuine objection to Nahant is the feeling of its dul- 
 ness, on the part of the young, and of its intense 
 sadness of association with the elders. 
 
 The air is full of ghosts to them. At twilight they 
 see figures glide pallid along the cliffs, and hear 
 vague voices singing airy songs by moonlight in the 
 rocky caves of the shore. Every stone, every turn is 
 so familiar, that the absence of the look and the 
 word, which in memory are integral parts of every 
 rock and turn, sharpen the sense of change into acute 
 sorrow. 
 
 Nor to the visitor of to-day, who hears the stories 
 of old Nahant days as he reads romances, is it possi 
 ble to watch without tenderness of thought, even 
 without a kind of sadness, if you will, the pleasant 
 evening promenade along the Lynn Beach. They 
 bound over the beach in the favoring sunset, those 
 graceful forms, fresh and unworn as the sea that 
 breaks languidly beside them and slips smoothly to 
 their horses hoofs. I do not wonder that it slips so 
 softly toward them and touches their flight as with a 
 musing kiss. I do not wonder that it breaks balmily 
 
156 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 upon their cheeks, and lifts their hair as lightly as 
 if twilight spirits were toying with their locks. I do 
 not wonder that as they turn homeward in the moon 
 light and leave the sea alone, it calls gently after 
 them and fills the air with soft sounds as they retire, 
 nor that it rises and rises until it has gathered into 
 its bosom the light tracks they left upon the shore. 
 The sea knows the brevity of that glad bound along 
 the beach. These are not the first, they shall surely 
 not be the last, and while itself shall stay forever 
 fresh and unworn as now, there shall be furrows 
 ploughed elsewhere which even its waves can never 
 smooth. 
 
 The evenings at E~ahant have a strange fascination. 
 There are no balls, no hops, no concerts, no congre 
 gating under any pretence in hotel parlors. The 
 damp night air is still, or throbs with the beating sea. 
 The Nahanters sit upon their piazzas and watch the 
 distant lighthouse or the gleam of a lantern upon a 
 sail. Gradually they retire. Lights fade from the 
 windows. Before midnight, silence and darkness 
 are supreme. But we who remembered Sorrento 
 loved the midnight, and, singing barcaroles, dreamed 
 our dreams. 
 
 One night we sang no longer, but lost in silence 
 watched the bay as if it had been the bay of Naples, 
 *rhen the sudden burst of a distant serenade filled 
 
NAHANT. 157 
 
 the midnight. It was the golden crown of delight. 
 The long, wailing, passionate strains floated around 
 us, as if our own thoughts had grown suddenly 
 audible, and the vague sadness, the nameless and 
 inexpressible fascination of midnight music utterly 
 enthralled us. Nothing but the music lived; the 
 world was its own ; we floated upon it, drifted hither 
 and thither as it would. There was no moon, but 
 the serenade was moonlight. There were no gardens 
 to sweeten the night, but the music was a bower of 
 Persian roses thronged with nightingales. Songs of 
 Mendelssohn the Adelaide of Beethoven Irish 
 melodies, whatever was melancholy, and exquisite, 
 and meet for the hour and the spot, pulsed towards 
 us upon the night, and last of all, a wild, sweet, 
 pensive strain, for which surely Shelley meant his 
 lines : 
 
 I arise from dreams of thee, 
 
 In the first sweet sleep of night, 
 When the winds are breathing low, 
 
 And the stars are shining bright. 
 I arise from dreams of thee, 
 
 And a spirit in my feet, 
 Has led me who knows howl 
 
 To thy chamber window, sweet ! 
 
 The wandering airs they faint 
 On the dark, the silent stream 
 
 The champak odors fail 
 Like sweet thoughts in a dream 5 
 
158 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 The Nightingale s complaint, 
 
 It dies upon her heart, 
 As I must ou thine, 
 
 Beloved as thou art. 
 
 lift me from the ground, 
 
 I die, I faint, I fail ! 
 Let thy Love in kisses rain 
 
 On my lips and eyelids pale. 
 My cheek is cold, and white, alas ! 
 
 My heart beats loud and fast, 
 Oh! press it close to thine again, 
 
 Where it will break at last. 
 
 At Nahant you shall live with the sea and sky and 
 yet not lose that pleasant social intercourse, which 
 has a secret sweeter than the sea or the sky can 
 whisper. Society at Nahant does not imply the 
 Polka, indeed, that last perfection of civilization, but 
 regard it, if you choose, as the ante-chamber to the 
 ball-room of Newport, where you may breathe the 
 fresh air awhile, and collect your thoughts, and see 
 the ocean and the stars, and remember with regret 
 the da;ys when happiness was in something else than 
 a dance, the days when you dared to dream. 
 
 Nor be surprised, if, as you linger on those cliffs, 
 remembering, one of the ghosts the elders see should 
 lay his light hand upon your shoulder, and whisper 
 as the sun sets. 
 
 Break, break, break, 
 On thy cold gray stones, Sea ! 
 
 And I would that my tongue could utter 
 The thoughts that arise in me. 
 
NAHANT. 
 
 159 
 
 well for the fisher boy, 
 That he sings in his boat on the bay, 
 
 well for the sailor lad, 
 That he shouts with his sister at play. 
 
 And the stately ships go on, 
 To their haven under the hill; 
 
 But for the touch of a vanished hand, 
 And the sound of a voice that is still. 
 
 Break, break, break, 
 At the foot of thy crags, Sea ! 
 
 But the tender grace of a day that is fled, 
 Will never come back to me. 
 
NEWPORT, 
 
X. 
 
 Ihinpart. 
 
 SEPTEMBER. 
 
 HE Golden Rods begin to flame 
 along the road-sides, and in the pleas 
 ant gardens of Newport. The 
 gorgeous dahlias and crisp asters 
 ^marshal the autumnal splendor of 
 the year. All day long, Herrick s 
 to the Summer has 
 
 been singing itself in my mind : 
 
 Fair daffodils, we weep to see 
 
 You haste away so soon, 
 As yet the early-rising Sun 
 
 Has not attained his noon. 
 Stay, stay, 
 
 Until the hastening day 
 Has run; 
 
 But to the even song, 
 And having prayed together, we 
 
 Will go with you along! 
 
164 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 We have short time to stay as you, 
 
 We have as short a Spring, 
 As quick a growth to meet decay, 
 
 As yoj or any thing. 
 We die 
 
 As your hours do ; and dry 
 Away 
 
 Like to the Summer s rain, 
 Or as the pearls of morning-dew, 
 
 Ne er to be found again. 
 
 The first chill breath of September has blown away 
 the froth of fashion, and the cottagers anticipate 
 with delight the cool serenity of the shortening days. 
 The glory has utterly gone from that huge, yellow 
 pagoda-factory, the Ocean House. The drop has 
 fallen, the audience is departed, the lights are ex 
 tinguished, and it were only to be wished that the 
 house might vanish with the season, and not haunt 
 " the year s last hours" with that melancholy aspect 
 of a shrineless, deserted temple. 
 
 I fear, however, that not only the glory of a sea 
 son, but of success, has left the " Ocean." The flame 
 of fashion which burned there a year or two since, 
 burned too intensely to last. The fickle goddess, 
 whose temple it is, is already weary of democratic, 
 congregational worship and affects the privacy of 
 separate oratories. The^ rise on every hand. For 
 fashion dwells in cottages now, and the hotel season 
 is brief and not brilliant. The cottagers will come, 
 
NEWPOKT. 165 
 
 indeed, and hear the Germania play, and hop in the 
 parlor ; but they come as from private palaces to a 
 public hall, and disappear again into the magnificent 
 mystery of " cottage life." 
 
 When I first knew Newport it was a southern re 
 sort for the summer. The old Bellevue, and the 
 present Touro House, then "Whitfield s, sufficed for 
 the strangers. It was before the Polka before the 
 days of music after dinner and when the word 
 "hop" was unknown even at Saratoga. Every body 
 bathed in those days, and all bathed together. There 
 was a little bowling, some driving and riding, but no 
 fast horses or fast men above all, no fast women. 
 The area on the hill, of which the Ocean House is 
 the centre, was an unsettled region. There were not 
 a dozen cottages, and the quaint little town dozed 
 quietly along its bay, dreaming only of the southern 
 silence, which the character of the climate and of the 
 visitors, who were mainly southerners, naturally 
 suggested. 
 
 Newport was the synonyme of repose. An in 
 genious commentator would surely have traced the 
 Yan "Winkles to a Newport origin, although as 
 surely, the "Rip" was a soubriquet of prophetic 
 omen. 
 
 In those good old days New York loved Saratoga, 
 and Newport was a name of no significance : but 
 
166 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 the Diana of that Ephesus looked suddenly seaward, 
 and a flood tide of fashion rose along Narragansett 
 Bay, and overflowed Newport. 
 
 Singular are the deposits it left and is leaving. 
 This amorphous "Ocean ;" this Grecian "Atlantic ;" 
 (.his "Bellevue" enlarged out of all recognizable pro 
 portions ; this whirl of fashionable equipages, these 
 hats and coats, this confused din of dancing music, 
 scandal, flirtation, serenades, and supreme voice of 
 the sea breaking through the fog and dust; this sing 
 ing, dancing, and dawdling incessantly; this crush 
 ing into a month in the country that which crowds 
 six months in town these are the foot-prints of 
 Fashion upon the sea-shore these the material with 
 which we build the golden statue to our Diana. 
 
 Beyond doubt, Newport is the great watering-place 
 of the country. And as such, as assembling yearly 
 the allied army of fashionable forces from every 
 quarter, it is the most satisfactory point from which 
 to review the host and mark the American aspect of 
 Fashion. 
 
 A very little time will reveal its characteristic to be 
 exaggeration. The intensity, which is the natural at 
 tribute of a new race, and which finds in active busi 
 ness its due direction, and achieves there its truest 
 present success, becomes ludicrous in the social sphere, 
 because it has no taste and no sense of propriety. 
 
NEWPORT, 167 
 
 Society is as much a sphere of art as any of the 
 more recognized spheres. To be rich, and to visit 
 certain persons, no more fits a man or woman for 
 society, than to be twenty years old and to have a 
 palette fits him to be an artist. When, therefore, a 
 boy embarks in business at ten years of age and re 
 tires a man at forty or fifty with a fortune, he is in 
 the situation of one who in the passionate pursuit of 
 the means has put the end out of his attainment. Pie 
 has been so long making his shoes that by inaction 
 his feet are withered, and he can not walk. Yet 
 the same man, who can never be an addition or an 
 ornament to society, which demands the harmonious 
 play of rare gifts, shall be very eminent and useful 
 in that active life which requires the stern labor of 
 very different powers. 
 
 Thus, as wealth is a primal necessity of society, 
 because giving it a pedestal, and allowing its gen 
 erous whims and fancies full play, so wherever 
 wealth is not an antecedent, but must be acquired, 
 the force and maturity of talent will always be swal 
 lowed up in the pedestal, and the statue will be light 
 and imperfect, or, what is worse, an imbecile imita 
 tion. In a society formed under such circumstances, 
 wealth will always enjoy an unnatural and undigni 
 fied consideration. 
 
 Now the test of a man is his manner of using 
 
168 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 means, not of acquiring them. Any adroit laborer 
 can quarry marble, but how many men could have 
 wrought the Apollo or the Yenus ? And how many 
 men who have made fortunes spend money well ? 
 
 I do not imply that they are not generous, and 
 even lavish ; but how much does the expenditure 
 advance the great common interests of men? in 
 this country where fortunes are yearly made and 
 spent, what results of that spending have we to show ? 
 We have carriages, and upholstery, and dinners, and 
 elaborate houses, and the waistcoats of Young Amer 
 ica blaze with charms, and it returns from " abroad" 
 with a knowledge of Parisian tailoring and haber 
 dashery, which would be invaluable in the first 
 Broadway establishment interested in those matters. 
 
 But consider that we get few pictures, statues, 
 buildings, gardens, or parks, for the money we spend ; 
 consider that no rich man has yet thought to endow 
 this country with a musuem of casts, like the Meng s 
 Museum in Dresden, by which we should have all 
 the finest sculptures of every age in the most perfect 
 ly accurate copy, only differing from the original in 
 the material. 
 
 " I have made my money, and I am not going to 
 throw it away," is the response of Croesus to any 
 such suggestion ; and he builds a house in the most 
 fashionable street rather larger than his neighbor s. 
 
* 
 
 f OF THE 
 
 (XTNIVEKSIT 
 
 but a reproduction of it in every upholstering de 
 tail. 
 
 Fine plate and glass, and Louis Quinze and Louis 
 Quatorze deformities follow, and Croesus, Jr. lias a 
 pair of 2 4CTs, and a wagon of weight proportioned 
 to the calibre of that young gentleman ; and, as he 
 dashes up the Newport dust, some cynical pedestrian 
 Tiinon, whitened and blinded by that dust, can not 
 help inquiring if this is the best statue that could be 
 wrought out of all the marble old Croesus quarried ! 
 
 The houses, and horses, and carriages are not to 
 be derided ; for, as I said already, these are the 
 pedestal ; they are the matters of course. But to 
 the eye of the money-making genius, they are valua 
 ble for themselves, and not as means, and there is 
 the necessary mistake of a society so constituted. If 
 a man buys a luxurious carpet, not that his friends 
 may tread softly and their sense be soothed, but that 
 it may proclaim his ability to buy the carpet, that it 
 may say with green and red and yellow emphasis 
 " at least twenty thousand a year" it is no longer 
 beautiful, and you feel the presence of a man who is 
 mastered by his means, and to whom any other man 
 with a larger rent roll will be respectable and awful. 
 
 From all this spring the ludicrous details of our 
 society. WQ dress too well ; we dance too well : we 
 are too gracious and graceful : our entertainments 
 
 H 
 
170 
 
 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 arc too elegant; our modesty degenerates into pru 
 dery and bad taste ; we are " smart," but not witty ; 
 flashy, but not gay. Young America is too young. 
 Its feet are beautifully small, and the head is pro 
 portioned to them. Society is only a ball. The heels 
 have carried it against the head ; and why not, since 
 the education and daily life of the youth fits him for 
 little else than shaking his heels adroitly. 
 
 We dance because we are unable to talk. The 
 novels of foreign society fascinate us by their tales 
 of a new sphere. Where are such women, we say, 
 where such men? We fancy it is the despairing 
 dream of a romance, but it is really the fact of 
 foreign life. We are very chivalric; no nation 
 reaches our point of courtly devotion to woman as 
 woman. But our chivalry is not entirely unfeuda- 
 
NEWPORT. 171 
 
 lized ; our courtliness does not always indicate re 
 spectful intercourse. 
 
 When I say that we dance too well, I speak of the 
 disproportion of those performances to the rest of our 
 social achievements. A fool crowned is doubly fool- 
 sh. Fine dressing and dexterous dancing, when not 
 subsidiary to the effect of personal beauty and char 
 acter, are monstrous. Every girl who dances grace 
 fully, should, in speaking, show that she is of graceful 
 and winning nature. If she does not if she is silly 
 and simpers you instinctively feel that her move 
 ment is artificial ; that it is the gift of the dancing 
 school, not a grace of nature; you have been de 
 ceived, and it is never again a pleasure to watch 
 that dancing. 
 
 What is high society but the genial intercourse of 
 the highest intelligences with which we converse ? 
 It is the festival of Wit and Beauty and Wisdom. 
 Its conversation is a lambent light playing over all 
 subjects, as the torch is turned upon each statue in 
 the gallery. It is riot an arena for dispute. Courts 
 and Parliaments are for debate. Its hall of reunion, 
 whether Holland House, or Charles Lamb s parlor, 
 or Schiller s garret, or the Tuileries, is a palace of 
 pleasure. Wine, and flowers, and all successes of art, 
 delicate dresses studded with gems, and graceful 
 motion to passionate and festal music, are its orna- 
 
172 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 ments and arabesqued outlines. It is a tournament 
 wherein the force of the hero is refined into the grace 
 of the gentlemana masque, in which womanly sen 
 timent blends with manly thought. This is the noble 
 idea of .society, a harmonious play of the purest 
 powers. Nothing less than this satisfies the demand 
 suggested by human genius and beauty, and the 
 splendid sphere of the world in which they are 
 placed. 
 
 Yes, you say, and how much of all this have you 
 found in Newport. 
 
 At least I have found the form of it ; and he must 
 have travelled in vain, who could not see, on some 
 Grecian summer morning, even thus late in time, 
 Alcibiades heading, with silken sails, for the Peireus, 
 or here in Newport the features of a truly fine socie 
 ty through the fog of fashion. 
 
 The very exaggeration we have remarked betrays 
 a tendency as well as a failure. "When we have 
 gone through our present discipline of French and 
 English social bullying, from the shape of our shoes 
 up to that of our opinions, we shall be the stronger 
 to take the field for ourselves. Yet I doubt if in any 
 country in which wealth is not hereditary, so that a 
 permanent and large class is secure from the neces 
 sity of some kind of gold digging, whereby man be 
 comes of the earth, earthy, there can ever be tho 
 
NEWPORT. ITS 
 
 simplest and finest tone of society. The aggregate 
 will be better, but will the single specimens be as 
 good ? 
 
 I do not insist upon it. It is a speculation. Yet, 
 perhaps, this perfection of the individual is the jewel 
 in the toad s head the real result of the elaborate 
 aristocratic organization of the old world, which, I 
 grant, was too cumbrous an operation for such a 
 result. 
 
 The old mystery, myth, fable,, fancy, or whatever 
 else, that labor came by the fall, will still suggest 
 itself. We make the best of a bad case, and poets 
 and philosophers speculate how to make labor "at 
 tractive." But the end of our labor is, all the while, 
 to dispense with labor. 
 
 "You lazy fellow," says the working merchant to 
 his friend who was an heir. "But why are you 
 working," retorts the heir upon the merchant, " but 
 to secure the laziness I enjoy ?" 
 
 At all events, hard labor, in any fair sense of the 
 word, is incompatible with the finest beauty, whether 
 personal or intellectual, and therefore with the most 
 delicate bloom of society. But we Americans are 
 workers by the nature of the case, or sons of laborers, 
 who spend foolishly w r hat they wisely won. And, 
 therefore, New York, as the social representative of 
 the country, has more than the task of Sisyphus. It 
 
174 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 aims, and hopes, and struggles, and despairs, to 
 make wealth stand for wit, wisdom and beauty. In 
 vain it seeks to create society by dancing, dressing, 
 and dining, by building fine houses and avoiding the 
 Bowery. Fine society is not exclusive, does not 
 avoid, but all that does not belong to it drops away 
 like water from a smooth statue. We are still peas 
 ants and parvenues, although we call each other 
 princes and build palaces. Before we are three 
 centuries old we are endeavoring to surpass, by imi 
 tating, the results of all art and civilization and so 
 cial genius beyond the sea. By elevating the stand 
 ard of expense, we hope to secure select society, but 
 have only aggravated the necessity of a labor inte 
 grally fatal to the kind of society we seek. 
 
 It would be unfortunate if we were all drones, and 
 it is foolish for any man to speak of labor in general 
 as inimical to society. But I speak of that labor 
 which is really drudgery, which is unfair to a man s 
 intellectual nature. Hans Sachs was a shoemaker, 
 but it is no less true that incessant hammering of 
 sole leather also hammers the cobbler s just devel 
 opment away. 
 
 One extreme is as bad as the other. The drudge 
 whose life is drained away in the inexorable toil of a 
 mine or a factory is as sad an object as the prodi 
 gal, whom wealth softens into imbecility. The polar 
 
NEWPORT. 175 
 
 zone freezes, the tropics burn, the realms of the equa 
 tor sleep in golden calm between. 
 
 Fine Society is a fruit that ripens slowly. We 
 Americans fancy we can buy it. But you might as 
 well go to market for fresh peaches in January. 
 Noble aims and sincere devotion to them the high 
 est development of mind and heart the fine aroma 
 of cultivation which springs from the intimacy with 
 all that human genius has achieved in every kind 
 simplicity and integrity a soul whose sweetness 
 overflows in the manner and makes the voice win 
 ning and the movement graceful here is the recipe 
 for fine society, and although much of this is impos 
 sible, as for instance, high and various cultivation, 
 without wealth, yet wealth of itself cannot supply the 
 lowest element. The wealth of a foolish man is a 
 pedestal which the more he accumulates elevates 
 him higher, and reveals his deformity to a broadei 
 circle. 
 
 These most obvious facts are rarely remembered. 
 Gilded vulgarity believes itself to be gold. But in 
 vain we "cut" and discriminate and eschew, now 
 warmly here and coldly there, as if many a Marquis 
 of unsullied blood, did not dine for ten cents in 
 Florence, and lie abed while his shirt was washed, 
 and then enter the saloons of fashion as a King his 
 Council Chamber. 
 
176 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 We separate and exclude, as if some fine morning 
 the little blackamoor of a sweep would not climb 
 down the chimney, and fall naturally asleep on the 
 best bed, soot and all, though he may never have 
 touched linen since the sheets of his cradle. 
 
 We Americans are gifted with the talent of getting 
 rich. But the money-getting is not the money- 
 spending genius, and the former nourishes a love of 
 wealth as an end, which is a love fatal to society. 
 We are not peculiar in our regard for money, but 
 we are in the exdusiveness of our regard for it. 
 Wealth will socially befriend a man at Newport or 
 Saratoga, better than at any similar spot in the world, 
 and that is the severest censure that could be passed 
 upon those places. 
 
 But life at Newport is not all moralizing, even with 
 the cynical Timons of which I spoke, and if you will 
 regard this chapter as our chat after dinner, upon 
 the piazza, in the next we will stroll in the pleasant 
 places of Newport. 
 
NEAVPORT, AGAIN 
 
XL 
 
 Jhtnpnrt, %$M- 
 
 SEPTEMBER. 
 
 >ms Island was originally called 
 ^Ehode Island from some fancied 
 ^resemblance in its climate to that of the 
 "Isle of Khodes. I do not wonder at 
 he suggestion, for Newport is washed 
 by a southern sea and the air that 
 breathes over it is soft and warm. Its climate is an 
 Italian air. These are Mediterranean days. They have 
 the luxurious languor of the South. Only the mo 
 notonous and melancholy coast reminds you that you 
 are not gazing upon Homer s sea, and that the wind 
 is not warmed by African sands. All day if you 
 have been in Italy and know its Southern shore, 
 you look for the orange groves and vineyards ; all 
 night you listen for the barcaroles. 
 
 I heard a simple and natural explanation of the 
 
 CFTHE 
 
180 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 softness of the Newport climate, which attributed it 
 to the immediate neighborhood of the Gulf Stream. 
 The current suddenly diverges westward near the 
 Island, and, according to the story, actually touches 
 it. Hence the warmer weather and softer airs here 
 than at spots not far removed, especially Nahant. 
 Upon leaving Newport the line of the Gulf Stream 
 stretches westward, leaving a broad space of sea 
 between itself and the Massachusetts shore, into 
 which flows the cold water from the north, by which 
 the winds warmed over the current are again chilled, 
 and blow into Massachusetts Bay with the sharp 
 sting that gives a name to Boston east winds. Yast 
 quantities of sea-weed are driven in upon the New 
 port coast, also indicating the neighborhood of the 
 Gulf Stream. If I do not mistake, this course is laid 
 down in Maury s chart. 
 
 But from whatever cause, the climate of Newport 
 is very bland and beautiful. It is called bracing, 
 but it is only pure. From the higher land of the in 
 terior of the island you may see the ocean, any sunny 
 day, basking and sparkling in the light, seemingly 
 girding the island with a broad visible belt of warmth. 
 If you see it across smooth, lawn-like slopes, with a 
 cluster of trees, as towards the Spouting Horn, it 
 will fascinate you no less than Undine was fascina 
 ted, and draw you to the shore. Follow it and incline 
 
NEWPORT 181 
 
 toward the Fort. Pass the numerous gates, gallop 
 along the hard avenue toward Bateman s, and push 
 on to the shore beyond. Then slowly pace along the 
 rocky marge. 
 
 The waves tumble in here, fresh and full from the 
 mid-sea. To the right is the southern shore of the 
 mainland, and by the light-house upon Beaver-Tail 
 pass the sloops and schooners heading toward Long 
 Island Sound. It is not a friendly coast; for at a 
 little distance in the sea the waves break and foam 
 over hidden rocks. That ledge is Bren ton s Eeef, 
 and here in the sand, on the very shore, stand two 
 head stones, side by side. Their silence tells the 
 same story as the fretfulness of the rock-rent waves 
 beyond. If you can cross a stream that intervenes, 
 and are not appalled by stone walls, you may still 
 keep the shore, and skirting Lily Pond which has 
 the stern aspect of a solitary mountain tarn, and is 
 only separated from the sea by a strip of sand, you 
 emerge upon the crescent beach of the Spouting 
 Horn, a throat of rock in the cliff, through which, 
 from a narrow cave below, the water, during storms, 
 is forced some forty or fifty feet into the air. 
 
 Just beyond the Spouting Horn is the southern 
 point of the Island. It is a rocky bluff, planted now 
 in corn, but from the highest point commanding an 
 unobstructed horizon, including the town removed 
 
182 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 i .---.* into picturesque dis- 
 .ss^<*^ r u 
 
 tance, and the inter- 
 ^Jmediate reaches of 
 ;?i ; ,green field, sprink- 
 -^ : led with occasion- 
 al groups of trees. 
 >The cliffs around 
 the Spouting 
 Horn are mag- 
 -_- nilicent ocean features, and 
 
 IV = _ .^ 
 
 - the shore of the mainland 
 s .- , is visible. The sea-sweep en 
 folds all, satisfying eye and mind. 
 
 This is the true site of a Newport 
 residence. The situation suggests a 
 cottage of the same general character 
 as the Nahant houses. No one could 
 go beyond you, no one could interfere, 
 and, in the present rapid settlement 
 of the island, it will not be long before it is occu 
 pied. A little farther on are the finest cliffs in 
 Newport, upon which, after southerly storms, the 
 sea dashes itself in magnificent surfs that set the 
 shore in flashing foam. These are the haunts oi 
 the bass fishers. We have left our horses behind, 
 for there is only a foot-path along the cliffs, and 
 walls and fences must be scaled. But by a hap- 
 
NEWPORT. 183 
 
 py old condition of the sale of these lands, the path 
 will long remain public. For when the colonists 
 took the land from the Indians, a right of way 
 along the sea was secured to them forever, for fish 
 ing and the gathering of sea-we ed. At least so runs 
 the tradition at Newport, and the convenient stiles 
 and holes in the walls, even upon properties already 
 settled, confirm its practical truth. 
 
 Or is it only, perhaps, that no man upon this 
 pleasant island feels that he has the right to exclude 
 others from the sea-shore, the sea, like the air, 
 being the only unquestioned universal heritage in 
 Nature ? The fields upon the cliffs are flat and tree 
 less. A dry, crisp grass carpets them quite to the 
 edge of the precipice. It is thus the finest ocean- 
 walk, for it is elevated sufficiently for the eye to 
 command the water, and is soft and grateful to the 
 feet, like inland pastures. No enterprise has yet 
 perceived that the true situation for a Newport hotel 
 is upon these cliffs. A broad piazza over the sea 
 would brook no rival in attraction, and the citizen 
 who sought the place for the ocean air, and the ocean 
 view, would not turn without a sigh, back into the 
 dusty road, upon which stands, out of the ocean s 
 sight and sound, the glaring, amorphous pile which 
 is his home for the nonce. 
 
 In the serene beauty of September weather, the 
 
184 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 cliffs are doubly beautiful. Fashion, the Diana of 
 the Summer Solstice, is dethroned ; that golden 
 statue is shivered, and its fragments cast back into 
 the furnace of the city, to be again fused and 
 moulded ; and out of the whirring dust and din 
 the loiterer emerges into the meditative autumnal 
 air. 
 
 "A feeling of sadness," says Coleridge, "a pecu 
 liar melancholy, is wont to take possession of me 
 alike in Spring and in Autumn. But in Spring it is 
 the melancholy of hope ; in Autumn it is the melan 
 choly of resignation." Strolling among these dry 
 fields, upon the sea, you may perceive plainly enough 
 the diiference. In the beginning of the month, a 
 cluster of days, like a troop of tropical birds, with 
 fiery breath and plumage, breathed torrid airs over 
 the island. It was the final ecstasy and festival of 
 summer. But a huge, black cloud gathered one 
 Saturday afternoon, and with lightning and flooding 
 rain dispersed those tropical estrays, and left us cool 
 and quiet, mind and body, in the rich, yellow, au 
 tumnal light. 
 
 Among those dry fields I ramble in these delicious 
 but melancholy days, looking at the sea and again 
 babbling Herrick, whose few good verses, among all 
 that he wrote, are like the few drops of vino d oro 
 wine of gold distilled from the must of Lebanon 
 
NEWPORT. 185 
 
 Vineyards. What pastoral sweetness and genuine 
 personality of feeling in this poem. 
 
 TO MEADOWS. 
 
 Ye have been fresh and green; 
 
 Ye have been filled with flowers ; 
 And ye the walks have been, 
 
 Where maids have spent their hears. 
 
 You have beheld how they, 
 
 With wicker arts did come, 
 To kiss and bear away 
 
 The richer cowslips home. 
 
 You ve heard them sweetly sing, 
 
 And seen them in a round ; 
 Each virgin like a Spring 
 
 With honey-suckles crown d. 
 
 But now we see none here, 
 
 Whose silv ry feet did tread, 
 And with dishevelled hair 
 
 Adorn d this smoother mead. 
 
 Like unthrifts, having spent 
 
 Your stock, and needy grown, 
 You re left here to lament 
 
 Your poor estates alone. 
 
 The tenderness of feeling excited by the loveliness 
 of the waning year begets a sympathy for this season 
 more personal than for any other. It is the sympa 
 thy with decline and death, the awe before the mys 
 tery of which they are the avenue and gate. In the 
 journey of the year, the Autumn is Yenice, Spring 
 is Naples certainly, and the majestic maturity of 
 
J86 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 Summer is Rome. Not dissimilar is the feeling with 
 which you glide through the shadow of crumbling 
 Venetian magnificence, and the sentiment with 
 which you tread the gorgeous bowers of Autumn. 
 What life, what hope, what illimitable promise, once 
 filled the eye here, and fed the imagination ! Venice 
 failed to fulfil that promise to experience. Has any 
 summer ever kept it to the life ? 
 
 See in the radiance and flashing cloud-forms of 
 this sky, how the year repeats the story of June, how 
 it murmurs these dying spring songs ! Upon pen 
 sive thought you drift through the splendors of the 
 decadent year, as in a black gondola through Venice. 
 
 Over the gleaming watery meadows, 
 Through the dusk of the palace shadows, 
 Like a dark beam mournfully sliding, 
 Steals the gondola, silently gliding. 
 
 And the gardener, this morn belated, 
 
 Urges his flower-hung barque, fruit-freighted, 
 
 Like a Summer-perfected vision 
 
 Through the dream of that sleep Elysian. 
 
 To these palaces ghostly glory 
 
 Olings, like the faintly remembered story 
 
 Of an old diamonded dowager, mumbling 
 
 Tales of her youth from her memory crumbling. 
 
 It is not possible to shun the influence of these 
 days. The deep dome of the sky frescoed by the 
 last sunbeams with delicate tracery of vapors and lu- 
 
NEWPORT. 187 
 
 minous masses of cloud, the endless extent of the sea, 
 which only seems small when you are upon it, the 
 uniform line of the coast, simple, grand material out 
 lined as grandly these store your mind with sweet 
 and solemn imagery, and indicate, even here, where 
 the wassail- worship of our Ephesian Diana has but 
 now reeled away, the altar of the unknown God. 
 
 Nor can you avoid wondering what evidence you 
 shall find in the winter that the city has summered 
 upon the seaside. If yearly we are thus submitted 
 to the most beautiful and profound natural influences, 
 and the tone of our society remains still as fiercely 
 frivolous, it is not strange that the September mus 
 ings of a cynical Timon make him still more cynical. 
 How can he help dreaming dreams of a race that 
 should show throughout their winter life the fresh 
 ness and vigor of their summer neighborhood ? 
 
 If a young man passes a few years in Europe and 
 returns with nothing but the air of a figure in the 
 last print of fashions, he can only please the ninth 
 part of a man. He will pain and mortify all the 
 rest. His mien, and motion, and conversation should 
 show that he has seen, and heard, and felt, what so 
 many yearn to behold, because they could see to the 
 utmost, yet must die without seeing. 
 
 A travelled man should be painting and sculpture. 
 He should be radiant with art and informed with 
 
188 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 experience: he should be a channel into the new 
 world of all the best influences of the old, or he has 
 defrauded his country, himself, and those who might 
 have been all that he has failed to be, by not relin 
 quishing the opportunity to another. I look into his 
 eyes, but instead of the Alps and Italy, I see only 
 the Boulevards or Notre Dame de Lorette. I hear 
 him speak, and catch a fine French oath, but no 
 Miserere, no Campagna song or Barcarole. I mark 
 his manner with women, but I do not perceive that 
 ne has seen Raphael s Madonnas ; with men, but 1 
 do not feel the presence of the Apollo or the manli 
 ness of Michael Angelo. Ixioii has come down from 
 heaven, having banqueted with all the Gods, and 
 remembers only the pattern of the table-cloth. 
 
 If this is our high requirement of the individual 
 who has enjoyed fine opportunities, what should we 
 not demand in the character of a society, which every 
 year repairs to the fountains of mental and physical 
 health? In its eye should be the clearness of the 
 sky, in its voice the sound of the sea, in its move 
 ment the grace of woods and waves. 
 
 It is very well to carry the country to the city, but 
 is very ill to bring the city to the country. The in 
 fluence of the city is always to be resisted, because 
 its necessary spirit is belittling, personal, and selfish ; 
 that of the country, on the other hand, is to be fos- 
 
NEWPORT. 189 
 
 terecL because it is impersonal and universal. The 
 exhilarating stimulus of the contact of men in the 
 
 O 
 
 city is useful, sometimes essential, but always dan 
 gerous. The tranquillizing friendliness of the country 
 favors repose, perhaps inactivity and intellectual 
 rest, but is always humane and elevating. The city, 
 in its technical, social sense, is always ludicrous, and 
 if it were possible, insulting in the country. There 
 is nothing finer in Nature and Art than the sublime 
 scorn inherent in their virginal purity. A great pic 
 ture will not be " seen," nor a grand landscape 
 " done." In the crowds of listless idlers who infest 
 Rome yearly, how many see the Transfiguration, or 
 hear the Miserere, or know the profound pathos of the 
 Campagnai Nature and Art are veiled goddesses, 
 and only Love and Humility draw the curtains. 
 
 "We must leave in the city, then, as far as possible, 
 the social fictions of the city, if we hope ever to mas 
 ter them rather than to be mastered by them. And 
 that is precisely what is most rarely done, precisely 
 what we Americans do less than any other people. 
 
 I remember, as we floated about the canals in 
 Venice, how we used to imagine a life and society 
 worthy the climate and the poetic city. The women 
 of those fancies were of beauty so rare, and of char 
 acter at once so lofty and lovely, that the sumptuous 
 palaces and the superb portraits of Titian, and Tin- 
 
190 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 toret, and Giorgione, were the only natural homes and 
 ornaments of their life. The men of those dreams 
 were so grave and gracious, of such intellectual 
 sweep, of such subtle human sympathy, that no por- 
 trait in the great council hall of the Doge s palace 
 quite suggested their mien. Life was a f estiva, 
 worthy its sphere worthy the illimitable splendor 
 and capacity of the world. 
 
 They were but gondola dreams, those fancies, 
 the articulate song of the mystery and magnificence 
 of Venice. They were only pictures on the air the 
 evanescent mirage of romance that hovers about that 
 spot. Yet, was it strange that the pleasant dream 
 inspired by so singular a triumph of Art as the city 
 of Venice should return upon the cliffs at Newport, 
 in view of the possibilities and influences of a society 
 just beginning? 
 
 Will you think me captious if I confess, what we 
 all feel, that the life of Nature Nature, whose head 
 is Man censures our life more than any philosophy ? 
 If a man should pass suddenly from a regal midsum 
 mer day in Windsor Forest to a drawing-room at St. 
 James, would he feel that he had advanced from the 
 less to the greater? The trees and flowers fulfil their 
 utmost destiny ; but the Eight Honorable Sir Jabesh 
 Windbag as Timon Carlyle dubs the courtier does 
 he impart a finer charm to the summer day ? 
 
191 
 
 NEWPORT. 11 
 
 ft was riot strange that the Venetian life recurred, 
 but it was sad. We shall never fulfil the destiny 
 that Hope has allotted us, since Hope always paints 
 human portraits with the colors of the Ideal. Even 
 upon these cliffs the spring promised a brighter sum 
 mer than was possible ; for the spring is a poet, and 
 eirigs to us in our speech the visions beheld in another 
 realm. Life is a rich strain of music suggesting a 
 realm too fair to be. How often we seem to touch 
 the edge of some high and poetic manner of life ; 
 how we revenge ourselves upon drudgery and Wall- 
 street, by fancying an eternal summer in Naples 
 Bay, where the syrens should sing in the moonlight 
 and every fisher-girl upon the shore should be Gra- 
 ziella. Our ancestral estates the possibilities of 
 hope of which we are heirs, all lie in the future. 
 In the golden tropics of distance flash their towers, 
 and their trees lean over singing streams. There our 
 coming is awaited, and the bells would fain chime 
 that we are of age. There, looking from the win 
 dows, or deep retired in interior chambers, the beau 
 tiful who were our dream and our despair await us. 
 Over those tropic lands the sun never sets those 
 flashing tow r ers do never crumble, in those palace 
 gardens gush the fountains of eternal youth, and all 
 the wide horizon forever flames with summer. 
 
 So upon the most distant horizon of life hope floats, 
 
192 
 
 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 
 a beautiful mirage. To reach those 
 pleasant places is the aim of all 
 r endeavors. A man would be rich, that 
 he may have a fine house hung with pictures 
 and adorned with sculptures. Even the 
 greatest drudge pays the homage to his 
 nature, of, at least, saying that. In youth it 
 / seems that we could reach out our hands and 
 ourselves unlock the doors. But those golden gates 
 shall never be unbarred. Gradually they recede, 
 clouds descend, and fogs rise, and at times obscure 
 the spectacle altogether. We resign ourselves to our 
 condition, we go about our work, but still that stately 
 domain of ours glimmers before our eyes a vision 
 in the shifting clouds to the toiling husbandman. 
 Still, strains of its wild and winning music peal 
 down the wind, the sweet clang of court-revels to the 
 lonely wanderer. 
 
NEWPORT. 193 
 
 Although we are thus defrauded of our rights, 
 royalty never dies from our hearts, and, living in 
 hovels, we are still the heirs of palaces. Strolling 
 in this mood beneath the September sunsets I can 
 yet see fair and graceful figures moving along the 
 cliffs fair and graceful enough to walk by the sea 
 and under the sky, as kings and queens their halls. 
 
 The great enjoyment at Newport is riding. The 
 hard, black beach is the most perfect race-course, 
 and the heaving of the sea sympathizes with the 
 rider and inspires him. The finest beach in New 
 port is the second, a mile beyond the crescent beach 
 by the town, but it always seems lonely and distant, 
 and can only be gained by plowing along a sandy 
 road among the wan fields upon the shore. On a 
 pleasant afternoon the first beach is alive with run 
 ning horses, and light wagons. You know we are 
 dandies in our carriages as well as in our dress, and 
 while they play their little pranks upon the edge of 
 the sea, which plunges slowly and heavily along the 
 shore, the impression is that of the recumbent statue 
 of the Nile in the Vatican and the garden of the 
 Tuileries, covered and pleased with the gambols of 
 the little ones. 
 
 One evening in September I was returning with a 
 friend, from the southern shore by Bateman s. It 
 was one of the golden twilights which transfigure the 
 
 T 
 
194 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 world. It seemed, in fact, as if we were very near 
 that domain which lies so deep in the future, and 
 our horses paced along cheerily, as if they shared 
 the exhilaration of the hour. We passed through 
 the town, by the groups sauntering on the road and 
 sitting under the piazzas and at the windows of 
 houses, and descended to the first beach. The sun 
 was just gone and the sky was a dome of molten 
 lead, except toward the eastern horizon upon the 
 sea, where gray vapors gradually clouded the glory. 
 
 We turned our backs upon the sunset and facing 
 the sea and the gray east we leaned forward, and 
 our horses flew over the beach. They did not seem 
 to touch the earth, but we were borne on as if by the 
 sway of the sea. Faster and faster we flew, and the 
 cold line of the point before us, stretching far into 
 the ocean, and the dull night that lowered beyond it, 
 and the black beach beneath us, were as the stern 
 landscape of the extremest north contrasted with the 
 southern splendors we had left behind. It was wild 
 and elfish, and the hoofs of the horses rang like the 
 dumb cadence of an old saga. Our hair streamed 
 on the wind that began to curdle chill across the sea, 
 and gaining the end of the beach we reined up, 
 turned suddenly, and were in another zone, in another 
 world. 
 
 Hie west was gorgeous, still, and warm. The lit- 
 
NEWPORT. 195 
 
 tie hill on which stands the town, and the fields be 
 tween it and us, were a belt of blackness drawn 
 between the glow of the west and the glossy, glitter 
 ing smoothness of the beach, upon whose moist sur 
 face the slant light of the late sunset blended with 
 the moonlight that quivered along the crumbling 
 ridges of the surf. The sea, beyond, heaved silvery 
 far into the night. The gorgeous west the black 
 land the glossy beach the silvery sea, these made 
 up the world in that moment, nor was the world ever 
 more beautiful and sublime. Along the way paved 
 with gleams of sunset and of inoonrise, our horses 
 slowly packed. "No realm of fairy was ever more sur 
 prising and alluring ; no such scene was yet painted 
 on canvass or in print; and though it faded every 
 moment and the world resumed its old expression, 
 that glance has bewildered me forever, and I am not 
 sure that it was not Undine who rode with me that 
 evening and compelled the sun, moon, and sea to 
 offer her magnificent homage. 
 
 Like all sea-sides, Newport has those fogs and 
 mists which are the delight of artists which are 
 themselves artists of a fantastic fancy and to which 
 even the belles are not always averse, for what the 
 sun does the fog undoes, being the rare cosmetic that 
 removes the brown scar of the sun s touch. These 
 fogs, however, are not always pleasant. They are 
 
196 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 thick, drenching clouds, and wet you through ae 
 thoroughly as the most insinuating rain. Moreovei 
 they brood over your spirits with a dull gloom akin 
 to their effect in extinguishing the landscape. But 
 in coming and going, and wherever they are not too 
 dense, they are very welcome to the lover of the 
 picturesque. 
 
 In the morning, perhaps, and especially in June 
 and September, as you saunter under a cloudless 
 sky, you see a vague roll of mist muffling the horizon 
 line of the sea. If you have been bounding over the 
 beach with Undine, the evening before, you are ac 
 climated to wonders, and fancy, simply, that a part 
 of the sky has fallen upon the sea. Toward dinner 
 you observe that it is nearer, that it advances, rolling 
 over the sea and blotting out every thing in its path. 
 The sun strikes a sail between you and it there is 
 a momentary flash, lost in the dull darkness of the 
 mist. 
 
 By dinner-time it beleaguers the Island it over 
 comes it it penetrates at windows and doors. "Woe 
 to starched rnuslin ! Woe to cravats ! Woe to choice 
 note paper! Woe to every thing but India rubber 
 shoes. The band may well play in the hall after 
 dinner. The world beyond the piazza is a vast white 
 opacity, the ghost of the ocean which thus asserts 
 the sea s sovereignty over the Island. It is damp 
 
NEWPORT. 
 
 197 
 
 and chill. The music breathes winning waltzes, 
 but who could dance here, save mermaids and Un 
 dine, hapl j, who loves the mists, and clothes herself 
 with the grace of clouds ? The horses must be coun 
 termanded. A slight wind shivers through the 
 dampness and the boughs in the little green yard by 
 the piazza shed a string of diamonds. The gayety 
 of Newport is suddenly quenched, and if you steal 
 quietly up to your room, and opening your window, 
 listen, you will hear the invisible sea encompassing 
 the Island with its ceaseless dash, and booming soft 
 Bcorn through the fog. 
 
 It breaks suddenly, and in Bounding masses recedes. 
 The sun bursts through the mist and shines into our 
 very hearts. The clouds roll away from our spirits, 
 we leap into the saddle and give galloping chase to 
 the skirts of the foe. Fold upon fold it sweeps re 
 treating over the Island embracing the few melan 
 choly trees and leaving them glittering ; nor pauses 
 at the shore, but softly over the water the flight of 
 the fog continues, until our sky is rosy again as in 
 the morning, and only a vague roll of mist muffles 
 the horizon line of the sea. 
 
 I rode one afternoon with Undine along the south 
 ern shore of the Island, by the lonely graves of which 
 I. have spoken. We could see only a few feet over 
 the water, but the ocean constantly plunged sullenly 
 
198 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 out of the heavy fog which was full of hoarse roars 
 and wailings the chaotic sound of the sea. We 
 took the homeward path through the solitary fields, 
 just unfamiliar enough to excite us with a vague 
 sense of going astray. At times, gleams of sun 
 light, bewildered like ourselves, struggled, surprised, 
 through the mist and disappeared. But strange and 
 beautiful were those estrays ; and I well understood 
 why Turner studied vapors so long and carefully. 
 
 Two grander figures are not in contemporary biog 
 raphy than that of Coleridge, in Carlyle s Sterling, 
 looking out from Highgate over the mingled smoke 
 and vapor which buries London, as in lava Pompeii 
 is buried, and that of Turner, in some anonymous, 
 but accurate, sketches of his latter days, at his cot 
 tage on the edge of London, where, apart from his 
 fame, and under a feigned name, he sat by day and 
 night upon the house-top, watching the sun glorify the 
 vapors and the smoke with the same splendor that 
 he lavishes upon the evening west, and which we 
 deemed the special privilege of the sky. Those two 
 men, greatest in their kind among their companions, 
 illustrate with happy force what Wordsworth sang : 
 
 In common things that round us lie. 
 Some random truths he can impart, 
 
 The harvest of a quiet eye 
 
 That brood? and sleeps on his own heart, 
 
NEWPORT. 199 
 
 Gazing from his Highgate window with "large, 
 gray eye," did Coleridge see more than the image 
 of his own mind and his own career, in that limit 
 less city, wide-sparkling, many-turreted, fading and 
 mingling in shining mist with strange voices call 
 ing from its clouds the solemn peal of cathedral 
 chimes and the low voice of the vesper bell ? And 
 out of that London fog with its irresistible splendors, 
 and out of the holy vapors which float serene amid 
 the Alps, has Turner quarried his colossal fame. 
 There is no grander lesson in any history of any art, 
 than the spectacle of the greatest painter of our 
 time, sitting upon his house-top, and from the mist 
 which to others was but a clog and inconvenience, 
 and associated in all men s minds only with link 
 boys and lanterns, plucking the heart of its mystery 
 and making it worshipped and remembered. 
 
 In the evening I found myself alone upon the 
 beach, surrounded by the fog. I seemed to be upon 
 the hard bottom of the sea, for nothing was visible 
 save occasionally the moon, as the fog thinned over 
 my head the seemingly circular spot of beach upon 
 which I stood and the long, white seething line of 
 surf that fell exhausted along the shore. The con 
 fused moan of the sea was the only and constant 
 sound. Fascinated by the strangeness of the scene, 
 lost in the fog, whose murky chill lay damp upon 
 
200 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 my Lands and face, I wandered over the beach. J 
 ran, but could not escape the small round spot of 
 black beach the encompassing dead white cloud 
 the moon, blotted out and again revealed. I shouted 
 aloud, but my voice fell flat and lost, and the mur 
 mur of the surf boomed in melancholy mockery. I 
 stood still, but the continuous sound did not destroy 
 the weird silence. I ran to the edge of the sea ; the 
 water broke over my feet and slid far up the beach 
 and washed my tracks away. I advanced constantly 
 with no sense of progress and saw suddenly a huge, 
 fantastic figure looming ominously through the 
 fog-cloud and confronting me. I stopped as if 
 an army had risen before me, then ran toward 
 the figure which dwindled into a shapeless block, 
 left upon the sand, and distorted by the mist into a 
 goblin. 
 
 The wildness of the feeling passed. The constant 
 iteration of the sea s wail, that wandered through 
 the enchanted silence as if seeking sympathy, grad 
 ually possessed my heart with its own sadness, and 
 as the fog thinned slowly, and wreathed along the 
 beach, curling and falling skirts of the flowing 
 drapery of Ossian s ghosts that exquisite and mourn 
 ful song in Alton Locke came singing into my mind. 
 You remember the scene in which the life of the 
 young poet culminates in the parlor of the Bishop 
 
NEWPORT, 201 
 
 and in the presence of the Lady Eleanor. She has 
 been singing a wild, melancholy air, of which the 
 words were poor, but whose meaning the poet feels 
 in his inmost soul, quickened as he is by the exhil 
 aration and intoxication of passion in which he was 
 reeling. Lady Eleanor asks for some words fit for 
 the melody, and struck by what he says, appeals to 
 him to write them. 
 
 At the same moment his eyes fall upon a water- 
 color of Copley Fielding s, representing a long, 
 lonely reach of sea-beach a shroud of rain drifting 
 along the horizon, and straggling nets rising and 
 falling upon the surf. Its utter desolation, though 
 he little thinks it at the moment, images his own 
 life, and returning home, in the wild whirl of name 
 less regret and passionate sorrow, he writes the lines. 
 It is a rare fortune for the artist that his picture is 
 so perfectly translated into \vords. "Who that feels 
 the penetrating pathos of the song but sees the rain- 
 shroud, the straggling nets and the loneliness of the 
 beach ? There is no modern verse of more tragic 
 reality. 
 
 0, Mary, go and call the cattle home, 
 And call the cattle home, 
 And call the cattle home, 
 Across the sands o Dee." 
 
 The Western wind was wild and dark wi foam, 
 And all alone went she. 
 
 i* 
 
202 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 The creeping tide came up along the sand. 
 
 And o er and o er the sand, 
 
 And round and round the sand, 
 
 As far as eye could see ; 
 The blinding mist came down and hid the land. 
 
 And never home came she. 
 
 Oh! is it weed, or fish, or floating hair 
 
 A tress o golden hair, 
 
 drowned maiden s hair 
 
 Above the nets at seal 
 Was never salmon yet that shone so fair, 
 
 Among the stakes on Dee. 
 
 They rowed her in across the rolling foam. 
 
 The cruel, crawling foam, 
 
 The cruel, hungry foam, 
 
 To her grave beside the sear 
 But still the boatmen hear her cull the cattle home 
 
 Across the sands o Dee. 
 
 The night became more merciful as I sauntered 
 homeward from the beach. The fog rolled away, 
 the unclouded moon shone, and the air was warm 
 and still. The lights were extinguished in the cotta 
 ges, only in the great hotels some windows were yet 
 bright. I turned up a lane between two of the pleas- 
 antest places upon the Island. Through the moonlit 
 trees, like ghosts of sound haunting the moonlight, 
 stole the faint tinkle of a guitar. A manly voice, 
 rich and full, chimed in unison and sang this song of 
 Browning s, amid whose pauses the lessening mur 
 mur of the sea wistfully repeated that other refrain 
 
 Oh ! is it weed, or fish, or floating hair 1 
 
NEWPORT. 203 
 
 The difference was that between the moon-misted 
 sea-beach and the moonlight garden. 
 
 There s a woman like a dew-drop, she s so purer than the 
 purest ; 
 
 And her noble heart s the noblest, yes, and her sure faith s the 
 surest ; 
 
 And her eyes are dark and humid, like the depth on depth of 
 lustre 
 
 Hid i the harebell, while her tresses, sunnier than the wild grape s 
 cluster, 
 
 Gush in golden-tinted plenty down her neck s rose-misted marble, 
 
 And her voice s music call it the well s bubbling, the bird s war 
 ble. 
 
 And this woman says, " My days were sunless and my nights were 
 
 moonless, 
 
 Parched the pleasant April herbage, and the lark s heart s out 
 break tuneless, 
 If you love me not" and I, who (ah, for words of flame !) adore 
 
 her ! 
 
 Who am mad to lay my spirit prostrate palpably before her 
 I may enter at her portal soon, as now her lattice takes me, 
 And by noontide as by midnight make her mine as hers she makes 
 me. 
 
 I hoped to have told you of the Corso or semi- 
 weekly promenade at the Fort, which began gal 
 lantly enough, but declined rapidly because velvet- 
 coated fast gentlemen would trot their fast horses 
 over the ground as if it had been a race-course, and 
 because, instead of forming two contrary lines of 
 carriages, to enable us to pass, and see, and chat, or 
 stopping, as at the Cascine in Florence, for conversa 
 tion, we all trotted meekly one way in eacn other s 
 
204 LOTUS-EATING. 
 
 dust. With our graceful carriages and the famed 
 beauty of American women, this should be one of 
 the most attractive features of Newport. But our 
 exaggeration spoiled it. What American is ever 
 going behind ? What is the use of a 2.40, if you are 
 to walk in a ring ? So we must wait a little, until 
 jockeys ripen into gentlemen and eagerness mellows 
 into elegance. I wonder if a wit from Mercury com 
 ing to summer on the earth, would suspect that our 
 Newport aim was enjoyment. 
 
 But there is another Fort, a circular ruin upon the 
 rocky point of an island at the entrance of the har 
 bor, which you can reach in a half-hour from New 
 port, and is well worth an afternoon. Deere recruited 
 a party one day for the excursion. We went into the 
 town and put off from the wharf in a fleet sail-boat. 
 The harbor was white and alive with similar craft, 
 bending in the wind and scudding to and fro. We 
 passed under the long, low embankment of Fort 
 Adams and across the mouth of the harbor to a group 
 of mound-like rocks. Crowning the summit of one 
 of them was our goal, called, appropriately enough 
 from the aspect of the rocks, Fort Dumpling. 
 
 You glide from the beautiful harbor directly into 
 the smooth water of the cove-like reaches among the 
 rocks. The bright vegetation clinging to the crevices 
 of their sides is touched Turneresquely by the after- 
 
NEWPORT. 205 
 
 noon sun, and as you land upon the island, its low, 
 bare, melancholy outline reminds you of days and 
 feelings upon^ the Roman Campagna. You climb 
 over the rocks, and pasture lands luxuriant with 
 scentless asters, crisp everlasting, and yellow golden 
 rods, and find them the only garrison of the ruined 
 old fort, which is perched upon a cliff over the sea. 
 They nod along the ramparts, and flame in the 
 crumbling walls. Girls toss pebbles through the 
 port-holes, and muse upon the distant sails at sea. 
 
 But best of all, quaint old Newport lies white 
 against its hill, and the sinking sun plays with it, 
 making it what city you will, of all the famous and 
 stately towns upon the sea. 
 
 Let us leave it so, the last picture of a pleasant 
 Summer, beneath which we will write this inscrip 
 tion ; 
 
 THE REAPER. 
 
 I walked among the golden grain, 
 That bent and whispered to the plain, 
 "How gaily the sweet Summer passes. 
 So gently treading o er us grasses." 
 
 A sad-eyed Reaper came that way, 
 But silent in the singing day- 
 Laying the graceful grain along, 
 That met the sickle with a song. 
 
 The sad-eyed Reaper said to me. 
 
 " Fair are the Summer fields you so? ; 
 
206 LOTUS-EATItfCK 
 
 Oolden to-day to-morrow gray ; 
 So dies young love from life away." 
 
 " Tis reaped, but it is garnered well,- 
 I ventured the sad man to tell : 
 "Though Love declines, yet Heaven is kind- 
 Qod knows his sheaves of life to bind." 
 
 More sadly then he bowed his head, 
 And sadder were the words he said, 
 " Tho every Summer green the plain, 
 This harvest can not bloom again." 
 
 
 THE END. 
 
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 
 
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