THE MIRROR LIBRARY, 
 
 LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE, 
 
 BY 
 
 N. P. WILLIS. 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THE " Letters from under a Bridge" were written in a secluded glen of the valley of the Susqueliannah. 
 The author after several years residence and travel abroad, made there, as he hoped, an altar of life-time 
 tranquillity for his household-gods. Most of the. letters were written in the full belief that he should pass 
 there the remainder of his days. Inevitable necessity drove him again into active metropolitan life, and the 
 remembrance of that enchanting interval of repose and rural pleasure seems to him, now, little but a dream. 
 As picturing truly the color of his own mind, and the natural flow of his thoughts during a brief enjoyment 
 of the kind of life alone best suited to his disposition as well as to his better nature, the book is interesting 
 to himself and to those who love him. As picturing faithfully the charm of nature and seclusion, after years 
 of intoxicated life in the gayest circles of the gayest cities of the world, it may be curious to the reader. 
 
 LETTER I. 
 
 Mr DEAR DOCTOR : Twice in the year, they say, 
 the farmer may sleep late in the morning between 
 hoein<r and haying, and between harvest.and thrash 
 ing. If I have not written to you since the frost was 
 out of the ground, my apology lies distributed over 
 the "spring-work," in due proportions among plough 
 ing, harrowing, sowing, plastering, and hoeing. We| 
 have finished the last some thanks to the crows, who i 
 saved us the labor of one acre of corn, by eating it in I 
 the blade. Think what times we live in, when even ] 
 the cro-,vs are obliged to anticipate their income ! 
 
 When 1 had made up my mind to write to you, I 
 cast about for a cool place in the shade for, besides 
 the changes which fanning works upon my epidermis, 
 [ fin 1 some in the inner man, one of which is a vege 
 table necessity for living out-of-doors. Between five | 
 in the morning and "flower-shut," I feel as if four j 
 walls and a ceiling would stop my breath. Very j 
 much to the disgust of William (who begins to think 
 it was infra dig. to have followed such a hob-nail 
 from London), I showed the first symptom of this 
 chair-and-carpet asthma, by ordering my breakfast 
 under a balsam-fir. Dinner and tea soon followed; 
 and now, if I go in-doors by daylight, it is a sort of 
 fireman s visit in and out with a long breath. I have 
 worn quite a dial on the grass, working my chair 
 .iiMiiiid with the sun. 
 
 "If ever you observed," (a phrase with which a 
 neighbor of mine ludicrously prefaces every possible 
 remark), a single tree will do very well to sit, or dine, 
 or be buried under, but you can not write in the shade 
 of it. Beside the sun-flecks and the light all around 
 you, there is a want of that privacy, which is neces 
 sary to a perfect abandonment to pen and ink. I dis 
 
 covered this on getting as far as " dear Doctor," and, 
 pocketing my tools, strolled away up the glen to bor 
 row " stool and desk" of Nature. Half open, like a 
 broad-leafed book (green margin and silver type), the 
 brook-hollow of Glenmary spreads wide as it drops 
 upon the meadow, but above, like a book that deserves 
 its fair margent, it deepens as you proceed. Not far 
 from the road, its little rivulet steals forth from a 
 shadowy ravine, narrow as you enter, then widening 
 back to a mimic cataract ; and here, a child would 
 say, is fairy parlor. A small platform (an island 
 when the stream is swollen) lies at the foot of the fall, 
 carpeted with the fine silky grass which thrives with 
 shade and spray. The two walls of the ravine are 
 mossy, and trickling with springs ; the trees over 
 head interlace, to keep out the sun; and down comes 
 the brook, over a flight of precipitous steps, like chil 
 dren bursting out of school, and after a laugh at its 
 own tumble, it falls again into a decorous ripple, and 
 trips murmuring away. The light is green, the 
 leaves of the overhanging trees look translucent above, 
 and the wild blue grape, with its emerald rings, has 
 wove all over it a basket-lattice so fine, that you 
 would think it were done to order warranted to keep 
 out the hawk, and let in the humming-bird. With a 
 yellow pine at my back, a moss cushion beneath, and 
 a ledge of flat stone at my elbow, you will allow 1 had 
 a secretary s outfit. I spread my paper, and mended 
 my pen ; and then (you will pardon me, dear Doctor) 
 I forgot you altogether. The truth is, these fanciful 
 garnishings spoil work. Silvio Pellico had a better 
 place to write in. If it had been a room with a Chi 
 nese paper (a bird standing for ever on one leg, and a 
 tree ruffled by the summer wind, and fixed with its 
 leaves on edge, as if petrified with the varlet s^ mu-- 
 dence), the eye might get accustomed to it. 
 
 But first 
 
 M147801 
 
THE MIRROR LIBRARY. 
 
 came a gold-robin, twittering out his surprise to find 
 strange company in his parlor, yet never frighted from 
 his twig by pen and ink. By the time I had sucked a 
 lesson out of that, a squirrel tripped in without knock 
 ing, and sat nibbling at a last-year s nut, as if nobody 
 but he took thought for the morrow. Then came an 
 enterprising ant, climbing my knee like a discoverer ; 
 and I wondered whether Fernando Cortes would have 
 mounted so boldly, had the peak of Darien been as 
 new-dropped between the Americas, as my leg by his 
 ant-hill. By this time, a small dripping from a moss- 
 fringe at my elbow betrayed the lip of a spring; and, 
 dislodging a stone, I uncovered a brace of lizards 
 lying snug in the ooze. We flatter ourselves, thought 
 I, that we drink first of the spring. We do not know 
 always whose lips were before us. 
 
 Much as you see of insect life, and hear of bird- 
 music, as you walk abroad, you should lie perdu in a 
 nook, to know how much is frighted from sight, and 
 hushed from singing, by your approach. What 
 worms creep out when they think you gone, and what 
 chatterers go on with their story ! So among friends, 
 thought I, as I fished for the moral. We should be 
 wiser, if we knew what our coming hides and silences, 
 but should we walk so undisturbed on our way ? 
 
 You will see with half a glance, dear Doctor, that 
 here was too much company for writing. I screwed 
 up my inkstand once more, and kept up the bed of 
 the stream till it enters the forest, remembering a still 
 place by a pool. The tall pines hold up the roof high 
 as an umbrella of Brobdignag, and neither water 
 brawls, nor small birds sing, in the gloom of it. Here, 
 thought 1, as far as they go, the circumstances are 
 congenial. But, as Jean Paul says, there is a period 
 of life when the real gains ground upon the ideal ; 
 and to be honest, dear Doctor, I sat leaning on the 
 shingle across my kneee, counting my sky-kissing 
 pines, and reckoning what they would bring in saw- 
 logs so much standing so much drawn to the mill. 
 Then there would be wear and tear of bob-sled, 
 teamster s wages, and your dead-pull springs the 
 horses knees. I had nearly settled the per and con 
 tra, when my eye lit once more on "my dear Doctor," 
 staring from the unfilled sheet, like the ghost of a 
 murdered resolution. " Since when," I asked, look 
 ing myself sternly in the face, " is it so difficult to be 
 virtuous ! Shall I not write when I have a mind ? 
 Shall I reckon pelf whether I will or no? Shall but 
 terfly imagination thrust iron-heart to the wall ? No !" 
 
 I took a straight cut through my ruta-baga patch 
 and cornfield, bent on finding some locality (out of 
 doors it must be) with the average attractions of a 
 sentry-box, or a church-pew. I reached the high 
 road, making insensibly for a brush dam, where I 
 should sit upon a log, with my face abutted upon a 
 wall of chopped saplings. I have not mentioned my 
 dog, who had followed me cheerfully thus far, putting 
 up now and then a partridge, to keep his nose in ; but, 
 on coming to the bridge over the brook, he made up 
 his mind. "My master," he said (or looked), "will 
 neither follow the game, nor sit in the cool. Chacun 
 a son gout. I m tired of this bobbing about for noth 
 ing in a hot sun." So, dousing his tail (which, "if 
 you ever observed," a dog hoists, as a flag-ship does 
 her pennant, only when the commodore is aboard), he 
 sprung the railing, and spread himself for a snooze 
 under the bridge. Ben trovato!" said I, as I seated 
 myself by his side. He wagged his tail half round to 
 acknowledge the compliment, and I took to work like 
 a hay-maker. 
 
 I have taken some pains to describe these difficulties 
 to you, dear Doctor, partly because I hold it to be fair, 
 in this give-and-take world, that a man should know 
 what it costs his fellow to fulfil obligations, but more 
 especially, to apprize you of the metempsychose that is 
 taking place in myself. You will have divined, ere 
 
 this, that, in my out-of-doors life, I am approaching a 
 degree nearer to Arcadian perfectability, and that, if 1 
 but manage to get a bark on and live by sap (spare 
 your wit, sir), I shall be rid of much that is trouble- , 
 some, not to say expensive, in the matters of drink and ! 
 integument. What most surprises me in the past, is, 
 that I ever should have confined my free soul and body, 
 in the very many narrow places and usages I have 
 known in towns. I can only assimilate myself to a 
 squirrel, brought up in a school-boy s pocket, and let 
 out some June morning on a snake fence. 
 
 The spring has been damp for corn, but I had 
 planted on a warm hill-side, and have done better than 
 my neighbors. The Owaga* creek, which makes a 
 bend round my meadow before it drops into the Sus- 
 quehannah (a swift, bright river the Owaga, with as 
 much water as the Arno at Florence), overflowed my 
 cabbages and onions, in the May freshet; but that 
 touches neither me nor my horse. The winter wheat 
 looks like "velvet of three-pile," and everything is 
 out of the ground, including, in my case, the buck 
 wheat, which is not yet put in. This is to be an old- 
 fashioned hot summer, and I shall sow late. The 
 peas are podded. Did it ever strike you, by the way 
 that the pious TEneas, famous through all ages for 
 carrying old Anchises a mile, should, after all, yield 
 glory to a bean. Perhaps you never observed, that 
 this filial esculent grows up with his father on his , 
 back. / 
 
 In my "new light," a farmer s life seems to me 
 what a manufacturer s might resemble, if his factory 
 were an indigenous plant machinery, girls, and all. 
 What spindles and fingers it would take to make an 
 orchard, if nature found nothing but the raw seed, 
 and rain-water and sunshine were brought as far as a 
 cotton bale ! Your despised cabbage would be a 
 prime article if you had to weave it. Pumpkins, if 
 they ripened with a hair-spring and patent lever, 
 would be, "by r lady," a /curious invention. Yet 
 these, which Aladdin nature produces if we but 
 "rub the lamp," are more necessary to life than 
 clothes or watches. In planting a tree (I write it 
 reverently), it seems to me working immediately with 
 the divine faculty. Here are two hundred forest trees 
 set out with my own hand. Yet how little is my part 
 in the glorious creatures they become ! 
 
 This reminds me of a liberty I have lately taken 
 with nature, which I ventured upon with proper diffi 
 dence, though the dame, as will happen with dames, 
 proved less coy than was predicted. The brook at my 
 feet, from its birth in the hills till it dropped into the 
 meadow s lap, tripped down like a mountain-maid 
 with a song, bright and unsullied. So it flowed by 
 my door. At the foot of the bank, its song and 
 sparkle ceased suddenly, and, turning under the hill, 
 its waters disappeared among sedge and rushes. It 
 was more a pity, because you looked across the 
 meadow to the stately Owaga, and saw that its un 
 fulfilled destiny was to have poured its brightness into 
 his. The author of Ernest Maltravers has set the 
 fashion of charity to such fallings away. I made a 
 new channel- over the meadow, gravelled its bed, and 
 grassed its banks, and (last and best charity of all) 
 protected its recovered course with overshadowy trees. 
 Not quite with so gay a sparkle, but with a placid and 
 tranquil beauty, the lost stream glides over the 
 meadow, and, Maltravers-like, the Owaga takes her 
 lovingly to his bosom. The sedge and rushes are 
 turned into a garden, and if you drop a flower into the 
 brook at my door, it scarce loses a breath of its per 
 fume before it is flung on the Owaga, aud the Sus- 
 quehannah robs him of it but with his life. 
 
 I have scribbled away the hours till near noon, and 
 
 * Corrupted now to Owego. Ochwaga was the Indian 
 word, and means swift tmtrr. 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 j 
 
 it is time to see that the oxen get their potatoes. 
 Faith! it s ;i coo! place under a bri<l;j> . Knock out 
 
 the, two ends of the Astor-house, and turn the Hudson 
 through the long pass:: :<. and you will get an idea of it. 
 
 1 ; The breeze draws through here deftly, the stone wall 
 is cool to my back, and this floor of running water, be 
 sides what the air steals from it, sounds and looks re 
 freshingly. My letter has run on, till I am inclined 
 to think the industry of running water "breeds i the 
 brain." Like the tin-pot at the cur s tail, it seems to 
 overtake one with an admonition, if he but slack to 
 breathe. Be not alarmed, dear Doctor, for, sans po 
 tatoes, my oxen will lull in the furrow, and though the 
 brook run till doomsday, I must stop here. Amen. 
 
 LETTER II. 
 
 Mr DKAR DOCTOR : I have just had a visit from 
 the assessor. As if a man should be taxed for a 
 house, who could be luxurious under a bridge ! I 
 have felt a decided "call" to disclaim roof and thresh 
 old, and write myself down a vagabond. Fancy tin- 
 variety of abodes open, rent-free, to a bridge-fancier. 
 It is said among the settlers, that where a stranger 
 finds a tree blown over (the roots forming, always, an 
 upright and well-matted wall), lie has only his house 
 to finish. Cellar and chimney-back are ready done to 
 his hand. But, besides being roofed, walled, and wa 
 tered, and better situated, and more plenty than over 
 blown trees bridges are on no man s land. You are 
 no " squatter," though you sit upon your hams. You 
 may shut up one end with pine boughs, and you have 
 a room a-la-mode one large window open to the 
 floor. The view is of banks and running water ex 
 quisite of necessity. For the summer months I 
 could imagine this bridge-gipsying delicious. What 
 furniture might pack in a donkey-cart, would set forth 
 a better apartment than is averaged in hotels (so 
 yclept). :uvl the saving to your soul (of sins commit 
 ted, sitting at a bell-rope, ringing in vain for water) 
 would be worthy a conscientious man s attention. 
 
 I will not deny that the bridge of Glenmary is a fa 
 vorable specimen. As its abutments touch my cot- 
 ta<:e-l;iwn, I was under the necessity of presenting the 
 public with anew bridge, for which act of munificence 
 I have not yet received the freedom of the town. Per 
 haps I am expected to walk through it when I please, 
 without asking. The hitherward railing coming into 
 the line of my fence, I have, in a measure, a private 
 entrance ; and the whole structure is overshadowed by 
 a luxuriant tree. To be sure, the beggar may go 
 down the bank in the road, and, entering by the other 
 side, sit under it as. well as I but he is welcome. I 
 like society sans-gene where you may come in or go 
 out without apology, or whistle, or take of? your shoes. 
 And I would give notice here to the beggary of Tioga, 
 that in building a stone seat under the bridge, and 
 laying the banks with green-sward, I intend no seques 
 tration of their privileges. I was pleased that a swal 
 low, who had laid her mud-nest against a sleeper 
 overhead, took no offence at my improvements. Her 
 three nestlings made large eyes when I read out what 
 I have scribbled, but she drowses on without astonish 
 ment. She is a swallow of last summer, and has seen 
 authors. 
 
 A foot-passenger has just gone over the bridge, 
 and, little dreaming there were four of us listening 
 (the swallows and Tj, he leaned over the railing, and 
 ventured upon a soliloquy. "Why don t he cut 
 down the trees so s he can see out?" said my uncon 
 scious adviser. I caught the eye of the mother-swal 
 low, and fancied she was amused. Her swallowlings 
 looked petrified at the sacrilegious suggestion. By 
 fhe way, it is worthy of remark, that though her littl e 
 
 ones have been hatched a week, this estimable parent 
 still AV/.S rioi ilnir heads. Might not this continued 
 incubation be tried with success upon backward chil 
 dren? We are so apt to think babies are finished 
 when their bodies are brought into the world! 
 
 For some minutes, now, I have observed an occa 
 sional cloud rising from the bottom of the brook, and, 
 peering among the stones, 1 discovered on of the 
 small lobsters with which the streams abound. (The 
 naturalists may class them differently, but as there is 
 but one, and he has all the armament of a lobster, 
 though on the scale of a shrimp, the swallows agree 
 with me in opinion that he should rank as a lobster.) 
 So we are five. " Cocksnouns !" to borrow Scott s 
 ejaculation, people should never be too sure that they 
 are unobserved. When I first came under the bridge, 
 I thought myself alone. 
 
 This lobster puts me in mind of Talleyrand. You 
 would say he is going backward, yet he gets on faster 
 i that way than the other. After all, he is a great man 
 who can turn his reverses to account, and that I take 
 to be, oftentimes, one of the chief secrets of great 
 ness. If I were in politics, I would take the lobster 
 for my crest. It would be ominous, I fear, in poetry. 
 
 You should come to the country now, if you would 
 
 I see the glory of the world. The trees have been co- 
 
 I queuing at their toilet, waiting for warmer weather; 
 
 i but now I think they have put on their last flounce 
 
 I and furbelow, spread their bustle, and stand to be ad- 
 
 . mired. They say "leafy June." To-day is the first 
 
 of July, and though I give the trees my first morning 
 
 regard (out-of-doors) when my eyes are clearest, I 
 
 ! have not fairly thought till to-day, that the foliage was 
 
 full. If it were not for lovers and authors, who keep 
 
 vigil and count the hours, I should suspect there was 
 
 foul play between sun and moon a legitimate day 
 
 I made away with now and then. (The crime is not 
 
 unknown in the upper circles. Saturn devoured his 
 
 children.) 
 
 There is a glory in potatoes well hoed. Corn 
 i the swaying and stately maize has a visible glory. 
 To see the glory of turnips, you must own the crop, 
 and have cattle to fat but they have a glory. Pease 
 need no paean they are appreciated. So are not cab 
 bages, which, though beautiful as a Pompeian wine- 
 cup, and honored above roses by the lingering of the 
 dew, are yet despised of all handicrafts save one. 
 Apt emblem of ancient maidenhood, which is despised, 
 like cabbages, yet cherishes unsunned in its bosom the 
 very dew we mourn so inconsistently when rifled from 
 the rose. 
 
 Apropos the delicate tribute in the last sentence 
 shall serve for an expiation. In a journey I made 
 through Switzerland, I had for chance-travelling com 
 panions, three Scotch ladies, of the class emulated by 
 this chaste vegetable. They were intelligent, refined, 
 and lady-like; yet in some Pencillings by the Way 
 (sketched, perhaps, upon an indigestion of mountain 
 cheese, or an acidity of bad wine such things affect 
 us) I was perverse enough to jot down a remark, more 
 invidious than just. We are reached with a long 
 whip for our transgressions, and, but yesterday, I re 
 ceived a letter from the Isle of Man, of which thus 
 runs an extract : " In your description of a dangerous 
 pass in Switzerland, you mention travelling in the 
 same public conveyance with three Scotch spinsters, 
 and declare you would have been alarmed, had there 
 been any neck in the carriage you cared for, and as 
 sert, that neither of your companions would have hesi 
 tated to leap from a precipice, had there been a lover 
 at the bottom. Did either of us tell you so, sir ? Or 
 what ground have you for this assertion ? You could 
 not have judged of us by your own beautiful country 
 women, for they are proverbial for delicacy of feeling. 
 You had not yet made the acquaintance of mine. 
 We, therefore, must appropriate entirely to ourselves 
 
THE MIRROR LIBRARY. 
 
 the very flattering idea of having inspired such an 
 opinion. Yet allow me to assure you, sir, that lovers 
 are by no means so scarce in my native country, as 
 you seem to imagine. No Scotchwoman need go 
 either to Switzerland, or Yankee-land, in search of 
 them. Permit me to say then, sir, that as the attack 
 was so public, an equally public amende honorable is 
 due to* us." 
 
 I make it here. I retract the opinion altogether. I 
 do not think you " would have leaped from the preci 
 pice, had there been a lover at the bottom." On the 
 
 contrary, dear Miss , I think you would have 
 
 waited till he climbed up. The amende, I flatter my 
 self, could scarce be more complete. Yet I will make 
 it stronger if you wish. 
 
 CAs I look out from under the bridge, I see an oriel 
 sitting upon a dog-wood tree of my planting. His 
 song drew my eye from the p;iper. 1 find it difficult, 
 now, not to take to myself the whole glory of tree, 
 song, and plumage. By an easy delusion, I fancy he 
 would not have come but for the beauty of the tree, 
 and that his song says as much, in bird-recitative. I 
 go back to one rainy day of April, when, hunting for 
 maple saplings, I stopped under that graceful tree, in 
 a sort of island jungle, and wondered what grew so 
 fair that was so unfamiliar, yet with a bark like the 
 plumage of the pencilled pheasant. The limbs grew 
 curiously. A lance-like stem, and, at regular distan 
 ces a cluster of radiating branches, like a long cane 
 thrust through inverted parasols. I set to work with 
 spade and pick, took it home on my shoulder, and set 
 it out by Glenmary brook, and there it stands to-day, 
 in the full glory of its leaves, having just shed the 
 white blossoms with which it kept holyday in June. 
 Now the tree would have leaved and flowered, and the 
 oriel, in black and gold, might perchance have swung 
 and sung on the slender branch, which is still tilting 
 with his effort in that last cadenza. But the fair pic 
 ture it makes to my eye, and the delicious music in 
 my ear, seem to me no less of my own making and 
 awaking. Is it the same tree, flowering unseen in 
 the woods, or transplanted into a circle of human love 
 and care, making a part of a woman s home, and 
 thought of and admired whenever she comes out from 
 her cottage, with a blessing on the perfume and ver 
 dure ? Is it the same bird, wasting his song in the 
 thicket, or singing to me, with my whole mind afloat 
 on his music, and my eyes fastened to his glittering 
 breast ? So it is the same block of marble, unmoved 
 in the caves of Pentelicus, or brought forth and 
 wrought under the sculptor s chisel. Yet the sculp 
 tor is allowed to create- Sing on, my bright oriel ! 
 Spread to the light and breeze your desiring finger, 
 my flowering tree ! Like the player upon the organ, 
 [ take your glory to myself; though, like the hallelu 
 jah that burns under his fingers, your beauty and mu 
 sic worship God. 
 
 There are men in the world whose misfortune it is 
 to think too little of themselves rari nantes in <fur- 
 gite vasto. I would recommend to such to plant trees, 
 and live among them. This suggesting to nature 
 working, as a master-mind, with all the fine mysteries 
 of root and sap, obedient to the call is very king-like. 
 Then how elevating is the society of trees ! The ob 
 jection I have to a city, is the necessity, at every other 
 . f step, of passing sonie acquaintance or other, with all 
 his merits or demerits entirely through my mind 
 some man, perhaps, whose existence and vocation I 
 have not suggested (as I might have done were he a 
 tree) whom I neither love, nor care to meet ; and 
 yet he is thrust upon my eye, and must be noticed. 
 But to notice him with propriety, I must remember 
 what he is what claims he has to my respect, my ci 
 vility. I must, in a minute balance the account be 
 tween my character and his, and if he speak to me, 
 remember his wife and children, his last illness, his 
 
 mishap or fortune in trade, or whatever else it is ne 
 cessary to mention in condolence or felicitation. A 
 man with but a moderate acquaintance, living in a 
 city, will pass through his mind each day, at a fair 
 calculation, say two hundred men and women, with 
 their belongings. What tax on the memory ! What 
 fatigue (and all profitless) to them and him! "Sweep 
 me out like a foul thoroughfare!" say I. " The town 
 has trudged through me !" 
 
 I like my mind to be a green lane, private to the 
 dwellers in my own demesne. I like to be bowed to 
 as the trees bow, and have no need to bow back or 
 smile. If I am sad, my trees forego my notice without 
 offence. If I am merry, or whimsical, they do not 
 suspect my good sense, or my sanity. We have a 
 constant itching (all men have, I think) to measure 
 ourselves by those about us. I would rather it should 
 be a tree than a fop, or a politician, or a prentice. 
 Wejjrow to the nearest standard. We become Lilli- /, 
 putians in LiHiput. Let me grow up like a tree. / 
 
 But here comes Tom Groom with an axe, as if he 
 had looked over my shoulder, and started, apropos of 
 trees. 
 
 "Is it that big button-ball you ll have cut down, 
 sir?" 
 
 " Call it a sycamore, Tom, and I ll come and see." 
 It is a fine old trunk, but it shuts out the village spire, 
 and must come down. 
 
 Adieu, dear Doctor ; you may call this a letter if you 
 will, but it is more like an ( 
 
 
 LETTER III. 
 
 DEAR DOCTOR : There are some things that grow 
 more certain with time and experience. Among 
 them, I am happier for finding out, is the affinity 
 which makes us friends. But there are other matters 
 which, for me, observation and knowledge only serve 
 to perplex, and among these is to know whose "edu 
 cation has been neglected." One of the first new 
 lights which broke on me, was after my first day in 
 France. I went to bed with a newborn contempt, 
 mingled with resentment, in my mind, toward my ven 
 erable alma mater. The three most important branches 
 of earthly knowledge, I said to myself, are, to under 
 stand French when it is spoken, to speak it so as to be 
 understood, and to read and write it with propriety 
 and ease. For accomplishment in the last, I could 
 refer to my diploma, where the fact was stated on in 
 destructible parchment. But, allowing it to speak 
 the truth (which was allowing a great deal), there 
 were the two preceding branches, in which (most 
 culpably to my thinking) "my education had been 
 neglected." Could I have taken out my brains, and, 
 by simmering in a pot, have decocted Virgil, Homer, 
 Playfair, Dugald Stewart, and Copernicus, all five, 
 into one very small Frenchman (what they had 
 taught me to what he could teach) I should have 
 been content, though the fiend blew the fire. 
 
 I remember a beggarly Greek, who acquired an 
 ascendency over eight or ten of us, gentlemen and 
 scholars, travelling in the east, by a knowledge of 
 what esculents, growing wild above the bones of Mil- 
 tiades, were " good for greens." We were out of pro 
 visions, and fain to eat with Nebuchadnezzar. " Hang 
 grammar!" thought I, "here s a branch in which my 
 education has been neglected." Who was ever called 
 upon in his travels to conjugate a verb ? Yet here, 
 but for this degenerate Athenian, we had starved for 
 our ignorance of what is edible in plants. 
 
 I had occasion, only yesterday, to make a similar 
 remark. I was in a crowded church, listening to a 
 Fourth of July oration ; what with one sort of caloric 
 and what with another, it was very uncomfortable, and 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 v 
 
 a lady near me became faint. To get her out, was 
 impossible, and there was neither fan, nor sal volatile, 
 within twenty pews. The bustle, after awhile, drew 
 the attention of an uncombed Yankee in his shirt 
 sleeves, who had stood in the aisle with his mouth 
 open, gazing at the stage in front of the pulpit, and 
 wondering, perhaps, what particular difference be 
 tween sacred and profane oratory, required this pains 
 taking exhibition of the speaker s legs. Compre 
 hending the state of the case at a single glance, the 
 backwoodsman whipped together the two ends of his 
 riding-switch, pulled his cotton handkerchief tightly- 
 over it, and, with this effective fan, soon raised a 
 breeze that restored consciousness to the lady, besides 
 cooling everybody in the vicinity. Here is a man, 
 thought I, brought up to have his wits ready for an 
 emergency. His " education has not been neglected." 
 
 To know nothing of sailing a ship, of farming, of 
 carpentering, in short, of any trade or profession, may 
 be a p<0gJ , though sometimes inconvenient igno 
 rance. Fonly speak of such deficiencies, as a modest 
 person will not confess without giving a reason as a 
 man who can not swim will say he is liable to the 
 cramp in deep water. With some reluctance, lately, 
 1 have brought myself to look after such dropped , 
 threads in my own woof of acquisitions, in the hope j 
 of mending them before they were betrayed by an exi 
 gency. Trout-fishing is one of these. I plucked up 
 \\I-.\Y\ a day or two since, and drove to call upon a 
 young sporting friend of mine, to whom I confessed, 
 plump, I never had caught a trout. I knew nothing 
 of flies, worms, rods, or hooks. Though I had seen 
 in a book that " hog s down" was the material for the 
 May-fly, I positively did not know on what part of that 
 succulent quadruped the down was found. 
 
 "Positively ?" 
 
 " Positively !" 
 
 My friend F. gravely shut the door to secure pri 
 vacy to my ignorance, and took from his desk a vol- j 
 ume _ f flies ! Here was new matter ! Why, sir ! j 
 your trout-fishing is a politician of the first water! 
 Here were baits adapted to all the whims, weaknesses, 
 states of appetite, even counter-baits to the very cun 
 ning, of the fish. Taking up the "Spirit of the 
 Times" newspaper, his authority in all sporting mat 
 ters, which he had laid down as I came in, he read a 
 recipe for the construction of one out of the many of 
 these seductive imitations, as a specimen of the labor 
 bestowed on them. "The body is dubbed with hog s 
 down, or light bear s hair mixed with yellow mohair, 
 whipped with pale floss silk, and a small strip of pea- 1 
 cock s herl for the head. The wings from the rayed 
 feathers of the mallard, dyed yellow ; the hackle from 
 the bittern s neck, and the tail from the long hairs of 
 the sable or ferret." 
 
 I cut my friend short midway in his volume, for, 
 ever since my disgust at discovering that the perplexed 
 grammar I had been whipped through was nothing 
 but the art of talking correctly, which I could do be 
 fore I began, 1 have had an aversion to rudiments. 
 "Frankly," said I, "dear F. my education has been 
 neglected. Will you take me with you, trout-fishing, 
 fish yourself, answer my questions, and assist me to 
 pick up the science in my own scrambling fashion?" 
 
 He was good-natured enough to consent, and now, 
 dear Doctor, you see to what all this prologue was 
 tending. A day s trout-fishing may be a very com 
 mon matter to you, but the sport was as new to me as 
 to tho trout. I .may say, however, that of the two, I 
 took to the novelty of the thing more kindly. 
 
 The morning after was breezy, and the air, without 
 n shower, had become cool. 1 was sitting under the 
 !>; lire, with my heels at the water s edge, reading ;> 
 ,>aper, while waiting for inv breakfast, \^\<-\ a 
 slight motion apprized me that the water had invaded 
 my instep. I had been wishing the sun had drank less 
 
 freely of my brook, and within a few minutes of the 
 wish, it had risen, doubtless, from the skirt of a shower 
 in the hills beyond us. "Come!" thought J, pulling 
 my boots out of the ripple, "so should arrive favors 
 that would be welcome no herald, and no weary ex 
 pectation. A human gift so uses up gratitude with 
 the asking and delaying." The swallow heard the in- 
 reased babble of the stream, and came out of the air 
 ike a cimeter to see if her little ones were afraid, and 
 he fussy lobster bustled about in his pool, as If there 
 were more company than he expected. " Semper pa- 
 ratus is a good motto, Mr. Lobster !" " I will look 
 after your little ones, Dame Swallow !" I had scarce 
 listributed these consolations among my family, when 
 a horse crossed the bridge at a gallop, and the head of 
 my friend F. peered presently over the railing. 
 
 " How is your brook ?" 
 
 "Rising, as you see!" 
 
 It was evident there had been rain west of us, and 
 he sky was still gray good auspices for the fisher. 
 [n half an hour we were climbing the hill, with such 
 contents in the wagon-box as my friend advised the 
 lebris of a roast pig and a bottle of hock supposed to 
 be included in the bait. As we got into the woods 
 above (part of my own small domain), I could scarce 
 lelp addressing my tall tenantry of trees. " Grow 
 away, gentlemen," I would have said, had I been 
 alone ; " I rejoice in your prosperity. Help your 
 selves to the dew and the sunshine ! If the showers are 
 not sent to your liking, thrust your roots into my 
 ellar, lying just under you, and moisten your clay 
 without ceremony the more the better." After all, 
 trees have pleasant ways with them. It is something 
 hat they find their own food and raiment something 
 that they require neither watching nor care some- . 
 thing that they know, without almanac, the proces 
 sions of the seasons, and supply, unprompted and 
 unaided, the covering for their tender family of germes. 
 So do not other and less profitable tenants. But it is 
 more to me that they have no whims to be reasoned 
 with, no prejudices to be soothed, no garrulity to re 
 ply or listen to. I have a peculiarity which this 
 touches nearly. Some m9n "make a god of their 
 aelly;" some spend thought and cherishing on their 
 feet, faces, hair; some few on their fancy or their 
 reason. 7am chary of my gift of speech. I hate to 
 talk but for my pleasure. In common with my fel 
 low-men, I have one faculty which distinguishes me 
 from the brute an articulate voice. I speak (I am 
 warranted to believe) like my Maker and his angels. 
 I have committed to me an instrument no human art 
 has ever imitated, as incomprehensible in its fine and 
 celestial mechanism, as the reason which controls it.^ 
 Shall I breathe on this articulate wonder at every 
 fool s bidding ? Without reasoning upon the matter 
 as I do now, I have felt indignant at the common ad 
 age, " words cost nothing !" It is a common saying 
 in this part of the country, that " you may talk oft" ten 
 dollars in the price of a horse." Those who have 
 travelled in Italy, know well that in procuring any 
 thing in that country, from a post-carriage to a paper 
 of pins, you pay so much money, so much talk the 
 less talk the more money. I commenced all my bar 
 gains with a compromise" You charge me ten scudi, 
 and you expect me to talk you down to five. I know 
 the price and the custom. Now, I will give you seven 
 and a half if you will let me off the talk." I should 
 be glad if all buying and selling were done by signs. 
 It seems to rne that talking on a sordid theme invades 
 and desecrates the personal dignity. The " scripta 
 vcrla manenf" has no terrors for me. I could write 
 that without a thought, which I would put myself to 
 great inconveniences to avoid tawng- 
 
 You, dear Doctor, among others, have often asked 
 me how long I should be contented in the country. 
 Comment, diaUc! ask, rather, how you are contented 
 
fc* 
 
 
 THE MIRROR LIBRARY. 
 
 \\ 
 
 in a town ! Does not every creature, whose nam 
 may have been mentioned to you a vast congrega 
 tion of nothiuglings stop you in the street, and, wil 
 you, nill you, make you perform on your celestial or 
 gan of speech nay, even choose the theme out of hi 
 own littlenesses ? When and how do you possess you 
 thoughts, and their godlike interpreter, in dignity anc 
 peace ? You are a man, of all others, worthy of th 
 unsuggestive listening of trees. Your coinage ol 
 thought, profuse and worthy of a gilt of utterance, is 
 alloyed and depreciated by the promiscuous admix 
 tures of a town. Who ever was struck with the 
 majesty of the human voice in the street ? Yet, who 
 ever spoke, the meanest, in the solitude of a temple 
 or a wilderness, or, in the stillness of night wher 
 ever the voice is alone heard without an awe of his 
 own utterance a feeling as if he had exercised a gift 
 which had in it something of the supernatural ? 
 
 The Indian talks to himself, or to the Great Spirit 
 in the woods, but is silent among men. We take 
 many steps toward civilization as we get on in life 
 but it is an error to think that the heart keeps up witl 
 the manners. At least, with me, the perfection of ex 
 istence seems to be, to possess the arts of social life 
 with the simplicity and freedom of the savage. They 
 talk of " unbridled youth !" Who would not have 
 borne a rein at twenty, he scorns at thirty ? Who 
 does not, as his manhood matures, grow more im 
 patient of restraint more unwilling to submit to the 
 conventional tyrannies of society more ready, if there 
 were half a reason for it, to break through the whole 
 golden but enslaving mesh of society, and start fresh, 
 with Nature and the instincts of life, in the wilderness. 
 The imprisonment to a human eye may be as irksome 
 as a fetter yet they who live in cities are never loosed. 
 Did you ever stir out of doors without remembering 
 that you were seen ? 
 
 I have given you my thoughts as I went by my tall 
 foresters, dear Doctor, for it is a part of trout-fishing, 
 as quaint Izaak held it, to be stirred to musing and 
 revery by the influences of nature. In this free air, 
 too, I scorn to be tied cjpwn to "the proprieties." 
 Nay, if it come to that, why should I finish what 
 begin ? Dame swallow, to be sure, looks curious to 
 hear the end of my first lesson with the angle. But 
 no ! rules be hanged ! I do not live on a wild brook to 
 be plagued with rhetoric. I will seal up my letter 
 where I am, and go a-fie!d. You shall know what 
 we brought home in the basket when I write again. 
 
 LETTER IV. 
 
 MY DEAR DOCTOR: Your letters, like yourself, trav 
 el in the best of company. What should come with 
 your last, but a note from our friend Stetson of the 
 Astor, forwarding a letter which a traveller had left in 
 the bronze vase, with "something enclosed which feels 
 like a key." "A key," quotha! Attar of jasmine, 
 subtle as the breath of the prophet from Constantino 
 ple by private hand! No less! The small gilt bottle, 
 with its cubical edge and cap of parchment, lies breath 
 ing before me. I think you were not so fortunate as 
 tomeet Bartlett, the draughtsman of the American sce 
 nery the best of artists in his way, and the pleasantest 
 of John Bulls, any way. He travelled with me asum- 
 mer here, making his sketches, and has since been 
 sent by the same enterprising publisher (Virtue, of 
 Ivy Lane), to sketch in the Orient. (" Stand by," as 
 Jack says, for something glorious from that quarter.) 
 Well pottering about the Bezestein, he fell in with 
 my old friend Mustaphn, the attar-merchant, who lift 
 ed the silk curtains for him, and over sherbet and 
 spiced coffee in the inner divan, questioned him of 
 America a country which, to Mustapha s fancy, is as 
 
 far beyond the moon as the moon is beyond the gilt 
 tip of the seraglio. Bartlett told him the sky was 
 round in that country, and the women faint and exquis 
 ite as his own attar. Upon which Mustapha took his 
 pipe from his mouth, and praised Allah. After stro 
 king the smoke out of his beard, and rolling his idea 
 over the whites of his eyes for a few minutes, the old 
 merchant pulled from under his silk cushion, a visit 
 ing-card, once white, but stained to a deep orange with 
 the fingering of his fat hand, unctuous from bath-hour 
 to bath-hour with the precious oils he traffics in. 
 When Bartlett assured him he had seen me in Amer 
 ica (it was the card I had given the old Turk at part 
 ing, that he might remember my name), he settled the 
 curtains which divide the small apartment from the 
 shop, and commanding his huge Ethiopian to watch 
 the door, entered into a description of our visit to the 
 forbidden recesses of the slave-market, of his pur 
 chase (for me), of the gipsy Maimuna, and some oth 
 er of my six weeks adventures in his company for 
 Mustapha and I, wherever it might lie in his fat body, 
 had a nerve in unison. We mingled like two drops 
 of the oil of roses. At parting, he gave Bartlett this 
 small bottle of jasmine, to be forwarded to me, with 
 much love, at his convenience; and with the perfume 
 of it in my nostrils, and the corpulent laugh of old 
 Mustapha ringing in my ear, I should find it difficult 
 at this moment, to say how much of me is under this 
 bridge in Tioga, North America. I am not sure that 
 my letter should not be dated " attar-shop, near the se 
 raglio" for there, it seems to me, I am writing. 
 
 " Tor-rnentingest growin time, aint it !" says a neigh 
 bor, leaning over the bridge at this instant, and little 
 thinking that on that breath of his I travelled from the 
 Bosphorus to the Susquehannah. Really, they talk 
 of steamers, but there is no travelling conveyance like 
 an interruption. A minute since, I was in the capital 
 of the Palaeologi, smoking a narghile in the Turk s 
 shop. Presto! here I am in the county of Tiog , sit 
 ting under a bridge; with three swallows and a lobster 
 (not three lobsters at a swallow as you are very like 
 ly to read it in your own careless way), and no outlay 
 for coals or canvass. Now, why should not this be re 
 duced to a science like steam ! I ll lend the idea to 
 the cause of knowledge. If a man may travel from 
 Turkey to New York on a passing remark, what might 
 be done on a long sermon ? At present the agent is 
 irregular, so was steam. The performance of the 
 journey, at present, is compulsory. So was travelling 
 by steam before Fulton. The discoveries in animal 
 magnetism justify the most sanguine hopes on the sub 
 ject, and "open up," as Mr. Bulwer would express it, 
 a vast field of novel discovery. 
 
 The truth is (I have been sitting a minute thinking 
 it over), the chief obstacle and inconvenience in trav 
 elling is the prejudice in favor of taking the body with 
 us. It is really a preposterous expense. Going abroad 
 exclusively for the benefit of the mind, we are at no 
 little trouble, in the first place, to provide the means 
 for the body s subsistence on the journey (the rnind 
 not being subject to "charges") and then, besides trail 
 ing after us through ruins and galleries, a companion 
 who takes no enjoyment in pictures or temples, and is 
 perpetually incommoded by our enthusiasm, we un 
 dergo endless vexation and annoyance with the care of 
 his baggage. Blessed be Providence, the mind is in 
 dependent of boots and linen. When the system 
 above hinted at is perfected, we can leave our box-coats 
 at home, item pantaloons for all weathers, item cravats, 
 flannels, and innumerable hose. I shall use my port 
 manteau to send eggs to market, with chickens in the 
 two carpet-bags. My body I shall leave with the dai 
 ry-woman, to be fed at milking-time. Probably, how 
 ever, in the progress of knowledge, there will be some 
 discovery by which it can be closed in the absence 
 of the mind, like a town-house when the occupant is 
 
; 
 
 LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 in the country blinds down, and a cobweb over the 
 keyhole. 
 
 In all the prophetic visions of a millenium, the chief 
 obstacle to its progress is the apparently undiminish- 
 ing necessity for the root of all evil. Intelligence is 
 diffusing, Jaw becoming less merciless, ladies driving 
 hoops, and (I have observed) a visible increase of mar 
 riages between elderly ladies and very young gentle 
 men the last a proof that the affections (as will be 
 universally true in the milleninm) may retain their 
 freshness in age. But among all these lesser begin 
 nings, the philanthropist has hitherto despaired, for to 
 his most curious search, there appeared no symptom 
 of beginning to live without money. May we not dis- 
 cenfin this system (by which the mind, it is evident, 
 may perform some of the most expensive functions of 
 the body), a dream of moneyless millenium a first 
 step toward that blessed era when " Diddle and dis 
 counts" will be read of like "Aaron and burnt-offer 
 ings" ceremonies which once made it necessary for 
 a high-priest, and an altar at which the innocent suf 
 fered for the guilty, but which shall have passed away 
 in the blessed progress of the millenium? 
 
 If I may make a grave remark to you, dear Doctor, 
 I think the whole bent and spirit of the age we live in, 
 is, to make light of mailer. Religion, which used to 
 be seated in the heart, is, by the new light of Chan- 
 ning, addressed purely to the intellect. The feelings 
 and passions, which are bodily affections, have less to 
 do with it than the mind. To eat with science and 
 drink hard, were once passports to society. To think 
 shrewdly and talk well, carry it now. Headaches 
 were cured by pills, which now yield to magnetic 
 fluid nothing so subtle. If we travelled once, it 
 must be by pulling of solid muscle. Rarefied air does 
 it now better than horses. War has yielded to nego 
 tiation. A strong man is no better than a weak one. 
 Electro-magnetism will soon do all the work of the 
 world, and men s muscles will be so much weight 
 no more. The amount of it is, that ive are gradually 
 learning to do loithout our bodies. The next great dis 
 covery will probably be some pleasant contrivance for 
 getting out of them, as the butterfly sheds his worm. 
 Then, indeed, having no pockets, and no " corpus" for 
 your " habeas" we can dispense with money and its 
 consequences, and lo ! the millenium ! Having no 
 stomachs to care for, there will be much cause of sin 
 
 crimes. That the London Quarterly ever existed, 
 will be classed with such historical enormities as the 
 Inquisition, and torture for witchcraft; and "to be 
 Locl lnnicd" will mean, then, what "to be Burked" 
 means now. 
 
 You will say, dear Doctor, that I am the " ancient , 
 mariner" of letter-writers telling my tale out of all 
 apropos-ity. But after some consideration, I have 
 made up my mind, that a man who is at all addicted 
 to r^vjjry, must have one or two escape-valves a 
 journal, or a very random correspondence. For rea 
 sons many and good, I prefer the latter; and the best 
 of those reasons is my good fortune in possessing a 
 friend like yourself, who is above " proprieties" (pro- 
 sodically speaking), and so you have become to me, 
 what Asia was to Prometheus 
 
 " When his being overflowed, 
 Was like a golden chalice to bright wine, 
 Which else had sunk into the thirsty dusk." 
 
 Talking of trout. We emerged from the woods of 
 Glenmary (you left me there in my last letter), and 
 rounding the top of the hill, which serves for my sun 
 set drop-curtain, we ran down a mile to a brook in the 
 bed of a low valley. It rejoices in no name, that 1 
 could hear of; but, like much that is uncelebrated, it 
 has its virtues. Leaving William to tie the horse to a 
 hemlock, and bring on the basket, we started up the 
 stream, and coming to a cold spring, my friend sat 
 down to initiate me into the rudiments of preparing 
 the fly. A very gay-coated gentleman was selected, 
 rather handsomer than your horse-fly, and whipped 
 upon a rod quite too taper for a comparison. 
 
 " What next?" 
 
 " Take a bit of worm out of the tin box, and cover 
 the barb of the hook !" 
 
 " I will. Stay ! where are the bits ? 1 sec nothing 
 here but full-length worms, crawling about, with 
 every one his complement of extremities not a tail 
 astray." 
 
 "Bah! pull a bit off!" 
 
 " What ! you don t mean that I am to pull one of 
 these squirming unfortunates in two ?" 
 
 " Certainly !" 
 
 "Well, come! that seems to me rather a liberty. 
 I grant you my education has been neglected, but, 
 my dear F., there is mercy in a guillotine. I had 
 
 done away, for in most penal iniquities, the stomach | J made up my mind to the death of the fish, but this 
 
 is at the bottom. Think what smoothness will follow 1 preliminary horror !" 
 
 " Come ! don t be a woman !" 
 
 " I wish I were I should have a pair of scissors 
 
 in "the cause of true love" money coming never be 
 tween ! It looks ill for your profession, dear Doctor. 
 We shall have no need of physic. The fee will go to 
 him who " administers to the mind deceased" prob 
 ably the clergy. (Mem. to put your children in the 
 church.) I am afraid crowded parties will go out of 
 fashion it would be so difficult to separate one s 
 globule in case of " mixed society" yet the extrica 
 tion of gases might be improved upon. Fancy a 
 lady and gentleman made " common air" of, by the 
 mixture of their " oxygen and hydrogen !" 
 - What most pleases me in the prospect of this Swe- 
 dmborg order of things, is the probable improvement 
 in the laws. In the physical age passing away, we 
 - have legislated for the protection of the body, but no 
 pains or penalties for wounds upon its more sensitive 
 inhabitant murder to break the snail s shell, but in- 
 nocent pastime to thrust a pin into the snail. In the 
 new order of things^ we shall have penal laws for the 
 0*; protection of the s^hsibljities whether they be touch- 
 , cd through the fanCyv-ftie judgment, or the personal 
 i dignity. Those will be days for poets ! Critics will 
 , be hanged or worse. A sneer will be manslaughter. 
 V I Ridicule will be a deadly weapon, only justifiable u IK n 
 -, used in defence of life. For scandal, imprisonment 
 from ten to forty years, at the mercy of the court. 
 All attacks upon honor, honesty, or innocence, capital 
 
 Fancy having your leg pulled off, my good fellow. I 
 say it is due to the poor devil that the operation be as 
 short as possible. Suppose your thumb slips?" 
 
 "Why, the worm feels nothing! Pain is in the 
 imagination. Stay ! I ll do it for you there ?" 
 
 What the remainder of the worm felt, I had no op 
 portunity of observing, as my friend thrust the tin box 
 ; into his pocket immediately ; but the "bit" which he 
 I dropped into the palm of my hand, gave every symp- 
 1 torn of extreme astonishment, to say the least. The 
 passing of the barb of the hook three times through 
 him, seemed rather to increase his vitality, and looked 
 to me as little like happiness as anything I ever saw 
 on an excursion of pleasure. Far be it from me, to 
 pretend to more sensibility than Christopher North, or 
 Izaak Walton. The latter had his humanities; and 
 Wilson, of all the men I have ever seen, carries, most 
 marked in his fine face, the philtre which bewitches 
 affection. But, emulous as I am of their fame as an 
 glers, and modest as I should feel at introducing inno 
 vations upon an art so refined, I must venture upon 
 some less primitive instrument than thumb and finger, 
 for the dismemberment of worms. I must take 
 scissors. 
 
 I had never seen a trout caught in my life, and 1 do 
 
8 
 
 THE MIRROR LIBRARY. 
 
 not remember at this moment ever having, myself, 
 caught a fish, of any genus or gender. My first les 
 son, of course, was to see the thing done. F. stole 
 up to the bank of the stream, as if his tread might 
 wake a naiad, and threw his fly into a circling, black 
 pool, sparkling with brilliant bubbles, which coiled 
 away from a small brook-leap in the shade. The 
 same instant the rod bent, and a glittering spotted 
 creature rose into the air, swung to his hand, and was 
 dropped into the basket. Another fling, and a small 
 trail of the fly on the water, and another followed. 
 With the third, I felt a curious uneasiness in my el 
 bow, extending quickly to my wrist the tingling of a 
 newborn enthusiasm. F. had taken up the stream, 
 and with his lips apart, and body bent over, like a mortal 
 surprising some troop of fays at revel, it was not rea 
 sonable to expect him to remember his pupil. So, 
 silently I turned down, and at the first pool threw in 
 my fly. Something bright seemed born at the instant 
 under it, and the slight tilting pull upon the pole, 
 took me so much by surprise, that for a second I for 
 got to raise it. Up came the bright trout, raining the 
 silver water from his back, and at the second swing 
 through the air (for I had not yet learned the sleight 
 of the fisher to bring him quick to hand), he dropped 
 into the pool, and was gone. I had already begun to 
 take his part against myself, and detected a pleased 
 thrill, at his escape, venturing through my bosom. 
 I sat down upon a prostrate pine, to new-Shylock my | 
 poor worm. The tin box was in F. s pocket ! Come ! 
 here was a relief. As to the wild-wood worms that 
 might be dug from the pine-tassels under my feet, I 
 was incapable of violating their forest sanctuary. I 
 would fish no more. I had had my pleasure. It is 
 not like pulling up a stick or a stone, to pull up a re 
 sisting trout. It is a peculiar sensation, unimaginable 
 till felt. I should like to be an angler very well, but 
 for the loorm in my pocket. 
 
 The brook at my feet, and around me, pines of the 
 tallest lift, by thousands ! You may travel through 
 a forest, and look upon these communicants with the 
 sky, as trees. But you can not sit still in a forest, 
 alone, and silent, without feeling the awe of their pres 
 ence. Yet the brook ran and sang as merrily, in 
 their black shadow, as in the open sunshine ; and the 
 woodpecker played his sharp hammer on a tree ever 
 green for centuries, as fearlessly as on a shivering 
 poplar, that will be outlived by such a fish-catcher as 
 I. Truly, this is a world in which there is small rec 
 ognition of greatness. As it is in the forest, so it is 
 in the f(Wn. The very gods would have their toes 
 trod upon, if they walked without their wings. Yet 
 let us take honor to ourselves above vegetables. The 
 pine beneath me has been a giant, with his top in the 
 clouds, but lies now unvalued on the earth. We rec 
 ognise greatness when it is dead. We are prodigal 
 of love and honor when it is unavailing. We are, in 
 something, above wood and stubble. 
 
 I have fallen into a sad trick, dear Doctor, of preach 
 ing sermons to myself, from these texts of nature. 
 Sometimes, like other preachers, I pervert the meaning 
 and forget the context, but revery would lose its 
 charm if it went by reason. Adieu! Come up to 
 Glenmary, and catch trout if you will. But I will 
 have your worms decently drowned before boxed for 
 use. I can not sleep o nights, after slipping one of 
 these harmless creatures out of his own mouth, in a 
 vain attempt to pull him asunder. 
 
 MY DKAR DOCTOR: If this egg hatch without get 
 ting cold, or, to accommodate my language to your 
 city apprehension, if the letter I here begin comes to 
 
 a finishing, it will be malgre blistering hands and 
 weary back the consequences of hard raking of 
 hay. The men are taking their four o clock of cheese 
 and cider in the meadow, and not having simplified 
 my digestion as rapidly as my habits, I have retired 
 to the shelter of the bridge, to be decently rid of the 
 master s first bit, and pull at the pitcher. After 
 employing my brains in vain, to discover why this par 
 ticular branch of farming should require cider and 
 cheese (eaten together at no other season that I can 
 learn), T have pulled out my scribble-book from the 
 niche in the sleeper overhead, and find, by luck, one 
 sheet of tabula rasa, upon which you are likely to pay 
 eighteen pence to Amos Kendall. 
 
 Were you ever in a hay-field, Doctor? I ask for 
 information. Metaphorically, I know you " live in 
 clover meaning, the society of wits, and hock of a 
 certain vintage but seriously, did you ever happen 
 to stand on the natural soil of the earth, off the pave 
 ment ? If you have not, let me tell you it is a very 
 pleasant change. I have always fancied there was a 
 mixture of the vegetable in myself; and I am con 
 vinced now, that there is something in us which grows 
 more thriftily on fresh earth, than on flag-stones. 
 There are some men indigenous to brick and mortar, 
 as there are plants which thrive best with a stone on 
 them; but there are " connecting links" between all 
 the varieties of God s works, and such men verge on 
 the mineral kingdom. I have seen whole geodes of 
 them, with all the properties of flints, for example. 
 But in you, my dear Doctor, without flattery, I think 
 I see the vegetable, strong, though latent. You 
 would thrive in the country, well planted and a little 
 pruned. I am not sure it would do to water you free 
 ly but you want sunshine and fresh air, and a little 
 bird to shake the " dew" out of your top. 
 
 I see, from my seat under the bridge, a fair mead-s 
 ow, laid like an unrolled carpet of emerald, along the 
 windings of a most bright and swift river. The first 
 owner of it after the savage, all honor to his memory, 
 sprinkled it with forest trees, now at their loftiest 
 growth, here and there one, stately in the smooth 
 grass, like a polished monarch on the foot-cloth of 
 his throne. The river is the Owaga, and its opposite 
 bank is darkened with thick wood, through which a 
 liberal neighbor has allowed me to cut an eye-path to 
 the village spire a mile across the fields. From my 
 cottage door across this meadow-lawn, steals, with 
 silver foot, the brook I redeemed from its lost stray- 
 ings, and, all along between brook and river, stand hay 
 cocks, not fairies. Now, possess me as well of your 
 whereabout what you see from your window in 
 Broadway ! Is there a sapling on my whole arm that 
 would change root-hold with you ? 
 
 The hay is heavy this year, and if there were less, I 
 should still feel like taking off my hat to the meadow. 
 There is nothing like living in the city, to impress one 
 with the gratuitous liberality of the services rendered 
 one in the country. Here are meadows now, that 
 without hint or petition, pressing or encouragement, 
 pay or consideration, nay, careless even of gratitude, 
 shoot me up some billions of glass-blades, clover- 
 flowers, white and red, and here and there a nodding 
 regiment of lilies, tall as my chin, and it is under 
 stood, I believe, that I am welcome to it all. Now, 
 you may think this is all easy enough, and the meadow 
 is happy to be relieved ; but so the beggar might think 
 of your alms, and be as just. But you have made the 
 money you give him by the sweat of your brow. So 
 has the meadow its grass. " It is estimated," says 
 the Book of Nature, " that an acre of grass-land trans 
 pires, in twenty-four hours, not less than six thousand 
 four hundred quarts of water." Sweat me that with 
 out, a fee, thou " dollar a visit !" 
 
 Here comes William from the post, with a handful 
 of papers. The Mirror, with a likeness of Sprague. 
 

 
 LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 A likeness in a mirror could scarce fail, one would 
 think, aud here, accordingly, he is, the banker-poet, 
 the Rogers of our country fit as " as himself to be 
 his parallel." Yet I have never seen that stern look 
 on him. We know he bears the " globe"* on his 
 back, like old Atlas, but he is more urbane than the j 
 world-bearer. He keeps a muscle unstrained for a 
 ffriiile. A more courteous gentleman stands not by I 
 Mammon s altar no, nor by the lip of Helicon yet 
 ( this is somehow stern. In what character, if you; 
 v__please, Mr. Harding? Sat Plutus, or Apollo, astride 
 J your optic nerve when you drew that picture ? Tt may 
 be a look he has, but, fine head as it stands on paper, j 
 they who form from it an idea of the man. -would be 
 * agreeably disappointed in meeting him. And this, 
 ^ which is a merit in most pictures, is a fault in one , 
 which posterity is to look at. 
 
 Sprague has the reputation of being a most able 
 <j /financier. Yet he is not a rich man. Best evidence ; 
 ~S/ n tne world that he puts his genius into his calcula 
 tions, for it is the nature of uncommon gifts to do : 
 ? \epod to all but their possessor. That he is a poet, 
 ^5 and a tnle and high one, has been not so much ac- 
 knowledged by criticism, as felt in the republic. The 
 / "great army of ed(tj>rs, who paragraph upon one name, 
 t \ as an entry of college-boys will play upon one flute, 
 till the neighborhood would rather listen to a volun 
 tary upon shovel and tongs, have not made his name ! 
 djfarhal and hebdomadal ; but his jioetry is diffused 
 by-more unjostlecjfavi imes, to the understandings and 
 hearts of his countrymen. I, for one, think he is a 
 better banker for his genius, as with the same power 
 \ he would have made a better soldier, statesman, far- 
 mer. what you will. I have seen excellent poetry 
 from the hand of Plutus (Biddle, I should have said, 
 but I never scratch out to you) yet he has but ruf- ; 
 fled the muse, while Sprague has courted her. Our ! 
 Theodore, ^ "bieri-aime, at the court of Berlin, writes a 
 better despatch, I warrant you, than a fellow born of 
 red tape and fed on sealing-wax at the department. 1 1 
 am afraid the genius of poor John Quincy Adams is 
 more limited. He is only the best president we have 
 had since Washington not a poet, though he has a 
 volume in press. Briareus is not the father of all who 
 will have a niche. Shelley would have made an un- ] 
 safe banker, for he was prodigal of stuff. Pope, j 
 Rogers, Crabbe, Sprague, Halleck, waste no gold, 
 even in poetry. Every idea gets his due of those 
 poets, and no more ; and Pope and Crabbe, by the 
 same token, would have made as good bankers as 
 Sprague and Rogers. We are under some mistake 
 about genius, my dear Doctor. I ll just step in-doors, ; 
 and find a definition of it in the library. 
 
 Really, the sun is hot enough, as Sancho says, to j 
 fry the brains in a man s scull. 
 
 " Genius," says the best philosophical book I know 
 of, " wherever it is found, and to whatever purpose 
 directed, is mental power. It distinguishes the man j 
 of fine phrensy, as Shakspere expresses it, from the ! 
 man of mere phrensij. It is a sort of instantaneous in- j 
 sight that gives us knowledge without going to school 
 for it. Sometimes it is directed to one subject, some 
 times to another; but under whatever form it exhibits j 
 itself, it enables the individual who possesses it, to 
 make a wonderful, and almost miraculous progress in 
 the line of his pursuit." 
 
 Si non e vero, e ben trovato. If philosophy were 
 more popular, we should have Irving for president, 
 Halleck for governor of Iowa, and .Bryant envoy to 
 Texas. But genius, to the multitude, is a phantom 
 without mouth, pockets, or hands incapable of work, 
 unaccustomed to food, ignorant of the uses of coin, 
 
 * Mr. Sprague is cashier of the Globe Bank, Boston, 
 j Theodore Fay, secretary of the Amcric;m embassy to 
 Prussia. 
 
 and unfit candidate, consequently, for any manner of 
 loaves and fishes. A few more Spragues would leaven 
 this lump of narrow prejudice. 
 
 I wish you would kill off your patients, dear Doctor, 
 and contrive to be with us at the agricultural show. I 
 (latter myself I shall take the prize for turnips. By 
 the way, to answer your question while I think of it, 
 that is the reason why I am not at Niagara, " taking a 
 look at the viceroy." I must watch my turnip-ling. 
 I met Lord Durham once or twice when in London, 
 and once at dinner at Lady Blessington s. I was ex 
 cessively interested, on that occasion, by the tactics of 
 D Israeli, who had just then chipped his political shell, 
 and was anxious to make an impression on Lord Dur 
 ham, whose glory, still to come, was confidently fore 
 told in that bright circle. I rather fancy the dinner 
 was made to give Vivian Grey the chance ; for her 
 ladyship, benevolent to" every one, has helped D Isra 
 eli to " imp his wing," with a devoted friendship, of 
 which he should imbody in his maturest work the 
 delicacy and fervor. Women are glorious friends to 
 stead ambition ; but effective as they all can be, few 
 have the tact, and fewer the varied means, of the lady 
 in question. The guests dropped in, announced but 
 unseen, in the dim twilight ; and, when Lord Durham 
 came, I could only see that he was of middle stature, 
 and of a naturally cold address. Bulwer spoke to him, 
 but he was introduced to no one a departure from 
 the custom of that maison sans-genc, which was ei 
 ther a tribute to his lordship s reserve, or a ruse on the 
 part of Lady Blessington, to secure to D Israeli the 
 advantage of having his acquaintance sought suc 
 cessful, if so ; for Lord Durham, after dinner, re 
 quested a formal introduction to him. But for D Or- 
 say, who sparkles, as he does everything else, out of 
 rale, and in splendid defiance of others dulness, the 
 soup and the first half hour of dinner would have 
 passed off, with the usual English fashion of earnest 
 silence. I looked over my spoon at the future premier, 
 a dark, saturnine man, with very black hair, combed 
 very smooth, and wondered how a heart, with the tur 
 bulent ambitions, and disciplined energies which were 
 stirring, I knew, in his, could be concealed under that 
 polished and marble tranquillity of mien and manner. 
 He spoke to Lady Blessington in an uuder-tone, re 
 plying with a placid serenity that never reached a 
 smile, to so much of D Orsay s champagne wit as 
 threw its sparkle in his way, and Bulwer and D Israeli 
 were silent altogether. I should have foreboded a dull 
 dinner if, in the open brow, the clear sunny eye, and 
 unembarrassed repose of the beautiful and expressive 
 mouth of Lady Blessington, I had not read the prom 
 ise of a change. It came presently. With a tact, of 
 which the subtle ease and grace can in no way be con 
 veyed into description, she gathered up the cobweb 
 threads of conversation going on at different parts of 
 the table, and, by the most apparent accident, flung 
 them into D Israeli s fingers, like the ribands of a four- 
 in-hand. And, if so coarse a figure can illustrate it, 
 he took the whip-hand like a master. It was an ap 
 peal to his opinion on a subject he well understood, 
 and he burst at once, without preface, into that fiery 
 vein of eloquence which, hearing many times after, 
 and always with new delight, have stamped D Israeli 
 on my mind as the most wonderful talker I have ever 
 had the fortune to meet. He is anything but a de- 
 claijner. You would never think him on stilts. If 
 he catches himself in a rhetorical sentence, he mocks 
 at it in the next breath. He is satirical, contemptuous, 
 pathetic, humorous, everything in a moment ; and his 
 conversation on any subject whatever, embraces the 
 omnibus rebut, c> Cjuilusdam aliis. Add to this, that 
 D Tsraeli s is the most intellectual face in England 
 pale, regular, and overshadowed with the most luxu 
 riant mnsses of raven-black hair; and you will scam- 
 wonder that, meeting him for the first time, Lord Dur- 
 
10 
 
 THE MIRROR LIBRARY. 
 
 ham was (as he was expected to be by the Aspasia of 
 that London Academe), impressed. He was not car 
 ried away as we were. That would have been unlike 
 Lord Durham. He gave his whole mind to the bril 
 liant meteor blazing before him ; but the telescope of 
 judgmeni was in his hand to withdraw at pleasure 
 He has evidently native to his blood, that great quality 
 of a statesman retenu. D lsraeli and he formed at 
 the moment a finely contrasted picture. Understand 
 ing his game perfectly, the author deferred, constantly 
 and adroitly, to the opinion of his noble listener, shap 
 ed his argument by his suggestions, allowed him to 
 say nothing without using it as the nucleus of some 
 new turn to his eloquence, and all this, with an appa 
 rent effort against it, as if he had desired to address 
 himself exclusively to Lady Blessington, but was com 
 pelled, by a superior intellectual magnetism, to turn 
 aside and pay homage to her guest. With all this in 
 stinctive management there was a flashing abandon in 
 his language and choice of illustration, a kindling of 
 his eye, and, what I have before described, a positive 
 foaming at his lips, which contrasted with the warm 
 but clear and penetrating eye of Lord Durham, his 
 calm yet earnest features, and lips closed without com 
 pression, formed, as I said, a picture, and of an order 
 worth remembering in poetry. Without meaning any 
 disrespect to D lsraeli, whom I admire as much as any 
 man in England, I remarked to my neighbor, a cele 
 brated artist, that it would make a glorious drawing of 
 Satan tempting an archangel to rebel. 
 
 Well D lsraeli is in parliament, and Lord Durham 
 on the last round but one of the ladder of subject 
 greatness, The viceroy will be premier, no doubt ; 
 but it is questionable if the author of Vivian Grey 
 does more than carry out the moral of his own tale. 
 Talking at a brilliant table, with an indulgent and su 
 perb woman on the watch for wit and eloquence, and 
 rising in the face of a cold common-sense house of 
 commons, on the look out for froth and humbug, are 
 two different matters. In a great crisis, with the na 
 tion in a tempest, D lsraeli would flash across the 
 darkness very finely but he will never do for the calm 
 right-hand of a premier. I wish him, I am sure, ev 
 ery success in the world ; but I trust that whatever 
 political reverses fall to his share, they will drive him 
 back to literature. 
 
 I have written this last sentence in the red light of 
 sunset, and I must be out to see my trees watered, and 
 my kine driven a-field after their milking. What a 
 coverlet of glory the day-god draws about him for his 
 repose ! I should like curtains of that burnt crimson. 
 If I have a passion in the world, it is for that royal 
 trade, upholstery; and so thought George the Fourth, 
 and so thinks Sultan Mahmoud, who, with his own 
 henna-tipped fingers, assisted by his assembled harem, 
 arranges every fold of drapery in the seraglio. If po 
 etry fail, I ll try the profession some day en grand, and 
 meantime let me go out and study one of the three 
 hundred and sixty-five varieties of couch-drapery in 
 the west. 
 
 LETTER VI. 
 
 MY DEAR DOCTOR : Your letter contained 
 
 " A few of the unpleasantest words 
 That e er were writ on paper !" 
 
 Why should you not pass August at Glenmary? 
 Have your patients bought you, body and soul ? Is 
 there no "night-bell" in the city but yours? Have 
 you no practice in the country, my dear Esculapius ? 
 Faith ! I ll be ill ! By the time you reach here, I 
 shall be a " case." I have not had a headache now 
 in twenty years, and my constitution requires a change. 
 I ll begin by eating the cucumbers we had saved for 
 
 your visit, and you know the consequences. Mix me a 
 pill for the cholera first, second, or third stage of the 
 disease, according to your speed and come with 
 what haste you may. If you arrive too late, you lose 
 your fee, but I ll return your visit, by the honor of a 
 ghost. 
 
 By the way, as a matter of information, do you 
 charge in such cases ? Or, the man being dead, do 
 you deduct for not feeling his pulse, nor felling him 
 the name of his damaged organ in Latin ? It should 
 be half-price, I think, these items off. Let me know 
 by express mail, as one likes to be prepared. 
 
 Since I wrote to you, I have added the Chemung 
 river to my list of acquaintances. It was done a Vim- 
 provista, as most pleasant things are. We were dri 
 ving to the village on some early errand, and met a 
 friend at the cross-roads, bound with an invalid to 
 Avon Springs. He was driving his own horses, and 
 proposed to us to set him a day s journey on his^way. 
 I had hay to cut, but the day was made for truarits 
 bright, breezy, and exhilarating ; and as I looked over 
 my shoulder, the only difficulty vanished, for there 
 stood a pedlar chaffering for a horn-comb with a girl 
 at a well. We provided for a night s toilet from his 
 tin-box, and easing off the check-reins a couple of 
 holes, to enlighten my ponies as to the change in 
 their day s work, we struck into the traveller s trot, 
 and sped away into the eye of a southwest breeze, 
 happy as urchins when the schoolmaster is on a jury. 
 
 When you come here, I shall drive you to the 
 Narrmcs of the Susquehannah. That is a word, nota 
 bene, which, in this degree of latitude, refers not at all 
 to the. breadth of the stream. It is a place where the 
 mountain, like many a frowning coward, threatens to 
 crowd its gentler neighbor, but gives room at its calm 
 approach, and annoys nobody but the passer-by. The 
 road between them, as you come on, looks etched 
 with a thumb-nail along the base of the cliff, and you 
 would think it a pokerish drive, making no allowance 
 for perspective. The friable rock, however, makes 
 rather a smooth single track, and if you have the in 
 side when you meet Farmer Giles or the stage-coach, 
 you have only to set your hub against the rock, and 
 "let them go by as likes." The majestic and tranquil 
 river sweeps into the peaked shadow, and on again, 
 with the disdain of a beauty used to conquer. It re 
 minded me of Lady Blessington s "do if you dare!" 
 when the mob at the house of lords threatened to 
 break her chariot windows. There was a calm cour 
 age in Miladi s French glove that carried her through, 
 and so amid this mob of mountains, glides the Sus 
 quehannah to the sea. 
 
 While I am here, let me jot down an observation 
 worthy the notice of Mr. Capability Brown. This 
 cliff" falls into a a line of hills running from northwest 
 to southeast, and by five in the summer afternoon, 
 their tall shoulders have nudged the sun, and the long, 
 level road at their bases lies in deep shadow, for miles 
 along the Owaga and Susquehannah. " Consequence 
 is," as my friend of the "Albany Daily" says, we can 
 steal a march upon twilight, and take a cool drive be 
 fore tea. What the ruination shops on the west side 
 of Broadway are to you, this spur of the Allega- 
 nies is to me (minus the plate-glass, and the tempta 
 tions). I value this for the afternoons in July and 
 August are hot and long; the breeze dies away, the 
 flies get in-doors, and with the desire for motion, yet 
 no ability to stir, one longs for a ride with Ariel -\ 
 through "the veins o the earth." Mr. C. Brown 
 now would mark me down, for this privilege of road 
 well shaded, some twenty pound in the rent. He is a 
 man in England who trades upon his taste. He goes | 
 to your country-seat to tell you what can be done 
 with it what are its unimproved advantages, what to 
 do with your wood, and what with your water. He 
 would rate this shady mountain as an eligibility in the 
 

 LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 11 
 
 V" 
 
 site, to be reckoned, of course, as income. A very 
 pleasant man is Mr. Brown ! 
 
 It occurs to me, Doctor, that a new branch of this 
 gentleman s profession might be profitable. Why not 
 set up a shop to tell people what they can make of 
 themselves? I have a great mind to take out a patent 
 for the idea. The stock in trade would be two chairs 
 and a green curtain (for taste, like rouge, should be 
 sold privately) not expensive. I would advertise to 
 see gentlemen in the morning, ladies in the evening, 
 " secresy in all cases strictly observed." Few people 
 of either sex know their own style. Your Madonna 
 is apt to romp, for instance, and your romp to wear 
 her hair plain and a rosary. Few ladies know what 
 colors they look best in whether smiles or tears are 
 most becoming, whether they appear to most advan 
 tage sitting, like Queen Victoria and Tom Moore (and 
 this involves a delicate question), or standing and 
 walking. The world is full of people who mistake 
 their style fish Tor your net -every one. How many 
 \\ omen are nev^r charming till they forget themselves ! 
 A belle is a woman who knows her weapons colors, 
 smiles, moods, caprices ; who has looked at her face 
 in the glass like an artist, and knows what will lighten 
 a defect or enhance a beauty. The art is as rare as 
 the belle. " Pourquoy, my dear "Knight." Because 
 taste is, where knowledge was before the discovery of 
 printing locked up with the first possessor. Why 
 should it not be diffused ? What a refuge for reduced 
 gentility would be such a vocation. What is now the 
 disease "Sif fortunes would be then their remedy ; pa 
 rents would cultivate a taste for eloquence in their 
 children, because there is no knowing what they may 
 come to the reason, now, why they take pains to re 
 press it. 
 
 I presume it is in consequence of the diffusion of 
 printing that ignorance of the law is no apology for 
 crime. Were taste within reach 6f all (there might 
 be dispensaries for the poor), that " shocking bad hat" 
 of yours, my dear Doctor, would be a criminal offence. 
 Our fat friend with the long-tailed coat, and the waist 
 at his shoulder-blades, would be liable to fine for mis 
 informing the tailor as to the situation of his hips 
 the tailor of course not to blame, having nothing to go 
 by. Two scandalous old maids together would be 
 abated as a nuisance as it is the quantity of tin-pots, 
 which, in a concert upon that tintinnabulary instru 
 ment, constitutes a disturbance of the peace. The 
 reform would be endless. I am not sure it -could be 
 extended to bad taste in literature, for, like rebellion, 
 the crime would merge in the iiniversality of the of 
 fenders. But it would be the general putting down of 
 tame monsters, now loose on society. Pensez y ! 
 
 What should you think of dining with a woman be 
 hind your chair worth seven hundred thousand pounds 
 sterling well invested? You may well stare but 
 unless a large number of sensible people are very- 
 much mistaken, you may do so any day, for some 
 three shillings, at a small inn on the Susquehannah. 
 Those who know the road, leave behind them a showy, 
 porticoed tavern, new, and carefully divested of all 
 trees and grass, and pull up at the door of the old inn 
 at the place, a low, old-fashioned house, built on a 
 brook-side, and with all the appearance of a comfort 
 able farmhouse, save only a leaning and antiquated 
 sign-post. Here lives a farmer well off in the world, 
 a good-natured old man, who for some years has not 
 meant to keep open tavern, but from the trouble of 
 taking down his sign-post, or the habit, and acquaint 
 ance with travellers, gives all who come what chance 
 fare may be under the roof, and at the old prices com 
 mon in days when the bill was not ridden by leagues 
 of white paint and portico. His dame, the heiress, is 
 a tall and erect woman of fifty (" or, by r lady, three 
 score"), a smiling, intelligent, ready hostess, with the 
 
 natural manners of a gentlewoman. Now and then, a 
 pale daughter, unmarried, and twenty-four or younger, 
 looks into the whitewashed parlor, and if the farmer 
 is home from the field, he sits down with his hat on, 
 and lends you a chat with a voice sound and hearty as 
 the smell of day. It is altogether a pleasant place to 
 loiter away the noon, and though it was early for din 
 ner when we arrived, we put up our horses (the men 
 were all a-field), and Dame Raymond spread her white 
 cloth, and set on her cherry-pie, while her daughter 
 broiled for us the de quoi of the larder, in the shape 
 of a salt mackerel. The key of the "bin" was in her 
 pocket, and we were young enough, the dame said, as 
 she gave it to us, to feed our own horses. This good 
 woman, or this great lady, is the only daughter, as I 
 understand it, of an old farmer ninety years of age, 
 who has fallen heir to an immense fortune in England. 
 He was traced out several years ago by the executors, 
 and the proper testimonials of the property placed in 
 his hands; but he was old, and his child was well off 
 and happy, and he refused to put himself to any trou 
 ble about it. Dame Raymond herself thought Eng 
 land a great way off; and the pride of her life is her 
 fine chickens, and to go so far upon the strength of a 
 few letters, leaving the farm and hen-roost to take care 
 of themselves, was an undertaking which, she felt, jus 
 tified Farmer Raymond in shaking his head. Lately 
 an enterprising gentleman in the neighborhood has 
 taken the papers, and she consented to write to her 
 father, who willingly made over to her all authority in 
 the matter. The claim, 1 understand, is as well au 
 thenticated as paper evidence can make it, and the 
 probability is, that in a few months Dame Raymond 
 will be more troubled with her riches than she ever 
 was with her chickens. 
 
 We dined at our leisure, and had plenty of sharp 
 gossip with the tall hostess, who stood to serve the tea 
 from a side-table, and between our cups kept the flies 
 from her tempting cherry-pie and brown sugar, with a 
 large fan. I have not often seen a more shrewd and 
 sensible woman, and she laughs and philosophizes 
 about her large fortune in a way that satisfied me she 
 would laugh just as cheerly if it should turn out a 
 bubble. She said her husband had told her " it was 
 best not to be proud, till she got her money." The 
 only symptom that I detected of castle-building, was a 
 hint she let slip of hoping to entertain travellers, some 
 day, in a better house. I coupled this with another 
 remark, and suspected that the new tavern, with its big 
 portico and blazing sign, had not taken the wind out 
 of her sails without offence, and that, perhaps, the 
 only use of her money, on which she had determined, 
 was to build a bigger and eclipse the intruder. 
 
 I amused myself with watching her as she bustled 
 about with old-fashioned anxiety to anticipate our 
 wants, and fancying the changes to which the acquisi 
 tion of this immense fortune might introduce her in 
 England. There was her daughter, whom a little mil 
 linery would improve into a very presentable heiress, 
 cooking our mackerel ; while Mrs. Thwaites, the gro 
 cer s widow in London, with no more money probably, 
 was beset by half the unmarried noblemen in England, 
 Lord Lyndhurst, it is said, the most pressing. But 
 speculation is endless, and you shall go down with 
 your trout line, dear Doctor, and spin your own cob 
 webs while Dame Raymond cooks your fish. 
 
 I have spun out my letter to such a length, that I 
 have left myself no room to prate to you of the beau 
 ties of the Chemung, but you are likely to hear 
 eimiiiih of it, for it is a subject with which I am just 
 now something enamoured. I think you share with 
 me my passion for rivers. If you have the grate to 
 come and visit us, and I survive the cholera you have 
 brought upon me, we will visit this new Naiad in com 
 pany, and take Dame Raymond in our way. Adieu. 
 
12 
 
 THE MIRROR LIBRARY. 
 
 LETTER VII. 
 
 I AM of opinion, dear Doctor, that a letter to be reac 
 understandingly, should have marginal references to 
 the state of the thermometer, the condition of the 
 writer s digestion, and the quality of his pen and ink 
 at the time of writing. These matters, if they do no 
 affect a man s belief in a future state, very sensibly op 
 erate upon his style of composition, sometimes (so 
 with me at least), upon his sentiments and minor mor 
 als. 
 
 Like most other pen-and-inklings in this be-printec 
 country, I commenced authorship at precisely the 
 wrong end criticism. Never having put my hat upon 
 more than one or two grown-up thoughts, I still fee; 
 myself qualified to pronounce upon any man s litera 
 ry stature from Walter Scott to whom you please 
 God forgive me ! I remember (under this delusion ol 
 Sathan) sitting down to review a book by one of the 
 most sensible women in this country. It was a pleas 
 ant morning favorable symptom for the author. I 
 wrote the name of the book at the head of a clean sheet 
 of Bath post, and the nib of my pen capered nimbly 
 away into a flourish, in a fashion to coax praise out ol 
 a pumpkin. What but courtesy on so bright a morn 
 ing and with so smooth a pen ? I was in the middle 
 of the page, taking breath after a long and laudatory- 
 sentence, when, paff! through the window came a 
 gust of air, labelled for the bare nerves. (If you have 
 ever been in Boston, perhaps you have observed that 
 an east wind, in that city of blue noses in June, gives 
 you a sensation like being suddenly deprived of your 
 skin.) In a shudder of disgust I bore down upon the 
 dot of an i, and my pen, like an " over-tried friend," 
 gave way under the pressure. With the wind in that 
 same quarter, dexterity died. After vain efforts to 
 mend my pen to its original daintiness, I amputated the 
 nib to a broad working stump, and aimed it doggedly 
 at the beginning of a new paragraph. But my wits 
 had gone about with the grasshopper on the church- 
 steeple. Nothing would trickle from that stumpy 
 quill, either graceful or gracious ; and having looked 
 through the book, but with a view to find matter to 
 praise, I was obliged to run it over anew to forage for 
 the east wind. "Hence the milk in the cocoa-nut," 
 as the showman says of the monkey s stealing chil 
 dren. I wrote a savage review, which the reader was 
 expected to believe contained the opinions of the re 
 viewer ! ! Oh, Jupiter ! 
 
 All this is to apologize, not for my own letter, which 
 I intend to be a pattern of good humor, but for a pas 
 sage in your last (if written upon a hard egg you 
 should have mentioned it in the margin), in which, 
 apropos of my jaunt to the Chemung, you accuse me 
 of being glad to get away from my hermitage. I 
 could write you a sermon now on the nature of content, 
 but you would say the very text is apocryphal. My 
 "lastly," however, would go to prove that there is big 
 otry in retirement as in all things either good or pleas- 
 ureable. The eye that never grows familiar with na 
 ture, needs freshening from all tilings else. A room, a 
 chair, a musical instrument, a horse, a dog, the road 
 you drive daily, and the well you drink from, are all 
 more prized when left and returned to. The habit of 
 turning back daily from a certain mile-stone, in your 
 drive, makes that milestone after awhile, a prison wall. 
 It is pleasant to pass it, though the road beyond be 
 less beautiful. If I were once more " brave Master 
 Shoetie, the great traveller," it would irk me, I dare 
 say, to ride thirty miles in a rail-car drawn by one slow 
 horse. Yet it is a pleasant " lark" now, to run down 
 to Ithaca for a night, in this drowsy conveyance, 
 though I exchange a cool cottage for a fly-nest, "lav- 
 endered linen" for abominable cotton, and the service 
 of civil William for the " young lady that takes care 
 of the chambers." I like the cobwebs swept out 
 
 of my eyes. I like to know what reason I have to 
 keep my temper among my household gods. I like 
 to pay an extravagant bill for villanous entertainment 
 abroad, and come back to escape ruin in the luxuries 
 of home. 
 
 Doctor! were you ever a vagabond for years togeth 
 er ? I know you have hung your hat on the south 
 pole, but you are one of those " friend of the family" 
 men, who will travel from Dan to Beersheba, and be 
 at no charges for lodging. You can not understand, 1 
 think, the life from which I have escaped the life of 
 " mine ease in mine inn." Pleasant mockery ! You 
 have never had the hotel fever never sickened of the 
 j copperplate human faces met exclusively in those 
 homes of the homeless never have gone distracted at 
 the eternal "one piece of soap, and the last occupant s 
 tooth-brush and cigar !" To be slighted any hour of 
 the evening for a pair of slippers and a tin candle 
 stick to sleep and wake amid the din of animal wants, 
 complaining and supplied to hear no variety of hu 
 man tone but the expression of these baser necessities 
 to be waited on either by fellows who would bring 
 your coffin as unconcernedly as your breakfast, or by a 
 woman who is rude, because insulted when kind to lie 
 always in strange beds to go home to a house of stran 
 gers to be weary without pity, sick without soothing, 
 sad without sympathy to sit at twilight by your lone 
 ly window, in some strange city, and, with a heart 
 which a child s voice would dissolve in tenderness, to 
 see door after door open and close upon fathers, broth 
 ers, friends, expected and welcomed by the beloved 
 and the beloving these are costly miseries against 
 which I almost hourly weigh my cheaper happiness iiu 
 a home ! Yet this is the life pined after by the grown 
 up boy the life called fascinating and mystified in ro 
 mance the life, dear Doctor, for whicli even yourself 
 can fancy I am " imping my wing" anew ! Oh, no ! 
 I have served seven years for this Rachel of content 
 ment, and my heart is no Laban to put me off with a 
 Leah. 
 
 "A!" Imagine this capital letter laid on its back, 
 and pointed south by east, and you have a pretty fair 
 diagram of the junction of the Susquehannah and the 
 Chemung. The note of admiration describes a su 
 perb line of mountains at the back of the Chemung 
 valley, and the quotation marks express the fine bluffs 
 that overlook the meeting of the waters at Athens. 
 The cross of the letter (say a line of four miles), de 
 fines a road from one river to the other, by which 
 travellers up the Chemung save the distance to the 
 point of the triangle, and the area between is a broad 
 plain, just now as fine a spectacle of teeming harvest 
 as you, would find on the Genesee. 
 
 As the road touches the Chemung, you pass under 
 the base of a- round mountain, once shaped like a 
 sugar-loaf, but now with a top, o the fashion of a 
 schoolboy s hat punched in to drink from; the floor- 
 worn edge of the felt answering to a fortification 
 
 around the rim of the hill built by I should 
 
 be obliged if you would tell me whom. They call 
 it Spanish Hill, and the fortifications were old at 
 the time of the passing through of Sullivan s ar 
 my. It is as pretty a fort as my Uncle Toby could 
 have seen in Flanders, and was, doubtless, occupied 
 by gentlemen soldiers long before the Mayflower 
 moored off the rock of Plymouth. The tradition 
 runs that an Indian chief once ascended it to look for 
 Spanish gold; but on reaching the top, was enveloped 
 in clouds and thunder, and returned with a solemn 
 command from the spirit of the mountain that no In 
 dian should ever set foot on it again. An old lady, 
 who lives in the neighborhood (famous for killing two 
 tories with a stone in her stocking), declares that the 
 dread of this mountain is universal among the tribes, 
 and that nothing would induce a red man to ascend it. 
 This looks as if the sachem had found what he went 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 13 
 
 after; and it is a modern fact, I understand, that a man 
 hired to plough on the hill-side, suddenly left his em 
 ployer and purchased a .large farm, by nobody knows 
 what windfall of fortune. Half this mountain belongs 
 to a gentleman who is building a country-seat on an 
 exquisite site between it and the river, and to the kind 
 ness of his son and daughter, who accompanied us in 
 our ascent, we are indebted for a most pleasant hour, 
 and what information 1 have given you. 
 
 I will slip in here a memorandum for any invalid, 
 town-weary person, or new-married couple, to whom 
 you may have occasion, in your practice, to recom 
 mend change of air. The house formerly occupied 
 by this gentleman, a roomy mansion, in a command 
 ing and beautiful situation, is now open as an inn, and 
 I know nowhere a retreat so private and desirable. It 
 is near both the Susquehannah and the Chemung, the 
 hills laced with trout-streams, four miles from Athens, 
 and half way between Owegoand Ehnira. The scen 
 ery all about is delicious, and the house well kept at 
 country charges. My cottage is some sixteen miles 
 off; and if you give any of your patients a letter to 
 me, I will drive up and see them, with a posy and a pot 
 of jelly. You will understand that they must be peo 
 ple who do not "add perfume to the violet." In my 
 way simple. 
 
 I can in no way give you an idea of the beauty of 
 the Chemung river from Brigham s Inn to Ehnira. 
 We entered immediately upon the Narrows a spot 
 where the river follows into a curve of the mountain, 
 like an inlaying of silver around the bottom of an em 
 erald cup the brightest water, the richest foliage 
 and a landscape of meadow between the horns of the 
 crescent that would be like the finest park scenery in 
 England, if the boldness of the horizon did not mix 
 with it a resemblance to Switzerland. 
 
 We reached Ehnira at sunset. What shall I say 
 of it ? From a distance, its situation is most beauti 
 ful. It lies (since we have begun upon the alphabet) 
 in the tail of a magnificent L, formed by the bright 
 winding of the river. Perhaps the surveyor, instead 
 of deriving its name from his sweetheart, called it L. 
 mirabilc corrupted to vulgar comprehension, Elmi- 
 ra. If he did not, he might, and I will lend him the 
 etymology. 
 
 The town is built against a long island, covered 
 with soft green-sward, and sprinkled with noble trees ; 
 a promenade of unequalled beauty and convenience, 
 but that all which a village can muster of unsightli- 
 ness has chosen the face of the river-bank " to turn 
 its lining to the sun." Fie on you, Ehnira ! I in 
 tend to get up a memorial to Congress, praying that 
 the banks of rivers in all towns settled henceforth, 
 shall be government property, to be reserved and 
 planted for public grounds. It was the design of 
 William Penn at Philadelphia, and think what a 
 binding it would have been to his chequer-board. 
 Fancy a pier and promenade along the Hudson at 
 New York ! Imagine it a feature of every town in 
 this land of glorious rivers ! 
 
 There is a singular hotel at Elmira (big as a state- 
 house, and be-turreted and be-columned according to 
 the most approved system of impossible rent and 
 charges to make it possible), in the plan of which, 
 curious enough, the chambers were entirely forgotten. 
 The house is all parlors and closets ! We were 
 shown into superb drawing-rooms (one for each party), 
 with pier-glasses, windows to the floor, expensive fur 
 niture, and a most polite landlord ; and began to think 
 the civilization for which he had been looking east, 
 had stepped over our heads and gone on to the Paci 
 fic. Excellent supper and civil service. At dark, 
 two very taper mutton candles set on the superb mar 
 ble-table but that was but a trifling incongruity. 
 After a call from a pleasant friend or two, and a walk, 
 we made an early request to be shown to our bed 
 
 rooms. The "young lady, that sometimes uses a 
 iroom for exercise," opened a closet-door with a look 
 of la vo iln ! ;\\\<\ left us ^\<- rrhlcss with astonishment, 
 Then- was a bed of the dimensions of a saint s niche, 
 but no window by which, if stilled, the soul could es 
 cape to its destination. Yet here we were, evidently 
 abandoned on a hot night in July, with a door to shut 
 if we thought it prudent, and a candle-wick like an 
 ignited poodle-dog to assist in the process of suffoca 
 tion! I hesitated about calling up the landlord, for, 
 as I said before, he was a most polite and friendly 
 person ; and if we were to give up the ghost in that 
 little room, it was evidently in the ordinary arrange 
 ments of the house. "Why not sleep in the parlor?" 
 you will have said. So we did. But, like the king 
 of Spain, who was partly roasted because nobody 
 came to move back the fire, this obvious remedy did 
 not at the instant occur to me. The pier-glass and 
 other splendors of course did duty as bed-room furni 
 ture, and, I may say, we slept sumptuously. Our 
 friends in the opposite parlor did as we did, but took the 
 moving of the bed to be, tout bonnement, what the land 
 lord expected. I do riot think so, yet I was well pleased 
 with him and his entertainment, and shall stop at the 
 " Eagle" incontinently if I can choose my apartment. 
 I am not sure but, in other parts of the house, the 
 blood-thirsty architect has constructed some of these 
 smothering places without parlors. God help the un 
 wary traveller! 
 
 Talking of home (we were at home to dinner the 
 next day), I wonder whether it is true that adverse for 
 tunes have thrown Mrs. Sigourney s beautiful home 
 into the market. It is offered for sale, and the news 
 papers say as much. If so, it is pity, indeed. I was 
 there once; and to leave so delicious a spot must, I 
 think, breed a heart-ache. In general, unless the re 
 verse is extreme, compassion is thrown away on those 
 who leave a large house to be comfortable in a small 
 one ; but she is a poetess, and a most true and sweet 
 one, and has a property in that house, and in all its 
 trees and flowers, which can neither be bought nor 
 sold. It is robbery to sell it for its apparent value. 
 You can understand, for "your spirit is touched to 
 these fine issues," how a tree that the eye of genius 
 has rested on while the mind was at work among its 
 bright fancies, becomes the cradle and home of these 
 fancies, The brain seems driven out of its workshop 
 if you cut it down. So with walks. So with streams. 
 So with the modifications of natural beauty seen thence 
 habitually sunrise, sunsetting, moonlight. In pecu 
 liar places these daily glories take peculiar effects, and 
 in that guise genius becomes accustomed to recognise 
 arid love them most. Who can buy this at auction ! 
 Who can weave this golden mesh in another tree 
 give the same voices to another stream the same sun 
 set to other hills? This fairy property, invisible as it 
 is, is acquired slowly. Habit, long association, the con 
 nexion with many precious thoughts (the more pre 
 cious the farther between), make it precious. To 
 sell such a spot for its wood and brick, is to value 
 Tom Moore for what he will weigh Daniel Webster 
 for his superficies. Then there ivill be a time (I trust 
 it is far off) when the property will treble even in sale 
 able value. The bee and the poet must be killed be 
 fore their honey is tasted. For how much more would 
 Abbotsford sell now than in the lifetime of Scott ?^ For 
 what could you buy Ferney Burns s cottage Shak- 
 spere s house at Stratford ? I have not the honor of 
 a personal acquaintance with Mrs. Sigourney, and 
 can not judge with what philosophy she may sustain 
 this reverse. But bear it well or ill, there can be no 
 doubt it falls heavily ; and it is one of those instances, 
 I think, where public feeling should be called on to 
 interpose. But in what shape ? I have always ad 
 mired the generosity and readiness with which actors 
 play for the benefit of a decayed " brother of the sock." 
 

 
 14 
 
 THE MIRROR LIBRARY. 
 
 Let American authors contribute to make up a volume, 
 and let the people of Hartford, who live in the light 
 of this bright spirit, head the subscription with ten 
 thousand copies. You live among literary people, 
 dear Doctor, and your "smile becomes you better than 
 any man s in all Phrygia." You can set it afloat if you 
 will. My name is among the W. s, but I will be 
 ready in my small turn. 
 
 " Now God b wi you, good Sir Topas !" for on this 
 sheet there is no more room, and I owe you but one. 
 Correspondence, like thistles, " is not blown away till 
 it hath got too high a top." Adieu. 
 
 LETTER VIII. 
 
 MY DEAR DOCTOR : What can keep you in town 
 during this insufferable hot solstice ? I can not fancy, 
 unless you shrink from a warm welcome in the coun 
 try. It is too hot for enthusiasm, and I have sent the 
 cart to the hay-field, and crept under the bridge in 
 my slippers, as if I had found a day to be idle, though 
 I promised myself to see the harvest home, without 
 missing sheaf or winrow. Yet it must be cooler here 
 than where you are, for I see accounts of drought on 
 the seaboard, while with us every hot noon has bred 
 its thunder-shower, and the corn on the dry hill-sides 
 is the only crop not kept back by the moisture. Still, 
 the waters are low, and the brook at my feet has de 
 pleted to a slender vein, scarce stouter than the pulse 
 that nutters under your thumb in the slightest wrist 
 in your practice. My lobster is missing probably 
 gone to " the springs." My swallowlets too, who 
 have, " as it were, eat paper and drunk ink," have 
 flitted since yesterday, like illiterate gipseys, leaving 
 no not* of their departure. " Who shall tell Priam 
 so, or Hecuba." The old swallows circle about as if 
 they expected them again. Heaven send they are not 
 in some crammed pocket in that red school-house, 
 unwilling listeners to the vexed alphabet, or, perhaps, 
 squeezed to death in the varlet s perplexity at crook 
 ed S. 
 
 I have blotted that last sentence like a school-boy, 
 but between the beginning and the end of it, I have 
 lent a neighbor my side-hill plough, besides answering, 
 by the way, rather an embarrassing question. My 
 catechiser lives above me on the drink (his name for 
 the river), and is one of those small farmers, common 
 here, who live without seeing money from one year s 
 end to the other. He never buys, he trades. He 
 takes a bag of wheat, or a fleece, to the village for salt 
 fish and molasses, pays his doctor in corn or honey, 
 and "changes work" with the blacksmith, the sad 
 dler, and the shoemaker. He is a shrewd man withal, 
 likes to talk, and speaks Yankee of the most Boeotian 
 fetch and purity. Imagine a disjointed-looking En- 
 celadus, in a homespun sunflower-colored coat, and 
 small yellow eyes, expressive of nothing but the merest 
 curiosity, looking down on me by throwing himself 
 over the railing like a beggar s wallet of broken meats. 
 
 " Good morning, Mr. Willis?/ !" 
 
 From hearing ray name first used in the possessive 
 case, probably (Willis s farm, or cow), he regularly 
 throws me in that last syllable. 
 
 "Ah ! good morning !" (Looking up at the inter 
 ruption, I made that unsightly blot which you have 
 just excused.) 
 
 " You aint got no side-hill plough?" 
 
 " Yes, I have, and I ll lend it to you with pleasure." 
 
 "Wai! you re darn d quick. I warnt a go n to 
 ask you quite yet. Writin to your folks at hum ?" 
 
 "No!" 
 
 " Making out a lease !" 
 
 "No!" 
 
 " How you do spin it off ! You haint always work d 
 on a farm, have ye ?" 
 
 It is a peculiarity (a redeeming peculiarity, I think), 
 of the Yankees, that though their questions are rude, 
 they are never surprised if you do not answer them. 
 I did not feel that the thermometer warranted me in 
 going into the history of my life to my overhanging 
 neighbor, and I busied myself in crossing my t s and 
 dotting my i s very industriously. He had a maggot 
 in his brain, however, and must e en be delivered of it. 
 He pulled off a splinter or two from under the bridge 
 with his long arms, and during the silence William 
 came to me with a message, which he achieved with 
 his English under-tone of respect. 
 
 " Had to lick that boy some, to make him so darn d 
 civil, hadn t ye ?" 
 
 " You have a son about his age, I think." 
 " Yes ; but I guess he couldn t be scared to talk 
 that way. What s the critter fear d on ?" 
 No answer. 
 
 " You haiut been a minister, have ye?" 
 " No !" 
 
 "Wai ! they talk a heap about your place. I say, 
 Mr. Willisy, you aint nothing particular, be ye?" 
 
 You should have seen, dear Doctor, the look of 
 eager and puzzled innocence with which this rather 
 difficult question was delivered. Something or other 
 had evidently stimulated my good neighbor s curiosi 
 ty, but whether I had been blown up in a steamboat, 
 or had fatted a prize pig, or what was my claim to the 
 digito monstrari, it was more than half his errand to 
 discover. I have put down our conversation, I be 
 lieve, with the accuracy of a short-hand writer. Now, 
 is not this a delicious world in which, out of a mu 
 seum neither stuffed nor muzzled, you may find such 
 an arcadian ? What a treasure he would be to those 
 ancient mariners of polite life, who exist but to tell 
 you of their little peculiarities ! 
 
 I have long thought, dear Doctor, and this reminds 
 me of it, that there were two necessities of society un 
 fitted with a vocation. (If you know of any middle- 
 aged gentlemen out of employment, I have no objec 
 tion to your reserving the suggestion for a private 
 charity, but otherwise, I would communicate it to the 
 world as a new light.) The first is a luxury which no 
 hotel should be without, no neighborhood, no thor- 
 j oughfare, no editor s closet. I mean a professed, 
 j salaried, stationary, and confidential listener. Fancy 
 the comfort of such a thing. There should be a well- 
 I dressed silent gentleman, for instance, pacing habitu- 
 | ally the long corridor of the Astor, with a single button 
 on his coat of the size of a door-handle. You enter 
 in a violent hurry, or with a mind tenanted to suit 
 yourself, and some faineant babbler, weary of his 
 emptiness, must needs take you aside, and rob you of 
 jtwo mortal hours, more or less, while lie tells you his 
 I tale of nothing. If " a penny saved is a penny got," 
 what a value it would add to life to be able to transfer 
 | this leech of precious time, by laying his hand polite- 
 jly on the large button of the listener! "Finish your 
 story to this gentleman !" quoth you. Then, again, 
 there is your unhappy man in hotels, newly arrived, 
 without an acquaintance save the crisp and abbrevia 
 ting bar-keeper, who wanders up and down, silent- 
 sick, and more solitary in the crowd about him than 
 the hermit on the lone column of the temple of Jupi 
 ter. What a mercy to such a sufferer to be able to 
 step to the bar, and order a listener. Or to send for 
 him with a bottle of wine when dining alone (most 
 particularly alone), at a table of two hundred ! Or to 
 ring for him in number four hundred and ninety-three, 
 of a rainy Sunday, with punch and cigars ! I am de 
 ceived in Stelston of the Astor, if he is not philoso 
 pher enough to see the value of this suggestion. 
 " Baths in the house, and a respectable listener if de 
 sired," would be an attractive advertisement, let me 
 promise you ! 
 
 The other vocation to which I referred, would be 
 

 LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 15 
 
 that of a sort of ambulant dictionary, used mostly at 
 evening parties. ]t should he a gentleman not dis 
 tinguishable from the common animated wall-flower, 
 except by some conventional sign, as a hit of blue rib 
 and in his button-hole. His qualifications should be- 
 to know all -persons moving in the circle, and some 
 thing about them to be up, in short, to th&,io.wn 
 ij;o-i.-<ip what Miss Thing s expectations are who 
 " my friend" is with the died mustache and which 
 of the stout ladies on the sola are the, forecast shad 
 ows of coming balls, or the like desirablenesses. There 
 are a thousand invisible cobwebs threaded through so 
 ciety, which the stranger is apt to cross a trovers 
 committing his enthusiasm, for instance, to the deaf 
 ears of a fiancee ; or, from ignorance, losing opportu 
 nities of knowing the clever, the witty, and the famous 
 all of whom look, at a first glance, very much like 
 other people. The gentleman with the blue riband, 
 you see, would remedy all this. You might make 
 for him after you bow to the lady of the house, and in 
 ten minutes put yourself au courantof the entire field. 
 You might apply to him (if you had been absent to 
 Santa Fe or the Pyramids) for the last new shibboleth, 
 the town rage, the name of the new play or poem, the 
 form and color of the freshest change in the kaleido 
 scope of society. It is not uncommon for sensible 
 yt people to retire, and "sweep and garnish" their self- 
 respect in a month s seclusion. It is some time before 
 they become au fait again of what it is necessary to 
 know of the follies of the lionr. The graceful yet 
 bitter wit, the unoffending yet pointed rally, the con 
 fidence which colors all defeats like successes, are del 
 icate weapons, the dexterity at which depends much 
 on familiarity with the ground. What an advent to 
 the diffident and the embarrassed would be such a 
 profession ! How many persons of wit and spirit 
 there are in society blank for lack of confidence, who, 
 with such a friend in the corner, would come out like 
 magic-ink to the fire ! " Ma hardiesse" (says the as 
 piring rocket), " vient de mon ardeur /" But the de 
 vice would lose its point did it take a jack-o -lantern 
 for a star. Mention these little hints to your cleverest 
 female friend, dear Doctor. It takes a woman to in 
 troduce an innovation. 
 
 Since I wrote to you, I have been adopted by per 
 haps the most abominable cur you will see in your 
 travels. I mention it to ward off the first impression 
 for a dog gives a character to a house ; and I would 
 not willingly have a friend light on such a monster in 
 my premises without some preparation. His first ap 
 parition was upon a small floss carpet at the foot of an 
 ottoman, the most luxurious spot in the house, of 
 which he had taken possession with a quiet impudence 
 that perfectly succeeded. A long, short-legged" cur, 
 of the color of spoiled mustard, with most base tail 
 and erect ears villanous in all his marks. Rather a 
 dandy gentleman, from New-York, was calling on us 
 when he was discovered, and presuming the dog to be 
 his, we forbore remark ; and, assured by this chance 
 indulgence, he stretched himself to sleep. The in 
 dignant outcry with which the gentleman disclaimed 
 all knowledge of him, disturbed his slumber; and, 
 not to leave us longer in doubt, he walked confidently 
 across the room, and seated himself between my feet 
 with a canine freedom I had never seen exhibited, ex 
 cept upon most familiar acquaintance. I saw clearly 
 that our visitor looked upon m?/ disclaimer as a " fetch." 
 It would have been perilling my credit for veracity to 
 deny the dog. So no more was said about him, and 
 since that hour he has kept himself cool in my shad 
 ow. I have tried to make him over to the kitchen, 
 but he will neither feed nor stay with them. I can 
 neither outrun him on horseback, nor lose him by 
 crossing ferries. Very much to the discredit of my 
 taste, I am now never seen without this abominable 
 follower and there is no help for it, unless I kill him, 
 
 which, since he loves me, would be worse than shoot 
 ing the albatross ; besides, I have at least a drachm 
 (three scruples) of Pythagoreanism in me, and " fear 
 to kill woodcock, lest I dispossess the soul of my 
 grandam." I shall look to the papers to see what 
 friend I have lost in Italy, or the East. I can think 
 of some who would come to me thus. 
 
 Adieu, dear Doctor. Send me a good name for my 
 cur for since he will have me, why I must needs be 
 his, and he shall be graced with an appellation. I 
 think his style of politics might be worth something 
 in love. If I were the lady, it would make a fair be 
 ginning. But I will waste no more ink upon you. 
 
 LETTER IX. 
 
 MY DEAR DOCTOR : As they say an oyster should 
 be pleased with his apotheosis in a certain sauce, I 
 was entertained with the cleverness of your letter 
 though you made minced-meat of my trout-fishing. 
 Under correction, however, I still cover the barb of my 
 " fly," and so I must do till I can hook my trout if he 
 but graze the bait with his whisker. You are an 
 alumnus of the gentle science, in which I am but a 
 neophyte, and your fine rules presuppose the dexteri 
 ty of a practised angler. Now a trout (I have ob 
 served in my small way) will jump once at your naked 
 fly ; but if he escape, he will have no more on t, un 
 less there is a cross of the dace in him. As it is a fish 
 that follows his nose, however, the smell of the worm 
 will bring him to the lure again, and if your awkward 
 ness give him time, he will stick to it till he has 
 cleaned the hook. Probatum est. 
 
 You may say this is unscientific, but, if I am to 
 breakfast from the contents of my creel, I must be 
 left with my worm and my ignorance. 
 
 Besides hang rules ! No two streams are alike 
 no two men (who are not fools) fish alike. Walton 
 and Wilson would find some new " wrinkle," if they 
 were to try these wild waters ; and, to generalize the 
 matter, I have, out of mathematics, a distrust of rules, 
 descriptions, manuals, etc., amounting to a phobia. 
 Experience was always new to me. I do not seem to 
 myself ever to have seen the Rome I once read of. 
 The Venice I know is not the Venice of story nor of 
 travellers books. There are two Londons in my 
 mind one where I saw whole shelves of my library 
 walking about in coats and petticoats, and another 
 where there was nothing visible through the fog but 
 fat men with tankards of porter one memory of it all 
 glittering with lighted rooms, bright and kind faces, 
 men all manly, and women all womanly, and another 
 memory (got from books) where every man was surly, 
 and dressed in a buff waistcoat, and every woman a 
 giantess, in riding-hat and boots. , . 
 
 It is delightful to think how i^&yy every thing is, 
 spite of description. Never believe, dear Doctor, that c-, 
 there is an old world. There is no such place, on 
 my honor ! You will find England, France, Italy, \ 
 and the East, after all you have read and heard, as 
 altogether new as if they were created by your eye, / 
 and were never sung, painted, nor be-written you/ 
 will indeed. Why to be sure what were the world 
 else? A pawnbroker s closet, where every traveller 
 had left his clothes for you to wear after him ! No ! 
 no! Thanks to Providence, all things are new ! Pen 
 and ink~can not take the gloss off your eyes, nor can 
 any man look through them as you do. I do not be 
 lieve the simplest matter sunshine or verdure has 
 exactly the same look to any two people in the world. 
 How much less a human face a landscape a broad 
 kingdom ? Travellers are very pleasant people. They 
 I tell you what picture was produced in their brain by 
 the things they saw ; but if they forestalled novelty by 
 
THE MIRROR LIBRARY. 
 
 
 
 that, I would as soon read them as beseech a thief to 
 steal my dinner. Hoio it looks to one pair of eyes ! 
 would be a good reminder pencilled on the margin of 
 many a volume. 
 
 -"I have run my ploughshare, in this furrow, upon a 
 root of philosophy, which has cured heart-aches for 
 me ere now. I struck upon it almost accidentally, 
 while administering consolation, years since, to a sen 
 sitive friend, whose muse had been consigned, alive 
 and kicking, to the tomb, by a blundering undertaker 
 of criticism. I read the review, and wrote on it. with 
 a pencil, " So thinks one man in fifteen millions ;" and, 
 to my surprise, up swore my dejected friend, like Mas 
 ter Barnardine, that he would " consent to die that 
 day, for no man s persuasion." Since that I have 
 made a practice of counting the enemy ; and trust me, 
 dear Doctor, it is sometimes worth while not to run 
 away without this little preliminary. A friend, for in 
 stance, with a most boding solemnity, takes you aside, 
 and pulls from his pocket a newspaper containing a 
 paragraph that is aimed at your book, your morals, 
 perhaps your looks and manners. You catch the 
 alarm from your friend s face, and fancy it is the voice 
 of public opinion, and your fate is fixed. Your book 
 is detestable, your character is gone. Your manners 
 and features are the object of universal disapprobation. 
 Stay ! count ilie enemy ! Was it decided by a conven 
 tion ? No ! By a caucus ? No ! By a vote on the 
 deck of a steamboat ? No ! By a group at the cor 
 ner of the street, by a club, by a dinner-party ? No ! 
 By whom then ? One small gentleman, sitting in a 
 dingy corner of a printing-office, who puts his quill 
 through your reputation as the entomologist slides a 
 pin through a beetle in the way of his vocation. No 
 particular malice to you. He wanted a specimen of 
 the genus poet, and you were the first caught. If j 
 there is no head to the pin (as there often is none), the 
 best way is to do as the beetle does pretend to be 
 killed till he forgets you, and then slip oft without a 
 buzz. 
 
 The only part of calumny that I ever found trouble 
 some was my friends insisting on my being unhappy 
 about it. I dare say you have read the story of the 
 German criminal, whose last request that his head 
 might be struck off while he stood engaged in conver 
 sation, was humanely granted by the provost. The 
 executioner was an adroit headsman, and watching his 
 opportunity, he crept behind his victim while he was 
 observing the flight of a bird, and sliced oft his bulb 
 without even decomposing his gaze. It was suggest 
 ed to the sufferer presently that he was decapitated, but 
 he thought not. Upon which one of his friends step 
 ped up, and begging he would take the pains to stir 
 himself a little, his head fell to the ground. If the 
 story be not true the moral is. In the many times I 
 have been put to death by criticism, I have never felt 
 incommoded, till some kind friend insisted upon it, 
 and now that I can stand on a potato-hill in a circle 
 of twice the diameter of a rifleshot, and warn off all 
 trespassers, I intend to defy sympathy, and carry my 
 top as long as it will stay on behead me as often as 
 you like, beyond my periphery. 
 Still, though 
 
 " The eagle suffers little birds to sing, 
 
 And is not careful what they mean thereby," 
 
 it is very pleasant now and then to pounce upon a big- j 
 ger bird screaming in the same chorus. Nothing im- | 
 pairs the dignity of an author s reputation like a news 
 paper wrangle, yet one bold literary vulture struck 
 down promptly and successfully serves as good a pur- ! 
 pose as the hawk nailed to the barn door. But I do | 
 not live in the country to be pestered with resentments. 
 o not well know how the thoughts of them came 
 under the bridge. I ll have a fence that shall keep 
 
 out such stray cattle, or there are no posts and rails in 
 philosophy. 
 
 There is a little mental phenomenon, dear Doctor, 
 which has happened to me of late so frequently, that 
 I must ask you if you are subject to it, in the hope 
 that your singular talent for analysis will give me the 
 "pourquoy." I mean a suddeii noyjnty in the impres 
 sion of very familiar objects, enjoyments, etc. For 
 example, did it ever strike you all at once that a tree 
 was a very magnificent production? After looking at 
 lakes and rivers for thirty years (more or less), have 
 you ever, some fine morning, caught sight of a very 
 familiar stream, and found yourself impressed with its 
 new and singular beauty ? I do not know that the mir 
 acle extends to human faces, at least in the same de 
 gree. I am sure that my old coat is not rejuvenes 
 cent. But it is true that from possessing the nil 
 admirari becoming to a "picked man of countries" 
 (acquired with some pains, I may say), I now catch 
 myself smiling with pleasure to think the river will not 
 all run by, that there will be another sunset to-mor 
 row, that my grain will ripen and nod when it is ripe, 
 and such like every-day marvels. Have we scales 
 that drop off our eyes at a " certain age ?" Do our 
 senses renew as well as our bodies, only more ca 
 priciously? Have we a chrysalis state, here below, 
 like that parvenu gentleman, the butterfly ? Still 
 more interesting query does this delicious novelty 
 attach, later in life, or ever, to objects of affection- 
 compensating for the ravages in the form, the dulness 
 of the senses, loss of grace, temper, and all outward 
 loveliness ? I should like to get you over a flagon of 
 tokay on that subject. 
 
 There is a curious fact, I have learned for the first 
 time in this wild country, and it may be new to you, 
 that as the forest is cleared, new springs rise to the 
 surface of the ground, as if at the touch of the sun 
 shine. The settler knows that water as well as herb 
 age will start to the light, and as his axe lets it in up 
 on the black bosom of the wilderness, his cattle find 
 both pasture and drink, where, before, there had never 
 been either well-head or verdure. You have yourself 
 been, in your day, dear Doctor, " a warped slip of 
 wilderness," and will see at once that there lies in this 
 ordinance of nature a beautiful analogy to certain mor- . 
 al changes that come in upon the heels of more cul 
 tivated and thoughtful manhood. Of the springs that 
 start up in the footsteps of thought and culture, the 
 sources are like those of forest springs, unsuspect 
 ed till they flow. There is no divining-rod, whose 
 dip shall tell us at twenty what we shall most relish at 
 thirty. We do not think that with experience we shall 
 have grown simple, that things we slight and overlook 
 will have become marvels, that our advancement in 
 worth will owe more to the cutting away of overgrowth 
 in tastes than to their acquisition or nurture. 
 
 I should have thought this change in myself scarce 
 worth so much blotting of good paper, but for its bear 
 ing on a question that has hitherto given me no little 
 anxiety. The rivers flow on to the sea, increasing in 
 strength and glory to the last, but we have our pride 
 and fulness in youth, and dwindle and fall away tow 
 ard the grave. How I was to grow dull to the ambi 
 tions and excitements which constituted my whole ex 
 istence be content to lag and fall behind and forego 
 emulation in all possible pursuits in short, how I 
 was to grow old contentedly and gracefully, has been 
 to me a somewhat painful puzzle. With what should 
 I be pleased ? How should I fill the vacant halls 
 from which had fled merriment and fancy, and hope, 
 and desire ? 
 
 You can scarce understand, dear Doctor, with what 
 pleasure I find this new spring in my path the con 
 tent with which I admit the conviction, that without 
 effort or self-denial, the mind may slake its thirst, and 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 17 
 
 the heart be satisfied with but the waste of what lies 
 so near us. 1 have all my life seen men grow old, 
 tranquilly and content, but I did not think it possible 
 that /should. I took pleasure only in that which re 
 quired young blood to follow, and I felt that to look 
 backward for enjoyment, would be at best but a diffi 
 cult resignation. 
 
 Now let it be no prejudice to the sincerity of my 
 philosophy, if, as a corollary, I beg you to take a farm 
 on the Susqueh;imi:ih, and let us grow old in com 
 pany. I should think Fate kinder than she passes for, 
 if I could draw you, and one or two others whom we 
 know and " love with knowledge," to cluster about 
 this certainly one of the loveliest spots in nature, and, 
 while the river glides by unchangingly, shape our 
 selves to our changes with a helping sympathy. 
 Think of it, dear Doctor! Meantime I employ my 
 self in my rides, selecting situations on the river banks 
 which 1 think would be to yours and our friends 
 liking ; and in the autumn, when it is time to trans 
 plant, I intend to suggest to the owners where trees 
 might be wanted in case they ever sold, so that you 
 will not lose even a season in your shrubbery, though 
 you delay your decision. Why should we not renew 
 Arcady ? God bless you. 
 
 LETTER X. 
 
 You may congratulate me on the safe getting in of 
 my harvest, dear Doctor ; for I have escaped, as you 
 may say, in a parenthesis. Two of the most destruc 
 tive hail-storms remembered in this part of the country 
 have prostrated the crops of my neighbors, above and 
 below leaving not a blade of corn, nor an unbroken 
 window ; yet there goes my last load of grain into the 
 barn, well-ripened, and cut standing and fair. 
 
 " Some bright little cherub, that sits up aloft, 
 Keeps watch for the soul of poor Peter." 
 
 I confess I should have fretted at the loss of my 
 firstlings more than for a much greater disaster in an 
 other shape. I have expended curiosity, watching, and 
 fresh interest, upon my uplands, besides plaster and my 
 own labor ; and the getting back five hundred bushels 
 for five or ten, has been to me, through all its beauti 
 ful changes from April till now, a wonder to be en 
 joyed like a play. To have lost the denouement by a 
 hail-storm, would be like a play with the fifth act 
 omitted, or a novel with the last leaf torn out. Now, if 
 no stray spark set fire to my barn, I can pick you out the 
 whitest of a thousand sheaves, thrash them with the 
 first frost, and send you a barrel of Glenmary flour, 
 which shall be, not only very excellent bread, but 
 should have also a flavor of wonder, admiration all 
 the feelings, in short, with which I have watched it, 
 from seed-time to harvest. Yet there is many a dull 
 dog will eat of it, and remark no taste of me ! And so 
 there are men who will read a friend s book as if it 
 were a stranger s but we are not of those. If we 
 love the man, whether we eat a potato of his raising, 
 or read a verse of his inditing, there is in it a sweet 
 ness which has descended from his heart by quill or 
 hoe-handle. I scorn impartiality. If it be a virtue, 
 Death and Posterity may monopolize it for me. 
 
 I was interrupted a moment since by a neighbor, 
 who, though innocent of reading and writing, has a 
 coinage of phraseology, which would have told in 
 authorship. A stray mare had broken into his peas, 
 and he came to me to write an advertisement for the 
 court-house door. After requesting the owner " to 
 pay charges and take her away," in good round char 
 acters, I recommended to my friend, who was a good 
 9 
 
 deal vexed at the trespass, to take a day s work out 
 of her. 
 
 " Why, I haint no job on the mounting," said he, 
 folding up the paper very carefully. " It s a side- 
 hill critter! Two off legs so lame, she can t stand 
 even." 
 
 It was certainly a new idea, that a horse with two 
 spavins on a side, might be used with advantage on a 
 hill-farm. While I was jotting it down for your bene 
 fit, my neighbor had emerged from under the bridge, 
 and was climbing the railing over my head. 
 
 "What will you do if he won t pay damages?" 1 
 cried out. 
 
 " Put the types on to him . " he answered : and, 
 jumping into the road, strided away to post up his ad 
 vertisement. 
 
 I presume, that "to put the types on to" a man, is 
 to send the constable to him with a printed warrant ; 
 but it is a good phrase. 
 
 The hot weather of the last week has nearly dried 
 up the brook, and, forgetting to water my young trees 
 in the hurry of harvesting, a few of them have hung 
 out the quarantine yellow at the top, and, I fear, will 
 scarce stand it till autumn. Not to have all my hopes 
 in one venture, and that a frail one, I have set about 
 converting a magnificent piece of wild jungle into an 
 academical grove an occupation that makes one feel 
 more like a viceroy than a farmer. Let me interest 
 you in this metempsychosis; for, if we are to grow 
 old together, as I proposed to you in my last, this 
 grove will lend its shade to many a slippered noontide, 
 and echo, we will hope, the philosophy of an old age, 
 wise and cheerful. Aptly for my design, the shape of 
 the grove is that of the Greek SI the river very nearly 
 encircling it ; and here, if I live, will I pass the Omega 
 of my life ; and, if you will come to the christening, 
 dear Doctor, so shall the grove be named, in solemn 
 ceremony The Omega, 
 
 How this nobly-wooded and water-clasped little pen 
 insula has been suffered to run to waste, I know not. 
 It contains some half-score acres of rich interval ; and, 
 to the neglect of previous occupants of the farm, I prob 
 ably owe its gigantic trees, as well as its weedy under 
 growth, and tangled vines. Time out of mind (five 
 years, in this country) it has been a harbor for wood 
 cocks, wood-ducks, minks, wild bees, humming birds, 
 and cranes (two of the latter still keeping possession) 
 and its labyrinth of tall weeds, interlaced with the 
 low branches of the trees, was seldom penetrated, ex 
 cept once or twice a year by the sportsman, and as 
 often by the Owaga in its freshet. Scarce suspecting 
 the size of the trees within, whose trunks were entirely 
 concealed, I have looked upon its towering mass of 
 verdure but as a superb emerald wall, shutting the 
 meadows in on the east and, though within a lance- 
 shot of my cottage, have neglected it, like my prede 
 cessors, for more manageable ground. 
 
 I have enjoyed very much the planting of young 
 wood, and the anticipation of its shade and splendor in 
 Heaven s slow, but good time. It was a pleasure of 
 Hope; and, to men of leisure and sylvan taste in Eng 
 land, it has been literature bears witness a pursuit 
 full of dignity and happiness. But the redemption of 
 a venerable grove from the wilderness, is an enjoyment 
 of another measure. It is a kind of playing of King 
 Lear backward discovering the old monarch in his 
 abandonment, and sweeping off his unnatural offspring, 
 to bring back the sunshine to his old age, and give him 
 room, with his knights, in his own domain. You 
 know how trees that grow wild near water, in this 
 country, put out foliage upon the trunk as well as the 
 branches, covering it, like ivy, to the roots. It is a 
 beautiful caprice of Nature ; but the grandeur of the 
 dark and massive stem is entirely lost and I have 
 been as much surprised at the giant bodies we have 
 I developed, stripping off this unfitting drapery, as 
 
18 
 
 THE MIRROR LIBRARY. 
 
 Richard at the thewes and sinews of the uncovvled 
 friar of Copmanhurst. 
 
 You can not fancy, if you have never exercised this 
 grave authority, how many difficulties of judgment 
 arise, and how often a jury is wanted to share the re 
 sponsibility of the irretrievable axe. I am slow to 
 condemn ; and the death-blow to a living tree, how 
 ever necessary, makes my blood start, and my judg 
 ment half repent. There are, to-day, several under 
 reprieve one of them a beautiful linden, which I can 
 see from my seat under the bridge, nodding just now 
 to the wind, as careless of its doom as if it were sure 
 its bright foliage would flaunt out the summer. In 
 itself it is well worth the sparing and cherishing, for it 
 is full of life and youth and, could I transplant it to j 
 another spot, it would be invaluable. But, though 
 full grown and spreading, it stands among giants, 
 whose branches meet above it at twice its height ; and, j 
 while it contributes nothing to the shade, its smaller 
 trunk looks a Lilliputian in Brobdignag, out of keep 
 ing and proportion. So I think it must come down 
 and, with it, a dozen in the same category condemned, , 
 like many a wight who was well enough in his place, j 
 for being found in too good company. 
 
 There is a superstition about the linden, by the 
 way, to which the peculiarity in its foliage may easily 
 have given rise. You may have remarked, of course, 
 that from the centre of the leaf starts a slender stem, 
 which bears the linden-flower. Our Savior is said, 
 by those who believe in the superstition, to have been 
 crucified upon this tree, which has ever since borne 
 the flowering type of the nails driven into it through j 
 his palms. 
 
 Another, whose doom is suspended, is a ragged ! 
 sycamore, whose decayed branches are festooned to 
 the highest top by a wild grape-vine, of the most su 
 perb fruitfulness and luxuriance. No wife ever pleaded j 
 for a condemned husband with more eloquence than j 
 these delicate tendrils to me, for the rude tree with 
 whose destiny they are united. I wish you were here, I 
 dear Doctor, to say spare it, or cut it down. In itself, j 
 like the linden, it is a splendid creature ; but, alas ! it i 
 spoils a long avenue of stately trees opening toward my ! 
 cottage porch, and I fear policy must outweigh pity. 
 I shall let it stand over Sunday, and fortify myself 
 with an opinion. 
 
 Did you ever try your hand, dear Doctor, at this 
 forest-sculpture? It sounds easy enough to trim out; 
 a wood, and so it is, if the object be merely to produce I 
 butter-nuts, or shade-grazing cattle. But to thin, and I 
 trim, and cut down, judiciously, changing a "wild and j 
 warped slip of wilderness" into a chaste and studious I 
 grove, is not done without much study of the spot, let 
 alone a taste for the sylvan. There are all the many 
 effects of the day s light to be observed, how morning 
 throws her shadows, and what protection there is from 
 noon, and where is flung open an aisle to let in the 
 welcome radiance of sunset. There is a view of 
 water to be let through, perhaps, at the expense of 
 trees otherwise ornamental, or an object to hide by 
 shrubbery which is in the way of an avenue. I have 
 lived here as long as this year s grasshoppers, and am 
 constantly finding out something which should have a 
 bearing on the disposition of grounds or the sculpture 
 (permit me the word) of my wood and forest. I am 
 sorry to finish " the Omega" without your counsel 
 and taste ; but there is a wood on the hill which I will 
 keep, like a cold pie, till you come to us, and we will 
 shoulder our axes and carve it into likelihood together. 
 
 And now here comes my Yankee axe (not curtal) 
 which I sent to be ground when I sat down to scrawl 
 you this epistle. As you owe the letter purely to its 
 dulness (and mine), I must away to a half-felled tree, 
 which I deserted in its extremity. If there were truth 
 in Ovid, what a butcher I were ! Yet there is a groan 
 when a tree falls, which sometimes seems to me more 
 
 than the sundering of splinters. Adieu, dear Doctor, 
 and believe that 
 
 " Whate er the ocean pales or sky inclips 
 Is thine," 
 
 if I can give it you by wishing. 
 
 LETTER XI. 
 
 THE box of Rhenish is no substitute for yourself, 
 dear Doctor, but it was most welcome partly, per 
 haps, for the qualities it has in common with the gen 
 tleman who should have come in the place of it. The 
 one bottle that has fulfilled its destiny, was worthy to 
 have been sunned on the Rhine and drank on the Sus- 
 quehannah, and I will never believe that anything can 
 come from you that will not improve upon acquaint 
 ance. So I shall treasure the remainder for bright 
 hours. I should have thought it superior even to the 
 Tokay I tasted at Vienna, if other experiments had not 
 apprized me that country life sharpens the universal 
 relish. I think that even the delicacy of the palate is 
 affected by the confused sensations, the turmoil, the 
 vexations of life in town. You will say you have your 
 quiet chambers, where you are as little disturbed by 
 the people around you as I by my grazing herds. But, 
 by your leave, dear Doctor, the fountains of thought 
 (upon which the senses are not a little dependant) will 
 not clear and settle over-night like a well. No nor 
 in a day, nor in two. You must live in the country 
 to possess your bodily sensations as well as your mind, 
 in tranquil control. It is only when you have forgot 
 ten streets and rumors and greetings forgotten the 
 whip of punctuality, and the hours of forced pleasures 
 only when you have cleansed your ears of the din 
 of trades, the shuffle of feet, the racket of wheels, and 
 coarse voices only when your own voice, accustomed 
 to contend against discords, falls, through the fragrant 
 air of the country, into its natural modulations, in har 
 mony with the low key upon which runs all the music 
 of nature only when that part of the world which par 
 took not of the fall of Adam, has had time to affect 
 you with its tranquillity only then that the dregs of 
 life sink out of sight, and while the soul sees through 
 its depths, like the sun through untroubled water, the 
 senses lose their fever and false energy, and play their 
 part, and no more, in the day s expenditure of time 
 and pulsation. 
 
 " Still harping on my daughter," you will say ; and 
 I will allow that I can scarce write a letter to you with 
 out shaping it to the end of attracting you to the Sus- 
 qnehannah. At least watch when you begin to grow 
 old, and transplant yourself in time to take root, and 
 then we may do as the trees do defy the weather till 
 we are separated. The oak, itself, if it has grown up 
 with its kindred thick about it, will break if left stand 
 ing alone: and you and I, dear Doctor, have known the 
 luxury of friends too well to bear the loneliness of an 
 unsyrnpathizing old age. Friends are not pebbles, 
 lying in every path, but pearls gathered with pain, and 
 rare as they are precious. We spend our youth and 
 manhood in the search and proof of them, and when 
 Death has taken his toll we have too few to scatter 
 none to throw away. I, for one, will be a miser of mine. 
 I feel the avarice of friendship growing on me with 
 every year tightening my hold and extending my 
 grasp. Who at sixty is rich in friends ? The richest 
 are those who have drawn this wealth of angels around 
 them, and spent care and thought on the treasuring. 
 Come, my dear Doctor ! I have chosen a spot on 
 one of the loveliest of our bright rivers. Here is all 
 that goes to make an Arcadia, except the friendly 
 dwellers in its shade. I will choose your hill-side, 
 and plant your grove, that the trees at least shall lose 
 no time by your delay. Set a limit to your ambition, 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 19 
 
 achieve it, and como away. It is terrible to grow old 
 amid the jostle and disrespectful hurry of a crowd. 
 The academy of the philosophers was out of Athens. 
 You can not fancy Socrates run against, in the mar 
 ket-place. Respect, which grows wild in the fields, 
 requires watching and management in cities. Let us 
 have an old man s Arcady where we can slide our 
 "slippered shoon" through groves of our own con 
 secrating, ami talk of the world as without ourselves 
 and gay philosophy within. 1 have strings pulling 
 upon one or two in other lands, who, like our 
 selves, are not men to let Content walk unrecognised 
 in their path. Slowly, but, I think, surely, they are 
 drawing thitherward ; and I have chosen places for 
 their hearthstones, too, and shall watch, as [ do for 
 you, that the woodman s axe cuts down no tree that 
 would be regretted, If the cords draw well, and 
 Death take but his tithe, my shady "Omega" will 
 soon learn voices to which its echo will for long years 
 be familiar, and the Owaga and Susquehannah will; 
 join waters within sight of an old man s Utopia. 
 
 " My sentiments better expressed" have come in j 
 the poet s corner of the Albion to-day a paper, by | 
 the way, remarkable for its good selection of poetry. ! 
 You w"ill allow that these two verses, which are the 
 Hosing ones of a piece called "The men of old," are 
 above the common run of newspaper/Motives : 
 
 " A man s best things are nearest him, 
 
 Lie close about his feet ; 
 It is the distant and the dim 
 
 That we are sick to greet : 
 For flowers that grow our hands beneath 
 
 We struggle and aspire, 
 Our hearts must die except we breathe 
 
 The air of fresh desire. 
 " But, brothers, who up reason s hill 
 
 Advance with hopeful cheer, 
 O loiter not ! those heights are chill, 
 
 As chill as they arc clear. 
 And still restrain your haughty gaze 
 
 The loftier that ye go, 
 Remembering distance leaves a haze 
 
 On all that lies below." 
 
 The man who wrote that, is hereby presented with the 
 freedom of the Omega. 
 
 The first of September, and a frost ! The farmers 
 from the hills are mourning over their buckwheat, 
 but the river-mist saves all which lay low enough for 
 its whito wreath to cover ; and mine, though sown on 
 the hill-side, is at mist-mark, and so escaped. Nature 
 seems to intend that I shall take kindly to farming, and 
 has spared my first crop even the usual calamities. I 
 have lost but an acre of com, I think, and that by the 
 crows, who are privileged marauders, welcome at 
 least to build in the Omega, and take their tithe with 
 out rent-day or molestation. I like their noise, though 
 discordant. It is the minor in the anthem of nature 
 making the gay song of the blackbird, and the merry 
 chirp of the robin and oriel, more gay and cheerier. 
 Then there is a sentiment about the raven family, and 
 for Shakspere s lines and his dear sake, I love them, 
 
 " Some say the ravens foster forlorn children 
 The while their own birds famish in their nests." 
 
 The very name of a good deed shall protect them. 
 Who shall say that poetry is a vain art, or that 
 poets are irresponsible for the moral of their verse ! 
 For Burns s sake, not ten days since, I beat off my dog 
 from the nest of a field-mouse, and forbade the mow 
 ers to cut the grass over her. She has had a poet for 
 her friend, and her thatched roof is sacred. I should 
 not like to hang about the neck of my soul all the evil 
 that, by the last day, shall have had its seed in Byron s 
 poem of the Corsair. It is truer of poetry than of 
 most other matters, that 
 
 " More water glideth by the mill 
 Than wots the miller of." 
 
 But I am slipping into a sermon. 
 
 Speaking of music, some one said here the other 
 day, that the mingled hum of the sounds of nature, 
 and the distant murmur of a city, produce, invariably, 
 the note F in music. The voices of all tune, the 
 blacksmith s anvil and the wandering organ, the church 
 bells and the dustman s, the choir and the cart-wheel, 
 the widow s cry, and the bride s laugh, the prisoner s 
 clanking chain and the schoolboy s noise at play at 
 the height of the church steeple are one ! It is all 
 " K" two hundred feet iu air! The swallow can out- 
 soar both our joys and miseries, and the lark what 
 are they in his chamber of the sun ! If you have any 
 iinhappiness at the moment of receiving this letter, 
 dear Doctor, try this bit of philosophy. It s all F 
 where the bird flies ! You have no wings to get there, 
 you say, but your mind has more than the six of the 
 cherubim, and in your mind lies the grief you would 
 be rid of. As Ca,-sar says, 
 
 " By all the gods the Romans bow before, 
 I here discard my sickness." 
 
 I ll be above F, and let troubles hang below. What 
 a twopenny matter it makes of all our cares aud vexa 
 tions. I ll find a boy to climb to the top of a tall pine 
 I have, aud tie me up a white flag, which shall be 
 above high-sorrow mark henceforth. I will neither be 
 elated or grieved without looking at it. It floats at 
 F," where it is all one ! Why, it will be a castle in 
 the air, indeed impregnable to unrest. Why not, 
 dear Doctor ! Why should we not set up a reminder, 
 that our sorrows are only so deep that the lees are 
 but at the bottom, and there is good wine at the top 
 that there is an atmosphere but a little above us where 
 our sorrows melt into our joys! No man need be un 
 happy who can see a grasshopper on a church vane. 
 
 It is surprising how mere a matter of animal spirits 
 is the generation of many of our bluest devils ; and it 
 is more surprising that we have neither the memory to 
 recall the trifles that have put them to the flight, nor 
 the resolution to combat their approach. A man 
 will be ready to hang himself in the morning for an 
 annoyance that he has the best reason to know would 
 scarce give him a thought at night. Even a dinner is a 
 doughty devil-queller. How true is the apology of 
 Menenius when Coriolanus had repelled his friend ! 
 
 " He had not dined. 
 
 The veins unfilled, our blood is cold, and then 
 We pout upon the morning : are unapt 
 To give or to forgive ; but when we nave stufTd 
 These pipes, and these conveyances of our blood, 
 With wine and feeding, we have suppler souls 
 Than in our priest-like fasts. Therefore I ll watch him 
 Till he be dieted to my request.". 
 
 I have recovered my spirits ere now by a friend ask 
 ing me what was the matter. One seems to want but 
 the suggestion, the presence of mind, the expressed 
 wish, to be happy any day. My white flag shall serve 
 me that good end! "Tut, man!" it shall say, "your 
 grief is not grief where I am ! Send your imagination 
 this high to be whitewashed !" 
 
 Our weather to-day is a leaf out of October s book, 
 soft, yet invigorating. The harvest moon seems to 
 have forgotten her mantle last night, for there lies on 
 the landscape a haze, that to be so delicate, should be 
 born of moonlight. The boys report plenty of deer- 
 tracks in the woods close by us, and the neighbors tell 
 me they browse in troops on my buckwheat by the 
 light of the moon, Let them ! I have neither trap 
 nor gun on my premises, and Shakspere shall be their 
 sentinel too. At least, no Robin or Diggory shall 
 shoot them without complaint of damage ; though if 
 you were here, dear Doctor, I should most likely bor 
 row a gun, and lie down with you in the buckwheat to 
 see you bring down the fattest. And so do our par 
 tialities modify our benevolence. I fear I should com 
 pound for a visit by the slaughter of the whole herd. 
 Perhaps you will come to shoot deer, aod with that 
 pleasant hope I will close my letter. 
 
20 
 
 THE MIRROR LIBRARY. 
 
 LETTER XII. 
 
 I HAVE nearly had by breath taken away this morn 
 ing, dear Doctor, by a grave assurance from a rail 
 road commissioner, that five years hence I shoul 
 "devour the way" between this and New York i 
 seven hours. Close on the heels of this gentlema 
 came an engineer of the canal, who promised me a 
 trippingly, that in three years I should run in a packet 
 boat from my cottage to tide-water. This was in 
 tended, in both cases, I presume, to be very pleasan 
 intelligence. With a little time, I dare say, I shal 
 come to think it so. But I assure you at present 
 that, of all dwellers upon the canal route, myself, am 
 the toads disentombed by the blasting of the rocks, are 
 perhaps, the most unpleasantly surprised they, poo 
 hermits, fancying themselves safe from the troubles ol 
 existence till dooms-day, and I as sure that my cot 
 tage was at a safe remove from the turmoil of citi 
 propinquity. 
 
 If I am compelled to choose a hearthstone again 
 (God knows whether Broadway will not reach bodilj 
 to this), I will employ an engineer to find me a spot 
 if indeed there be one, which has nothing behind it o 
 about it, or in its range, which could by any chanci 
 make it a thoroughfare. There is a charm to me ir 
 an zn-navigable river, which brought me to the Sus 
 quehannah. I like the city sometimes, and I bles 
 Heaven for steamboats ; but I love haunts where . 
 neither see a steamboat nor expect the city. What is 
 the Hudson but a great highroad ? You may have 
 your cottage, it is true, and live by the water-side in 
 the shade, and be a hundred miles, more or less, from 
 the city. But every half hour comes twanging through 
 your trees, the clang of an untuneable bell informing 
 you, whether you will or no, that seven hundred cits 
 are seething past your solitude. You must be an ab 
 stracted student indeed if you do not look after the 
 noisy intruder till she is lost to the eye. Then follow 
 conjectures what news may be on board, what friends 
 may be passing unknown, what celebrities or oddities, 
 or wonders of beauty, may be mingling in the throng 
 upon her decks ; and by the time you remember again 
 that you are in the country, there sounds another bell, 
 and another discordant whiz, and so your mind is 
 plucked away to city thoughts and associations, while 
 your body sits alone and discontented amid the trees. 
 Now, for one, I like not this divorce. If I am to be 
 happy, my imagination must keep my body company 
 and both must be in the country, or both in town 
 With all honor to Milton, who avers 
 
 " The mind is its own place, and in itself 
 Can make a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell, 
 
 my mind to make a heaven, requires the society of its 
 material half. Though my pores take in a palpable 
 pleasure from the soft air of morning, my imagination 
 feeds twice as bountifully, foraging amid the sunshine 
 and verdure with my two proper eyes ; and in turn my 
 fancy feeds more steadily when I breathe and feel what 
 she is abroad in. Ask the traveller which were his 
 unhappiest hours under foreign skies. If he is of my 
 mind, he will say, they were those in which his 
 thoughts (by letters or chance news) were driven irre 
 sistibly home, leaving his eyes blind and his ears deaf 
 in the desert or the strange city. There are persons, 
 I know, who make a pleasure of revery, and, walking 
 on the pavement, will be dreaming of fields, and in the 
 fields think only of the distractions of town. But 
 with me, absent thoughts, unless to be rid of disagree 
 able circumstances, are a disease. When in health, I 
 am all together, what there is of me soul and body, 
 head and heart and a steamboat that should daily cut 
 the line of my horizon with human interest enough on 
 board to take my thoughts with her when she disap 
 peared, would, to my thinking, be a daily calamity. I 
 
 thank God that the deep shades of the Omega lie be 
 tween my cottage and the track of both canal and rail 
 road. I live in the lap of a semicircle of hills, and the 
 diameter, I am pleased to know, is shorter than the 
 curve. There is a green and wholesome half mile, 
 thickly wooded, and mine own to keep so, between my 
 threshold and the surveyor s line, and like the laird s 
 Jock, I shall be " aye sticking in a tree." 
 
 Do not think, dear Doctor, that I am insensible to 
 the grandeur of the great project to connect Lake Erie 
 with the Hudson by railroad, or that I do not feel a 
 becoming interest in my country s prosperity. I would 
 fain have a farm where my cattle and I can ruminate 
 without fear of falling asleep on a rail-track, or slip 
 ping into a canal ; but there is an imaginative and a 
 bright side to these improvements, which I look on as 
 often as on the other. What should prevent steam- 
 posting, for example not in confined and cramped 
 carriages, suited to the strength of a pair of horses, but 
 in airy and commodious apartments, furnished like a 
 bachelor s lodgings, with bed, kitchen, and servants ? 
 What should prevent the transfer of such a structure 
 from railroad to canal-boat as occasion required ? In 
 five years probably, there will pass through this village 
 a railroad and a canal, by which, together, we shall 
 have an unbroken chain of canal and railroad commu 
 nication with most of the principal seaboard cities of 
 this country, and with half the towns and objects of 
 curiosity in the west and north. 
 
 I build a tenement on wheels, considerably longer 
 than the accommodations of single gentlemen at ho 
 tels, with a small kitchen, and such a cook as pleases 
 the genius of republics. The vehicle shall be fur 
 nished, we will say, with tangent moveable rails, or 
 some other convenience for wheeling off the track 
 whenever there is occasion to stop or loiter. As I 
 said before, it should be arranged also for transfer to a 
 boat. In either case there shall be post-horses, as 
 upon the English roads, ready to be put to at a mo 
 ment s warning, and capable, upon the railroad at 
 least, of a sufficient rate of speed. What could be 
 more delightful or more easy than to furnish this am 
 bulatory cottage with light furniture from your sta 
 tionary home, cram it with books, and such little re 
 finements as you most miss abroad, and, purchasing 
 provisions by the way, travel under your awn roof from 
 one end of the country to the other ? Imagine me 
 sending you word, some fine morning, from Jersey 
 city, to come over and breakfast with me at my cot 
 tage, just arrived by railroad from the country ? Or 
 going to the Springs with a house ready furnished ? 
 Or inviting you to accept of my hospitality during a 
 trip to Baltimore, or Cincinnati, or Montreal ! The 
 English have anticipated this luxury in their expensive 
 private yachts, with which they traverse the Levant, 
 and drink wine from their own cellars at Joppa and 
 Trebizond ; but what is that to travelling the same 
 distance on land, without storms or sea-sickness, with 
 the choice of companions every hour, and at a hun 
 dredth part of the cost? The snail has been before 
 us in the invention. 
 
 I presume, dear Doctor, that even you would be 
 obliged to fish around considerably to find Owego on 
 he map ; yet the people here expect in a year or 
 wo to sit at their windows, and see all the fashion 
 and curiosity, as well as the dignity and business of 
 he world go by. This little village, to which pros 
 perity 
 
 " Is as the osprey to the fish, who takes it 
 By sovereignty of nature," 
 
 ies at the joint of a great cross of northern and west 
 ern travel. The Erie railroad will intersect here the 
 canal which follows the Susquehannah to the Che- 
 lango, and you may as well come to Glenmary if you 
 vish to see your friend, the General, on his annual 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 21 
 
 trip to the Springs. Think what a superb route it 
 will be for southern travellers. Instead of being fil 
 tered through all the seaboard cities, at great cost 
 of money and temper, they will strike the Susquehan- 
 nah at Columbia, and follow its delicious windings past 
 Wyoming to Owega, where, turning west, they may 
 steam up the smalf lakes to Niagara, or keeping on the 
 Chenango, track that exquisite river by canal to the 
 Mohawk, and so on to the Springs all the way by the 
 most lovely river-courses in the world. Pure air, 
 new scenery, and a near and complete escape from the 
 cities in the hot months, will be (the O-egoists think) 
 inducements enough to bring the southern cities, rank 
 and file in annual review before us. The canal-boat, 
 of course will be " the genteel thing" among the arri 
 vals in this metropolis. Pleasure north and south, 
 business east and west. We shall take our fashions 
 from New Orleans, and I do not despair of seeing a 
 cafe on the Susquehannah, with a French dame de 
 comptoir, marble tables, and the Picayune newspaper. 
 If my project of travelling cottages should succeed, i 
 shall offer the skirt of my Omega to such of my New 
 Orleans friends as would like to pasture a cow during 
 the summer, and when they and the orioles migrate m 
 the autumn, why, we will up cottage and be off to the 
 south too freeze who likes in Tioga. 
 
 1 wish my young trees liked this air of Italy as well 
 as I. This ten days sunshine has pinched their thirsty 
 tops, and it looks like mid-autumn from my seat under 
 the bridge. No water, save a tricklet in the early morn 
 ing. But such weather for pick-nick-ing ! The buck 
 wheat is sun-dried, and will yield but half a crop. The 
 deer come down to the spring-heads, and the snakes 
 creep to the river. Jenny toils at the deep-down well- 
 bucket, and the minister prays for rain. I love the sun, 
 and pray for no advent but yours. 
 
 You have never seen, I dare be certain, a vol me 
 of poems called " Mundi et Cordis Carmina," by 
 Thomas Wade. It is one of those volumes killed, 
 like my trees, in the general drought of poesy, but 
 there is stuff in it worth the fair type on which it is 
 printed, though Mr. Wade takes small pains to shape 
 his verse to the common comprehension. I mention 
 him now, because, in looking over his volume, I find 
 he has been before me in particularizing the place 
 where a letter is written, and goes beyond me, by 
 specifying also the place where it should be read. 
 " The Pencilled Letter" and its "Answer" are among 
 his most intelligible poems, and I will give you their 
 concluding lines as containing a new idea in amatory 
 correspondence : 
 
 " Dearest, love me still ; 
 I know new objects must thy spirit fill ; 
 But vet I pray thee, do not love me less ; 
 This write I where I dress. Bless thee ! for ever bless !" 
 
 The reply has a very pretty conclusion, aside from the 
 
 final oddity : 
 
 " Others may inherit 
 
 My heart s wild perfume ; but the flower is thine. 
 This read where thou didst write. All blessings round thee 
 throng." 
 
 will cover them with one of Mr. Wade s sonnets, 
 which will serve you, should you have occasion for an 
 cpithalamium. It is called "the Bride," and should 
 be read failing by a bachelor: 
 
 " Let the trim tapers burn exceeding brightly ! 
 And the white bed be deok d as for a goddess, 
 Who must be pillow d, liko high vesper, nightly 
 On couch ethereal ! J3e the curtains fleecy, 
 Like vesper s fairest, when calm nights are breezy 
 Transparent, parting showing what they hide, 
 Or strive to veil by mystery deified ! 
 The floor, gold carpet, that her zone and boddice 
 May lie in honor where they gently fall, 
 Slow loosened from her form symmetrical 
 Like mist from sunlight. Burn, sweet odors, burn ! 
 For incense at the altar of her pleasure ! 
 Let music breathe with a voluptuous measure, 
 And witchcrafts trance her wheresoe er she turns." 
 
 It is in your quality as bachelor that you get the loan 
 of this idea, for in love, " a trick not worth an egg," 
 so it be new, is worth the knowing. 
 
 Here s a precious coil ! The red heifer has chewed 
 up a lace cape, and the breachy ox has run over the 
 " bleach and lavender" of a seven days wear and 
 washing. It must be laid to the drought, unless a 
 taste for dry lace as well as wet can be proved on the 
 peccant heifer. The ox would to the drink small 
 blams to him. But lace is expensive fodder, and the 
 heifer must be "hobbled" so swears the washerwo- 
 
 " Her injury 
 s the jailer to her pay." 
 
 1 have only the "turn overs" left, dear Doctor, and I 
 
 LETTER XIII. 
 
 THIS is not a very prompt answer to your last, my 
 dear Doctor, for I intended to have taken my brains 
 to you bodily, and replied to all your "whether-or- 
 noes" over a broiled oyster at ***** . Perhaps I 
 may bring this in my pocket. A brace of ramblers, 
 brothers of my own, detained me for a while, but are 
 flitting to-day; and Bartlett has been here a week, to 
 whom, more particularly, I wish to do the honors of 
 the scenery. We have climbed every hill-top that has 
 the happiness of looking down on the Owaga and Sus 
 quehannah, and he agrees with me that a more lovely 
 and habitable valley has never sat to him for its pic 
 ture. Fortunately, on the day of his arrival, the dust 
 of a six weeks drought was washed from its face, and, 
 barring the wilt that precedes autumn, the hill-sides 
 were in holyday green and looked their fairest. He 
 has enriched his portfolio with four or five delicious 
 i sketches, and if there were gratitude or sense of re 
 nown in trees and hills, they would have nodded their 
 tops to the two of us. It is not every valley or pine- 
 tree that finds painter and historian, but these are as 
 insensible as beauty and greatness were ever to the 
 claims of their trumpeters. 
 
 How long since was it that I wrote to you of Bartlett s 
 visit to Constantinople ? Not more than four or five 
 weeks, it seems to me, and yet, here he is, on his re 
 turn from a professional trip to Canada, with all its 
 best scenery snug in his portmanteau ! He steamed to 
 Turkey and back, and steamed again to America, and 
 will be once more in England in some twenty days- 
 having visited and sketched the two extremities of the 
 civilized world. Why, I might farm it on the Susque 
 hannah and keep my town-house in Constantinople 
 (with money). It seemed odd to me to turn over a 
 drawing-book, and find on one leaf a freshly-pencilled 
 sketch of a mosque, and on the next a view of Glen- 
 lnar y_ m y turnip-field in the foreground. And then 
 the man himself pulling a Turkish para and a Yan 
 kee shinplaster from his pocket with the same pinch 
 shuffling to breakfast in my abri on the Susquehan 
 nah, in a pair of peaked slippers of Constantinople, 
 that smell as freshly of the bazar as if they were 
 bought yesterday waking up with "pekke ! pekke ! 
 my good fellow!" when William brings him his boots 
 and never seeing a blood-red maple (just turned 
 with the frost) without fancying it the sanguine flag 
 of the Bosphorus or the bright jacket of a Greek ! All 
 this unsettles me strangely. The phantasmagoria of 
 my days of vagabondage flit before my eyes again. 
 This, "by-the-by, do you remember, in Smyrna?" 
 and "the view you recollect from the Seraglio!" and 
 such like slip-slop of travellers, heard within reach of 
 my corn and pumpkins, affects me like the mad poet s 
 
 proposition, 
 
 " To twitch the rainbow from the sky, 
 And splice both ends together." 
 
22 
 
 THE MIRROR LIBRARY. 
 
 I have amused my artist friend since he has been 
 here, with an entertainment not quite as expensive as 
 the Holly Lodge fireworks, but quite as beautiful 
 the burning of log-heaps. Instead of gossipping over 
 the tea-table these long and chilly evenings, the three 
 or four young men who have been staying with us 
 were very content to tramp into the woods with a bun 
 dle of straw and a match-box, and they have been in 
 itiated into the mysteries of "picking and piling," to 
 the considerable improvement of the glebe of Glen- 
 mary. Shelley says, 
 
 " Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is ;" 
 
 and 1 am inclined to think that there are varieties of 
 glory in its phenomena which would make it worth 
 even your metropolitan while to come to the west and 
 "burn fallow." At this season of the year after the 
 autumn droughts, that is to say the whole country 
 here is covered with a thin smoke, stealing up from 
 the fires on every hill, in the depths of the woods, and 
 on the banks of the river ; and what with the graceful 
 smoke-wreaths by day, and the blazing beacons all 
 around the horizon by night, it adds much to the va 
 riety, and, I think, more to the beauty of our western 
 October. It edifies the traveller who has bought wood 
 by the pound in Paris, or stiffened for the want of it in 
 the disforested Orient, to stand off a rifle-shot from a 
 crackling wood, and toast himself by a thousand cords 
 burnt for the riddance. What experience I have had 
 of these holocausts on my own land has not diminished 
 the sense of waste and wealth with which I first 
 watched them. Paddy s dream of "rolling in a bin 
 of gold guineas," could scarce have seemed more 
 luxurious. 
 
 Bartlett and I, and the rest of us, in our small way, 
 Burnt enough, I dare say, to have made a comfortable 
 drawing-room of Hyde Park in January, and the ef 
 fects of the white light upon the trees above and 
 around were glorious. But our fires were piles of 
 logs and brush small beer, of course, to the confla 
 gration of a forest. I have seen one that was like the 
 Thousand Columns of Constantinople ignited to a red 
 heat, and covered with carbuncles and tongues of 
 flame. It was a temple of fire the floor, living coals 
 the roof, a heavy drapery of crimson the aisles 
 held up by blazing and innumerable pillars, sometimes 
 swept by the wind till they stood in still and naked 
 redness while the eye could see far into their depths, 
 and again covered and wreathed and laved in ever- 
 changing billows of flame. We want an American 
 Tempesta or " Savage Rosa," to " wreak" such pic 
 tures on canvass ; and perhaps the first step to it would 
 be the painting of the foliage of an American autumn. 
 These glorious wonders are peculiarities of our coun 
 try ; why should they not breed a peculiar school of 
 effect and color? 
 
 " Gentle Doughty, tell me why !" 
 
 Among the London news which has seasoned our 
 breakfasts of late, 1 hear pretty authentically that Camp 
 bell is coming to look up his muse on the Susquehan- 
 nah. He is at present writing the life of Petrarch, and 
 superintending the new edition of his works (to be il 
 lustrated in the style of Rogers s), and, between whiles, 
 projecting a new poem; and, my letters say, is likely 
 to find the way, little known to poets, from the Tem 
 ple of Fame to the Temple of Mammon. One would 
 think it were scarce decent for Campbell to die without 
 seeing Wyoming. 1 trust he will not. What would 
 I not give to get upon a raft with him, and float down 
 the Susquehannah a hundred miles to the scene of 
 his Gertrude, watching his fine face while the real dis 
 placed the ideal valley of his imagination. I think it 
 would trouble him. Probably in the warmth of com 
 position and the familiarity of years, the imaginary 
 scene has become enamelled and sunk into his mind, 
 
 ind it would remain the home of his poem after Wy 
 oming itself had made a distinct impression on his 
 memory- They would be two places not one. He 
 wrote it with some valley of his own land in his mind s 
 ye, and gray Scotland and sunny and verdant Penn 
 sylvania will scarce blend. But he will be welcome. 
 Oh, how welcome ! America would rise up to Camp 
 bell. He has been the bard of freedom, generous and 
 chivalric in all his strains; and, nation of merchants 
 as we are, I am mistaken if the string he has most 
 played is not the master-chord of our national char 
 acter. The enthusiasm of no people on earth is so 
 easily awoke, and Campbell is the poet of enthusiasm. 
 The schoolboys have him by heart, and what lives up 
 on their lips, will live and be beloved for ever. 
 
 It would be a fine thing, I have often thought, dear 
 Doctor, if every English author would be at the pains 
 to reap his laurels in this country. If they could 
 overcome their indignation at our disgraceful robbery 
 of their copyrights, and come among the people who 
 read them for the love they bear them read them as 
 they are not read in England, without prejudice or fa 
 vor, personal or political it would be more like taking 
 a peep at posterity than they think. In what is the 
 judgment of posterity better than that of contempora 
 ries ? Simply in that the author is seen from a dis 
 tance his personal qualities lost to the eye, and his 
 literary stature seen in proper relief and proportion. 
 We know nothing of the degrading rivalries and diffi 
 culties of his first efforts, or, if we do, we do not real 
 ize them, never having known him till success sent his 
 name over the water. His reputation is a Minerva to 
 us sprung full-grown to our knowledge. We praise 
 him, if we like him, with the spirit in which we criti 
 cise an author of another age with no possible pri 
 vate bias. Witness the critiques upon Bulwerin this 
 country, compared with those of his countrymen. 
 What review has ever given him a tithe of his deserv- 
 ings in England ! Their cold acknowledgment of his 
 merits reminds one of Enobarbus s civility to Menas: 
 
 " S ir ! I have praised you 
 
 When you have well deserved ten times as much 
 As I have said you did !" 
 
 1 need not to you, dear Doctor enlarge upon the ben 
 efits, political and social, to both countries, which 
 would follow the mutual good-will of our authors. 
 We shall never have theirs while we plunder them so 
 barefacedly as now, and I trust in heaven we shall, 
 some time or other, see men in Congress who will go 
 deeper for their opinions than the circular of a pira 
 ting bookseller. 
 
 I wish you to send me a copy of Dawes s poems 
 when they appear. I have long thought he was one 
 of the unappreciated ; but I see that his fine play of 
 Athanasia is making stir among the paragraphers. Ru- 
 fus Dawes is a poet if God ever created one, and he 
 lives his vocation as well as imagines it. I hope he 
 will srmfile off the heavenward end of his mortal coil 
 under the cool shades of my Omega. He is our Cole 
 ridge, and his talk should have reverent listeners. I 
 have seldom been more pleased at a change in the lit 
 erary kaleidoscope, than at his awakening popularity ; 
 and, I pray you blow what breath you have into his 
 new-spread sail. Cranch, the artist, who lived with 
 me in Italy (a beautiful scholar in the art, whose hand 
 is fast overtaking his head), has, I see by the papers, 
 made a capital sketch of him. Do you know wheth 
 er it is to be engraved for the book ? 
 
 Ossian represents the ghosts of his heroes lament 
 ing that they had not had their fame, and it is a pity, 
 I think, that we had not some literary apostle to tell 
 us, from the temple of our Athens, who are the un 
 known great. Certain it is, they often live among us, 
 and achieve their greatness unrecognised. How pro 
 foundly dull was England to the merits of Charles 
 
LETTER* FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 23 
 
 Lamb till he died ! Yet he was a fine illustration of 
 my remark just now. America was posterity to 
 him. The writings of all our young authors were 
 tinctured with imitation of his style, when, in Eng 
 land (as I personally know), it was difficult to light up 
 on a person who had read his Elia. Truly " the root 
 of a great name is in the dead body." There is Wal 
 ter Savage Landor, whose Imaginary Conversations 
 contain more of the virgin ore of thought than any 
 six modern English writers together, and how many 
 persons in any literary circle know whether he is alive 
 or dead an author of Queen Elizabeth s time or 
 Queen Victoria s ? He is a man of fortune, and has 
 bought Boccacio s garden at Fiesole, and there upon 
 the "classic Atricus, he is tranquilly achieving his re 
 nown, and it will beunburied,and acknowledged when 
 he is dead. Travellers will make pilgrimages to the 
 spot where Boccacio and Landor have lived, and won 
 der that they did not mark while it was done this 
 piling of Ossa on Pelion. 
 
 By the way, Mr. Landor has tied me to the tail of 
 his immortality, for an offence most innocently com 
 mitted ; and I trust his biographer will either let me 
 slip off at " Lethe s wharf," by expurgating the book 
 of me, or do me justice in a note. When I was in 
 Florence, I was indebted to him for much kind atten 
 tion and hospitality ; and I considered it one of the 
 highest of my good fortunes abroad to go to Fiesole 
 and dine in the scene of the Decameron with an au 
 thor who would, I thought, live as long as Boccacio. 
 Mr. Landor has a glorious collection of paintings, and 
 at parting he presented me with a beautiful picture by 
 Cuyp, which I had particularly admired, and gave me 
 some of my most valuable letters to England, where I 
 was then going. I mention it to show the terms on 
 which we separated. While with him on my last vis 
 it, I had expressed a wish that the philosophical con 
 versations in his books were separated from the politi 
 cal, and repablished in a cheap form in America ; and 
 the following morning, before daylight, his servant 
 knocked at the door of my lodgings, with a package 
 of eight or ten octavo volumes, and as much manu 
 script, accompanied by a note from Mr. Landor, com 
 mitting the whole to my discretion. These volumes, 
 I should tell you, were interleaved and interlined very 
 elaborately, and having kept him company under his 
 olive-trees, were in rather a dilapidated condition. 
 How to add such a bulk of precious stuff to my bag 
 gage, I did not know. I was at the moment of start 
 ing, and it was very clear that even if the custom 
 house officers took no exception to them (they are 
 outlawed through Italy for their political doctrines), 
 they would never survive a rough journey over the 
 Appenines and Alps. I did the best I could. I sent 
 them with a note to Theodore Fay, who was then in 
 Florence, requesting him to forward them to America 
 by ship from Leghorn ; a commission which I knew 
 that kindest and most honorable of men and poets 
 would execute with the fidelity of an angel. So he 
 did. He handed them to an American straw-bonne 
 maker (who, he had no reason to suppose, was the ma 
 licious donkey he afterward proved), and through him 
 they were shipped and received in New York. I ex 
 pected, at the time I left Florence, to make but a short 
 stay in England, and sail in the same summer for 
 America; instead of which I remained in England 
 two years at the close of which appeared a new book 
 of Mr. Landor s Pericles and Aspasia. I took it up 
 with delight, and read it through to the last chapter, 
 where, of a sudden, the author jumps from the acad 
 emy of Plato, clean over three thousand years, upon 
 the shoulders of a false American, who had robbed 
 him of invaluable manuscripts ! So there I go to pos 
 terity astride the Finis of Pericles and Aspasia! 
 had corresponded occasionally with Mr. Lnndor, and 
 in one of my letters had stated the fact, that the man 
 
 uscripts had been committed to Mr. Miles to forward 
 to America. He called, in consequence, at the shop 
 of this person who denied any knowledge of the 
 books, leaving Mr. Landor to suppose that I had been 
 either most careless or most culpable in my manage 
 ment of his trust. The books had, however, after a 
 brief stay in New York, followed me to London ; and 
 Fay and Mr. Landor both happening there together, 
 the explanation was made and the books and manu 
 scripts restored unharmed to the author. I was not 
 Ion" enough in London afterward to know whether I 
 was" forgiven by Mr. Laudor; but, as his book has not 
 reached a second edition, I am still writhing in my 
 purgatory of print. 
 
 1 havy told you this long story, dear Doctor, because 
 I am sometimes questioned on the subject by the lit 
 erary people with whom you live, and hereafter I shall 
 transfer them to your button for the whole matter. 
 | But what a letter ! Write me two for it, and revenge 
 yourself in the postage. 
 
 LETTER XIV. 
 
 THIS is return month, dear Doctor, and if it were 
 only to be in fashion, you should have a quid pro quo 
 for your four pages. October restores and returns; 
 your gay friends and invalids return to the city ; the 
 birds and the planters return to the south ; the seed 
 returns to the granary ; the brook at my feet is noisy 
 again with its returned waters ; the leaves are return 
 ing to the earth ; and the heart that has been out-of- 
 do ors while the summer lasted, comes home from its 
 wanderings by field and stream, and returns to feed on 
 its harvest of new thoughts, past pleasures, and 
 strengthened and confirmed affections. At this time 
 of the year, too, you expect a return (not of paste 
 board) for your " visits ;" but, as you have made me 
 no visit, either friendly or professional, I owe you 
 nothing. And that is the first consolation I have 
 found for your short-comings (or no-comings-at-all) 
 to Glenmary. 
 
 Now, consider my arms a-kimbo, if you please, 
 while I ask you what you mean by calling Glenmary 
 "backwoods!" Faith, I wish it were more back 
 woods than it is. Here be cards to be left, sir, morn 
 ing calls to be made, body-coat soirees, and ceremony 
 enough to keep one s most holyday manners well aired. 
 The two miles distance between me and Owego serves 
 me for no exemption, for the village of Canewana, 
 which is a mile nearer on the road, is equally within 
 the latitude of silver forks ; and dinners are given in 
 both, which want no one of the belongings of Bel- 
 arave-square, save port-wine and powdered footmen. 
 I think it is in one of Miss Austin s novels that a lady 
 claims it to be a smart neighborhood in which she 
 dines with four-and-twenty families." If there are 
 not more than half as many in Owego who give din 
 ners, there are twice as many who ask to tea and give 
 ice-cream and champaign. Then for the fashions, 
 there is as liberal a sprinkling of French bonnets in 
 the Owego church as in any village congregation in 
 England. And for the shops that subject is worthy 
 of a sentence by itself. When I say there is no need 
 , to go to New- York for hat, boots, or coat, 1 mean 
 1 that the Owego tradesmen (if you are capable of de- 
 1 scribin* what you want) are capable of supplying you 
 with the best and most modish of these articles. Call 
 you that " backwoods ?" 
 
 All this, I am free to confess, clashes with the beau 
 I ideal of the 
 
 " Beatus ille qni procvl," etc. 
 
 I had myself imagined (and continued to imagine 
 i for some weeks after coming here), that, so near the 
 
24 
 
 THE MIRROR LIBRARY. 
 
 primeval wilderness, I might lay up my best coat and 
 my ceremony in lavender, and live in fustian and a 
 plain way. I looked forward to the delights of a broad 
 straw hat, large shoes, baggy habiliments, and leave to 
 sigh or whistle without offence ; and it seemed to me 
 that it was the conclusion of a species of apprentice 
 ship, and the beginning of my " freedom." To be 
 above no clean and honest employment of one s time, 
 to drive a pair of horses or a yoke of oxen with equal 
 alacrity, and to be commented on for neither the one 
 nor the other ; to have none but wholesome fanning 
 cares, and work with nature and honest yeomen, and 
 be quite clear of mortifications, envies, advice, remon 
 strance, coldness, misapprehensions, and etiquettes ; 
 this is what I, like most persons who "forswear the 
 full tide of the world," looked upon as the blessed 
 promise of retirement. But, alas ! wherever there is 
 a butcher s shop and a post-office, an apothecary and 
 a blacksmith, an " Arcade" and a milliner wherever 
 the conveniences of life are, in short there has al 
 ready arrived the Procrustes of opinion. Men s eyes 
 will look on you and bring you to judgment, and un 
 less you would live on wild meat and corn-bread in the 
 wilderness, with neither friend nor helper, you must 
 give in to a compromise yield half at least of your 
 independence, and take it back in common-place com 
 fort. This is very every-day wisdom to those who 
 know it, but you are as likely as any man in the world 
 to have sat with your feet over the fire, and fancied 
 yourself on a wild horse in a prairie, with nothing to 
 distinguish you from the warlike Camanche, except 
 capital wine in the cellar of your wigwam, and the last 
 new novel and play, which should reach this same wig 
 wam you have not exactly determined how ! Such 
 " pyramises are goodly things," but they are built of 
 the smoke of your cigar. 
 
 This part of the country is not destitute of the 
 chances of adventure, however, and twice in the year, 
 at least, you may, if you choose, open a valve for your 
 spirits. One half the population of the neighbor 
 hood is engaged in what is called lumbering, and until 
 the pine timber of the forest can be counted like the 
 cedars of Lebanon, this vocation will serve the uses 
 of the mobs of England, the revolutions of France, and 
 the plots of Italy. I may add the music and theatres 
 of Austria and Prussia, the sensual indulgence of the 
 Turk, and the intrigue of the Spaniard ; for there is 
 in every people under the sun a superflu of spirits un- 
 consumed by common occupation, which, if not turn 
 ed adroitly or accidentally to some useful or harmless 
 end, will expend its reckless energy in trouble and 
 mischief. 
 
 The preparations for the adventures of which I 
 speak, though laborious, are often conducted like a 
 frolic. The felling of the trees in mid-winter, the cut 
 ting of shingles, and the drawing out on the snow, are 
 employments preferred by the young men to the tamer 
 but less arduous work of the farm-yard ; and in the 
 temporary and uncomfortable shanties, deep in the 
 woods, subsisting often on nothing but pork and whis 
 key, they find metal more attractive than village or 
 fireside. The small streams emptying into the Sus- 
 quehannah are innumerable, and eight or ten miles 
 back from the river the arks are built, and the mate 
 rials of the rafts collected, ready to launch with the 
 first thaw. I live, myself, as you know, on one of these 
 tributaries, a quarter of a mile from its junction. The 
 Owago trips along at the foot of my lawn, as private 
 and untroubled for the greater part of the year as 
 Virginia Water at Windsor ; but, as it swells in March, 
 the noise of voices and hammering coming out from 
 the woods above, warn us of the approach of an ark, 
 and at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour the rude 
 structure shoots by, floating high on the water without 
 its lading (which it takes in at the village below), and 
 manned with a singing and saucy crew, who dodge the 
 
 branches of the trees, and work their steering paddles 
 
 , with an adroitness and nonchalance which sufficiently 
 
 I shows the character of the class. The sudden bends 
 
 I which the river takes in describing my woody Omega, 
 
 ! put their steersmansbip to the test ; and when the 
 
 I leaves are off the trees, it is a curious sight to see the 
 
 bulky monsters, shining with new boards, whirling 
 
 around in the swift eddies, and, when caught by the 
 
 ! current again, gliding off among the trees like a sing- 
 
 | ing and swearing phantom of an unfinished barn. 
 
 At the village they take wheat and pork into the 
 arks, load their rafts with plank and shingles, and wait 
 i for the return of the freshet. It is a fact you may not 
 : know, that when a river is rising, the middle is the 
 highest, and vice versa when falling, sufficiently proved 
 | by the experience of the raftsmen, who, if they start 
 I before the flow is at its top, can not keep their crafts 
 from the shore. A pent house, barely sufficient for 
 a man to stretch himself below, is raised on the deck, 
 with a fire-place of earth and loose stone, and with 
 what provision they can afford, and plenty of whiskey, 
 they shove out into the stream. Thenceforward it is 
 vogue la galere ! They have nothing to do, all day, 
 but abandon themselves to the current, sing and dance 
 and take their turn at the steering oars ; and when the 
 sun sets they look out for an eddy, and pull in to the 
 shore. The stopping-places are not very numerous, 
 and are well known to all who fellow the trade ; and, 
 as the river swarms with rafts, the getting to land, and 
 making sure of a fastening, is a scene always of great 
 competition, and often of desperate fighting. When 
 all is settled for the night, however, and the fires are 
 lit on the long range of the flotilla, the raftsmen get 
 together over their whiskey and provender, and tell 
 the thousand stories of their escapes and accidents ; 
 and with the repetition of this, night after night, the 
 whole rafting population along the five hundred miles 
 of the Susquehannah becomes partially acquainted, 
 and forms a sympathetic corj)s, whose excitement and 
 esprit might be roused to very dangerous uses. 
 
 By daylight they are cast off and once more on the 
 current, and in five or seven days they arrive at tide 
 water, where the crew is immediately discharged, and 
 start, usually on foot, to follow the river home again. 
 There are several places in the navigation which are 
 dangerous, such as rapids and dam-sluices ; and what 
 with these, and the scenes at the eddies, and their pil 
 grimage through a thinly settled and wild country 
 home again, they see enough of adventure to make 
 them fireside heroes, and incapacitate them (while 
 their vigor lasts, at least), for all the more quiet habits 
 of the fanner. The consequence is easy to be seen. 
 Agriculture is but partially followed throughout the 
 country, and while these cheap facilities for transport 
 ing produce to the seaboard exist, those who are con 
 tented to stay at home, and cultivate the rich river 
 lands of the country, are sure of high prices and a 
 ready reward for their labor. 
 
 Moral. Come to the Susquehannah, and settle on 
 a farm. You did not know what I was driving at all 
 this while ! 
 
 The raftsmen who " follow the Delaware" (to use 
 their own poetical expression) are said to be a much 
 wilder class than those on the Susquehannah. In re 
 turning to Owego, by different routes, I have often 
 fallen in with parties of both : and certainly nothing 
 could be more entertaining than to listen to their tales. 
 In a couple of years the canal route on the Susque 
 hannah will lay open this rich vein of the picturesque 
 and amusing, and as the tranquil boat glides peace 
 fully along the river bank, the traveller will be sur 
 prised with the strange effect of these immense flo 
 tillas, with their many fires and wild people, lying in 
 the glassy bends of the solitary stream, the smoke 
 stealing through the dark forest, and the confusion of 
 a hundred excited voices breaking the silence. In my 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 25 
 
 trip down the river in the spring, I saw enough that 
 was novel in this way to fill a new portfolio for Bart- 
 lett, and I intend he shall raft it with me to salt water 
 the next time he comes among us. 
 
 How delicious are these October noons ! They 
 will soon chill, I am afraid, and I shall be obliged to 
 give up my out-of-door s habits ; but I shall do it un 
 willingly. I have changed sides under the bridge, to 
 sit with my feet in the sun, and I trust this warm cor 
 ner will last me till November at least. The odor of 
 the dying leaves, and the song of the strengthening 
 brook, are still sufficient allurements, and even your 
 rheumatism (of which the Latin should be podagra) 
 might safely keep me company till dinner* Adieu, 
 dear Doctor ! write me a long account of Vestris and 
 Matthews (how you like them, I mean, for I know very 
 well how I like them myself), and thank me for turning 
 over to you a new leaf of American romance. You 
 are welcome to write a novel, and call it " The Rafts 
 man of the Susquehannah." 
 
 LETTER XV. 
 
 " When did I descend the Susquehannah on a 
 raft ?" Never, dear Doctor ! But I have descended 
 it in a steamboat, and that may surprise you more. It 
 is an ire-navigable river, it is true : and it is true, too, 
 that there are some twenty dams across it between 
 Owego and Wilkesbarre ; yet have I steamed it from 
 Owego to Wyoming, one hundred and fifty miles, in 
 twelve hours on the top of a freshet. The dams were 
 deep under water, and the river was as smooth as the 
 Hudson. And now you will wonder how a steamer 
 came, by fair means, at Owego. 
 
 A year or two since, before there was a prospect of 
 extending the Pennsylvania canal to this place, it be 
 came desirable to bring the coal of " the keystone 
 state" to these southern counties by some cheaper 
 conveyance than horse-teams. A friend of mine, liv 
 ing here, took it into his head that, as salmon and 
 shad will ascend a fall of twenty feet in a river, the 
 propulsive energy of their tails might possibly furnish 
 a hint for a steamer that would shoot up dams and 
 rapids. The suggestion was made to a Connecticut 
 man, who, of course, undertook it. He would have 
 been less than a Yankee if he had not tried. The 
 product of his ingenuity was the steamboat " Susque 
 hannah," drawing but eighteen inches ; and, besides 
 her side-paddles, having an immense wheel in the 
 stern, which playing in the slack water of the boat, 
 would drive her up Niagara, if she would but hold to 
 gether. The principal weight of her machinery hung 
 upon two wooden arches running fore and aft, and al 
 together she was a neat piece of contrivance, and 
 promised fairly to answer the purpose. 
 
 I think the " Susquehannah" had made three trips 
 when she broke a shaft, and was laid up ; and, what 
 with one delay and another, the canal was half com 
 pleted between her two havens before the experiment 
 had fairly succeeded. A month or two since, the pro 
 prietors determined to run her down the river for the 
 purpose of selling her, and t was invited among others 
 to join in the trip. 
 
 The only offices professionally filled on board were 
 those of the engineer and pilot. Captain, mate, fire 
 men, steward, cook, and chambermaid, were repre 
 sented en amateur by gentlemen passengers. We 
 rang the bell at the starting hour with the zeal usually 
 displayed in that department, and, by the assistance of 
 the current, got oil in the usual style of a steamboat 
 departure, wanting only the newsboys and pirkpocUeis. 
 With a stream running at five knots, and paddles cal 
 culated to mount a cascade, we could not fail to take 
 the river in gallant style, and before we had regulated 
 
 our wood-piles and pantry, we were backing water at 
 Athens, twenty miles on our way. 
 
 Navigating the Susquehannah is very much like 
 dancing " the cheat." You are always making straight 
 up to a mountain, with no apparent possibility of 
 escaping contact with it, and it is an even chance up 
 to the last moment which side of it you are to chassez 
 with the current. Meantime the sun seems capering 
 about to all points of the compass, the shadows falling 
 in every possible direction, and north, south, east, and 
 west, changing places with the familiarity of a mas 
 querade. The blindness of the river s course is in 
 creased by the innumerable small islands in its bosom, 
 whose tall elms and close-set willows meet half-way 
 those from either shore ; and, the current very often 
 dividing above them, it takes an old voyager to choose 
 between the shaded alleys, by either of which you 
 would think Arethusa might have eluded her lover. 
 
 My own mental occupation, as we glided on, was 
 the distribution of white villas along the shore, on 
 spots where nature seemed to have arranged the 
 ground for their reception. I saw thousands of sites 
 where the lawns were made, the terraces defined and 
 levelled, the groves tastefully clumped, the ancient 
 trees ready with their broad shadows, the approaches 
 to the water laid out, the banks sloped, and in every 
 thing the labor of art seemingly all anticipated by na 
 ture. I grew tired of exclaiming, to the friend who 
 was beside me, "What an exquisite site for a villa! 
 What a sweet spot for a cottage !" If I had had 
 the power to people the Susquehannah by the wave 
 of a wand, from those I know capable of appreciating 
 its beauty, what a paradise I could have spread out 
 between my own home and Wyoming ! It was pleas 
 ant to know, that by changes scarcely less than ma 
 gical, these lovely banks will soon be amply seen and 
 admired, and probably as rapidly seized upon and in 
 habited by persons of taste. The gangs of laborers 
 at the foot of every steep cliff, doing the first rough 
 work of the canal, gave promise of a speedy change 
 in the aspect of this almost unknown river. 
 
 It was sometimes ticklish steering among the rafts 
 and arks with which the river was thronged, and we 
 never passed one without getting the raftsman s rude 
 hail. One of them furnished my vocabulary with a 
 new measure of speed. He stood at the stern oar of 
 a shingle raft, gaping at us, open-mouthed as we came 
 down upon him. "Wai!" said he, as we shot past, 
 "you re going a good hickory, mister !" It was amu 
 sing, again, to run suddenly round a point and come 
 upon a raft with a minute s warning ; the voyagers as 
 little expecting an intrusion upon their privacy, as a 
 retired student to be unroofed in a London garret. 
 The different modes of expressing surprise became at 
 last quite a study to me, yet total indifference was not 
 infrequent ; and there were some who, I think, would 
 not have risen from their elbows if the steamer had 
 flown bodily over them. 
 
 We passed the Falls of Wyalusing (most musical 
 j of Indian names) and Buttermilk Falls, both cascades 
 j worthy of being known and sung, and twilight over- 
 i took us some two hours from Wyoming. We had no 
 ! lights on board, and the engineer was unwilling to run 
 in the dark ; so our pilot being an old raftsman, we 
 put into the first "eddy," and moored for the night. 
 These eddies, by the way, would not easily be found 
 by a stranger, but to the practised navigators of the 
 river they are all numbered and named like harbors on 
 a coast. The strong current, in the direct force of 
 which the clumsy raft would find it impossible to conic 
 to, and moor, is at these places turned back by son it- 
 projection of the shore, or ledge at the bottom, ami a 
 pool of still water is formed in which the craft may lie- 
 secure for the night. The lumbermen give a cheer 
 when they have steered successfully in, and springing 
 joyfully ashore, drive their stakes, eat, dance, quarrel, 
 
26 
 
 THE MIRROR LIBRARY. 
 
 and sleep ; and many a good tale is told of rafts slily 
 unmoored, and set adrift at midnight by parties from 
 the eddies above, and of the consequent adventures of 
 running in the dark. We had on board two gentle 
 men who had earned an independence in this rough 
 vocation, and their stories, told laughingly against 
 each other, developed well the expedient and hazard 
 of the vocation. One of them had once been mis 
 chievously cut adrift by the owner of a rival cargo, 
 when moored in an eddy with an ark-load of grain. 
 The article was scarce and high in the markets below, 
 and he had gone to sleep securely under his pent 
 house, and was dreaming of his profits, when he sud 
 denly awoke with a shock, and discovered that he was 
 high and dry upon a sedgy island some miles below 
 his moorings. The freshet was falling fast, arid soon 
 after daylight his competitor for the market drifted 
 past with a laugh, and confidently shouted out a good- 
 by till another voyage. The triumphant ark-master 
 floated on all day, moored again at night, and arrived 
 safely at tide-water, where the first object that struck 
 his sight was the ark he had left in the sedges, its 
 freight sold, its owner preparing to return home, and 
 the market of course forestalled ! The " Roland for 
 his Oliver" had, with incredible exertion, dug a canal 
 for his ark, launched her on the slime, and by risking the 
 night-running, passed him unobserved and gained a 
 day a feat as illustrative of the American genius for 
 emergency as any on record. 
 
 It was a still, starlight night, and the river was laced 
 with the long reflections of the raft-fires, while the 
 softened songs of the men over their evening carouse, 
 came to us along the smooth water with the effect of 
 far better music. What with " wooding" at two or 
 three places, however, and what with the excitement 
 of the day, we were too fatigued to give more than a | 
 glance and a passing note of admiration to the beauty j 
 of the scene, and the next question was, how to come j 
 by Sancho s " blessed invention of sleep." We had ! 
 been detained at the wooding-places, and had made ! 
 no calculation to lie by a night. There were no beds j 
 on board, and not half room enough in the little cabin 
 to distribute to each passenger six feet by two of 
 floor. The shore was wild, and not a friendly lamp 
 glimmering on the hills ; but the pilot at last recollect 
 ed having once been to a house a mile or two back 
 from the river, and with the diminished remainder of 
 our provender as a pis oiler in case of finding no sup 
 per in our forage, we started in search. We stum 
 bled and scrambled, and delivered our benisons to rock 
 and brier, till I would fain have lodged with Trinculo 
 " under a moon-calf s gaberdine," but by-and-by our 
 leader fell upon a track, and a light soon after glim 
 mered before us. We approached through cleared 
 fields, and, without the consent of the farmer s dog, to 
 whose wishes on the subject we were compelled to do 
 violence, the blaze of a huge fire (it was a chilly night 
 of spring) soon bettered our resignation. A stout, 
 white-headed fellow of twenty-eight or thirty, bare 
 footed, sat in a cradle, see-sawing before the fire, and 
 without rising when we entered, or expressing the 
 slightest surprise at our visit, he replied to our ques 
 tions, that he was the father of some twelve sorrel and 
 barefoot copies of himself huddled into the corner, j 
 that " the woman" was his wife, and that we were 
 welcome "to stay." Upon this the "woman" for the 
 first time looked at us, counted us with the nods of 
 her head, and disappeared with the only candle. 
 
 When his wife reappeared, the burly farmer ex 
 tracted himself with some difficulty from the cradle, 
 and without a word passing between them, entered 
 upon his office as chamberlain. We followed him 
 up stairs, where we were agreeably surprised to find 
 three very presentable beds ; and as I happened to 
 be the last and fifth, I felicitated myself on the good 
 chance of sleeping alone, " clapped into my prayers," 
 
 as was recommended to Master Barnardine, and was 
 asleep before the candle-snuff. I should have said 
 that mine was a " single bed," in a sort of a closet par 
 titioned off from the main chamber. 
 
 How long I had travelled in dream-land I have no 
 means of knowing, but I was awoke by a touch on the 
 shoulder, and the information that 1 must make room 
 for a bedfellow. It was a soft-voiced young gentle 
 man, as well as I could perceive, with his collar turned 
 down, and a book under his arm. Without very clear 
 ly remembering where I was, I represented to my pro 
 posed friend that I occupied as nearly as possible the 
 whole of the bed to say nothing of a foot, over which 
 he mighfsee (the foot) by looking where it outreached 
 the coverlet. It was a very short bed, indeed. 
 
 " It was large enough for me till you came," said 
 the stranger, modestly. 
 
 " Then I am the intruder ?" I asked. 
 
 " No intrusion if you will share with me," he said ; 
 " but as this is my bed, and I have no resource but 
 the kitchen-fire, perhaps you will let me in." 
 
 There was no resisting his tone of good humor, and 
 my friend by this time having prepared himself to take 
 up as little room as possible, I consented that he should 
 blow out the candle and get under the blanket. The 
 argument and the effort of making myself small as he 
 crept in, had partially waked me, and before my ears 
 were sealed up again, I learned that my companion, 
 who proved rather talkative, was the village school 
 master. He taught for twelve dollars a month and his 
 board taking the latter a week at a time with the dif 
 ferent families to which his pupils belonged. For the 
 present week he was quartered upon our host, and hav 
 ing been out visiting past the usual hour of bedtime, 
 he was not aware of the arrival of strangers till he found 
 me on his pillow. 
 
 I went to sleep, admiring the amiable temper of my 
 new friend under the circumstances, but awoke pres 
 ently with a sense of suffocation. The schoolmaster 
 was fast asleep, but his arms were clasped tightly round 
 my throat. I disengaged them without waking him, 
 and composed myself again. 
 
 Once more I awoke half suffocated. My friend s arms 
 had found their way again round my neck, and, though 
 evidently fast asleep, he was drawing me to him with 
 a clasp I found it difficult to unloose. I shook him 
 broad awake, and begged him to take notice that he 
 was sleeping with a perfect stranger. He seemed very 
 much annoyed at having disturbed me, made twenty 
 apologies, and turning his back, soon fell asleep. I 
 followed his example, wishing him a new turn to his 
 dream. 
 
 A third time I sprang up choking from the pillow, 
 drawing my companion fairly on end with me. I could 
 stand it no longer. Even when half aroused he could 
 hardly be persuaded to let go his hold of my neck. I 
 jumped out of bed, and flung open the window for a 
 little air. The moon had risen, and the night was ex 
 quisitely fine. A brawling brook ran under the win 
 dow, and after a minute or two, being thoroughly 
 awaked, I looked at my watch in the moonlight, and 
 found it wanted but an hour or two of morning. Afraid 
 to risk my throat again, and remembering that I could 
 not fairly quarrel with my friend, who had undoubtedly 
 a right to embrace, after his own fashion, any intruder 
 who ventured into his proper bed, I went down stairs, 
 and raked open the embers of the kitchen fire, which 
 served me for less affectionate company till dawn. 
 How and where he could have acquired his caressing 
 habits, were subjects upon which I speculated unsatis 
 factorily over the coals. 
 
 My companions were called up at sunrise by the 
 landlord, and as we were paying for our lodging, the 
 schoolmaster came down to see us off, I was less sur 
 prised when I came to look at him by daylight. It 
 was a fair, delicate boy of sixteen, whose slender health 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 27 
 
 had probably turned his attention to books, and who, 
 perhaps, had never slept away from his mother till he 
 went abroad to teach school. Quite satisfied with one 
 experiment of filling the maternal relation, I wished 
 him a less refractory bedfellow, and we hastened on 
 board. 
 
 The rafts were under weigh before us, and the tor 
 toise had overtaken the hare, for we passed several 
 that we had passed higher up, and did not fail to get a 
 jeer for our sluggishness. An hour or two brought 
 us to Wilkesbarre, an excellent hotel, good breakfast, 
 and new and kind friends ; and so ended my trip on 
 the Susquehannah. Some other time I will tell you 
 how beautiful is the valley of Wyoming, which I have 
 since seen in the holyday colors of October. Thereby 
 hangs a tale too, worth telling and hearing; and as a 
 promise is good parting stuff, adieu ! 
 
 LETTER XVI. 
 
 THE books and the music came safe to hand, dear 
 Doctor, but I trust we are not to stand upon guid-pro- 
 quosities. The barrel of buckwheat not only cost mo 
 nothing, but I have had my uses of it in the raising, and 
 can no more look upon it as value, than upon a flower 
 which I pluck to smell, and give away when it is faded. 
 I have sold some of my crops for the oddity of the sensa 
 tion ; and I assure you it is very much like being paid 
 for dancing when the ball is over. Why, consider the 
 offices this very buckwheat has performed. There was 
 the trust in Providence, in the purchase of the seed 
 a sermon. There were the exercise and health in 
 ploughing, harrowing, and sowing -prescription and 
 pill. There was the performance of the grain, its 
 sprouting, its flowering, it earing, and its ripening a 
 great deal more amusing than a play. Then there 
 were the harvesting, thrashing, fanning, and grinding 
 a sort of pastoral collection, publication, and purgation 
 by criticism. Now, suppose your clergyman, your 
 physician, your favorite theatrical corps, your pub 
 lisher, printer, and critic, thrashed and sold in bags 
 for six shillings a bushel ! I assure you the cases are 
 similar, except that the buckwheat makes probably 
 the more savory cake. 
 
 The new magazine was welcome ; the more, that it 
 brought b,ack to my own days of rash adventure in 
 such tiqklish craft, with a pleasant sense of deliver 
 ance from its risk and toil. The imprint of " No. I., 
 Vol. I.," reads to me like a bond for the unreserved 
 abandonment of time and soul. Truly, youth is wise 
 ly provided with little forethought, a nd much hope. 
 What child would learn the alphabet if he could see 
 at a glance the toil that lies behind it? I look upon 
 the fresh type and read the sanguine prospectus of 
 this new-born monthly, and remember, with astonish 
 ment, the thoughtlessness with which, years ago, I 
 launched in the same gay colors such a venture on 
 the wave. It is a voyage that requires plentiful stores, 
 much experience of the deeps and shallows of the 
 literary seas, and a hand at every halyard; yet, to 
 } abandon my simile, I proposed to be publisher and 
 / editor, critic and contributor; and I soon found that I 
 might as well have added reader to my manifold of- 
 fices. No one who lias not tried this vocation can 
 -have any idea of tho difficulty of procuring the lieht, 
 s yet condensed the. fragmented, yet finished the 
 \ good-tempered and gentlemanly, yet liinh so i-oned 
 and dashing papers necessary to a periodical. A man 
 who can wrif* flu-m, can, in our country, put hims-lf 
 to a more profitable use and does. The best maga 
 zine writer living, in my opinion, is Edward Everett; 
 and IK- governs a state with the same time and atten 
 tion whidi in England, perhaps, would be cramped 
 to contributing to a review. Calhoun might write 
 
 wonderfully fine articles. Legar6, of Charleston, has 
 I the right talent, with the learning. Crittenden, of the 
 senate, I should think might have written the most 
 brilliant satirical papers. But these, and others like 
 them, are men the country and their own ambition 
 can not spare. There is a younger class of writers, 
 however; and though the greater number of these, too, 
 (ill responsible stations in society, separate from general 
 literature, they might be induced, probably, were the 
 remuneration adequate, to lend their support to a 
 periodical "till the flower of their fame shall be more 
 blown." Among them are Felton and Longfellow, 
 botli professors at Cambridge ; and Sumner and Hen 
 ry Cleaveland, lawyers of Boston a knot of writers 
 who sometimes don the cumbrous armor of the North 
 American ReyitJw, but who would show to more ad 
 vantage in the lighter harness of the monthlies. I 
 could name~Twenfy more to any one interested to 
 know them, all valuable allies to a periodical ; but no 
 literary man questions that. We have in our country f. . 
 talent enough, if there were the skill and means to put 
 it judiciously together. 
 
 Coleridge and others have mourned over the age of 
 reviews, as the downfall and desecration of authorship ; 
 but I am inclined to think authors gain more than they 
 lose by the facility of criticism. What chance has a 
 book on a shelf, waiting to be called for by the purcha 
 ser uninformed of its merits, to one whose beauties 
 and defects have been canvassed by these Mercury- 
 winged messengers, volant and universal as the quick 
 est news of the hour? How slow and unsympathetic 
 must have been the progress of a reputation, when the 
 judicious admirer of a new book could but read and 
 put it by, expressing his delight, at farthest, to his 
 immediate friend or literary correspondent? The ap 
 prehensive and honest readers of a book are never 
 many; but in our days, if it reach but one of these, 
 what is the common outlet of his enthusiasm ? Why, 
 a trumpet-tongued review, that makes an entire peo 
 ple partakers of his appreciation, in the wax and wane 
 of a single moon. Greedily as all men and women 
 devour books, ninety-nine in a hundred require them 
 to be first cut up, liable else, like children at their 
 meals, to swallow the wrong morsel. Yet, like chil 
 dren still, when the good is pointed out, they digest it 
 as well as another, and so is diffused an understanding, 
 as well as prompt admiration of the author. For my 
 self, I am free to confess I am one of those who like 
 to take the first taste of an author in a good review. 1 
 look upon the reviewer as a sensible friend, who came\/ 
 before me to the feast, and recommends me the dish 
 that has most pleased him. There is a fellowship in 
 agreeing that it is good. I have often wished there 
 were a Washington among the critics some one up 
 on whose judgment, freedom from paltry motives, gen 
 erosity and fairness, I could pin my faith blindly and 
 implicitly. Dilke, of the London Athenaeum, is the 
 nearest approach to this character, and a good proof 
 of it is an order frequently given (a London publisher 
 informed me), by country gentlemen : " Send me ev 
 erything the Athenaeum praises." Though a man of 
 letters, Dilke is not an author, and, by the way, dear 
 Doctor, I think in that lies the best qualification, if not 
 the only chance for the impartiality of the critic. 
 How few authors are capable of praising a book by 
 which their own is thrown into shadow. " Why does 
 Plato never mention Zenophon ? and why does Zen- 
 ophon inveigh against Plato?" 
 
 But I think there is less to fear from jealousy, than 
 from the want of sympathy between writers on differ 
 ent subjects, or in different styles. D Israeli the el 
 der, from whom I have just quoted, sounds the depth 
 of this matter with the very plummet of truth. " Kv- 
 t ery man of genius has a manner of his own ; a mode 
 j of thinking and a habit of style; and usually decides 
 I on a work as it approximates or varies from his own. 
 
 
0" 
 
 
 28 
 
 THE MIRROR LIBRARY. 
 
 When one great author depreciates another, it has oft 
 en no worse source than his own taste. The witty 
 Cowley despised the natural Chaucer; the cold, clas 
 sical Boileau, the rough sublimity of Crebillon ; the 
 refining Marivaux, the familiar Moliere. The deficient 
 sympathy in these men of genius, for modes of feeling 
 opposite to their own, was the real cause of their opin 
 ions ; and thus it happens that even superior genius is 
 so,joften liable to be unjust and false in its decisions." 
 /Apropos of English periodicals, we get them now 
 almost wet from the press, and they seem far off and 
 foreign no longer. But there is one (to me) melan 
 choly note in the Paean with which the Great West 
 ern was welcomed. In literature we are no longer a 
 distinct nation. The triumph of Atlantic steam navi 
 gation has driven the smaller drop into the larger, and 
 London has become the centre. Farewell nationali 
 ty ! The English language now marks the limits of a 
 new literary empire, and America is a suburb. Our 
 themes, our resources, the disappearing savage, and 
 the retiring wilderness, the free thought, and the ac 
 tion as free, the spirit of daring innovation, and the ir 
 reverent question of usage, the picturesque mixture 
 of many nations in an equal home, the feeling of ex 
 panse, of unsubserviency, of distance from time-hal 
 lowed authority and prejudice all the elements which 
 were working gradually but gloriously together to 
 make us a nation by ourselves, have, in this approxi 
 mation of shores, either perished for our using, or 
 slipped within the clutch of England. What effect 
 the now near and jealous criticism of that country will 
 have upon our politics is a deeper question, but our 
 literature is subsidized at a blow. Hitherto we have 
 been to them a strange country ; the few books that 
 reached them they criticised with complimentary jeal 
 ousy, or with the courtesy due to a stranger; while 
 our themes and our political structures were looked on 
 with the advantage of distance, undemeaned by ac 
 quaintance with sources or familiarity with details. 
 While all our material is thrown open to English au 
 thors, we gain nothing in exchange, for, with the in 
 stinct of descendants, we have continued to look back 
 to our fathers, and our conversance with the wells of 
 English literature was as complete as their own. 
 
 The young American author is the principal suffer 
 er by the change. Imagine an actor compelled to 
 make a debut without rehearsal and you get a faint 
 s .shadow of what he has lost. It was some advantage, 
 let me tell you, dear Doctor, to have run the gauntlet 
 of criticism in America before being heard of in 
 England. When Irving and Cooper first appeared as 
 authors abroad, they sprung to sight like Minerva, full- 
 grown. They had seen themselves in print, had re 
 flected and improved upon private and public criticism, 
 and were made aware of their faults before they were 
 irrecoverably committed on this higher theatre. Keats 
 died of a rebuke to his puerilities, which, had it been 
 administered here, would have been borne up against 
 with the hope of higher appeal and new effort. He 
 might have been the son of an American apothecary, 
 and never be told by an English critic to " return to 
 his gallipots." The Atlantic was, hitherto, a friendly 
 Lethe, in which the sins of youth (so heavily and un 
 justly visitited on aspirants to fame), were washed out 
 and forgotton. The American "licked into shape" 
 by the efficient tongues of envy and jealousy at home, 
 stepped ashore in England, wary and guarded against 
 himself and others. The book by which he made 
 himself known, might have been the successful effort 
 after twenty failures, and it met with the indulgence 
 of a first. The cloud of his failures, the remem 
 brance of his degradations by ridicule were left behind. 
 His practised skill was measured by other s beginnings. 
 
 We suffer, too, in our social position, in England. 
 We have sunk from the stranger to the suburban or 
 provincial. In a year or two every feature and detail 
 
 of our country will be as well known to English soci 
 ety as those of Margate and Brighton. Our similar 
 ity to themselves in most things will not add to their 
 respect for us. We shall have the second place ac 
 corded to the indigenous society of well-known pla 
 ces of resort or travel, and to be an American will be 
 in England like being a Maltese or an East Indian 
 every way inferior, in short, to a metropolitan in Lon 
 don. 
 
 You see, my dear Doctor, how 1 make my corre 
 spondence with you serve as a trap for my stray 
 thoughts ; and you will say, that in this letter I have 
 caught some that might as well have escaped. But 
 as the immortal Jack "turned" even "diseases to 
 commodity," and as " la superiorite est une infirmite 
 sociale," perhaps you will tolerate my dulness, or con 
 sider it a polite avoidance of your envy. Write me 
 better or worse, however, and I will shape a welcome 
 to it. 
 
 LETTER XVII. 
 
 Do you remember, my dear Doctor, in one of the 
 Elizabethan dramas (I forget which), the description 
 of the contention between the nightingale and the 
 page s lute ? Did you ever remark how a bird, sitting 
 silent in a tree, will trill out, at the first note which 
 breaks the stillness, as if it had waited for that signal 
 to begin ? Have you noticed the emulation of pigs in 
 a pasture how the gallopping by of a horse in the 
 road sets them off for a race to the limits of the cross- 
 fence ? 
 
 I have been sitting here with my feet upon the 
 autumn leaves, portfolio on knee, for an hour. The 
 shadow of the bridge cuts a line across my breast, 
 leaving my thinking machinery in shadow, while the 
 farmer portion of me mellows in the sun ; the air is as 
 still as if we had suddenly ceased to hear the growing 
 of the grain, and the brooks runs leaf-shod over the 
 pebbles like a child frightened by the silence into a 
 whisper. You would say this was the very mark and 
 fashion of an hour for the silent sympathy of letter- 
 writing. Yet here have I sat, with the temptation of 
 an unblotted sheet before me, and my heart and 
 thoughts full and ready, and by my steady gazing in 
 the brook, you would fancy I had taken the sun s func 
 tion to myself, and was sitting idle to shine. All at 
 once from the open window of the cottage poured a 
 passionate outbreak of Beethoven s music (played by 
 the beloved hand), and with a kind of fear that I should 
 not overtake it, and a resistless desire (which, I dare 
 say, you have felt in hearing music) to appropriate 
 such angelic utterance to the expression of my own 
 feelings, I forthwith started into a scribble, and have 
 filled my first page as you see without drawing nib. 
 If turning over the leaf break not the charm, you are 
 likely to have an answer writ to your last before the 
 shadow on my breast creep two buttons downward. 
 
 Your letter was short, and if this were not the com 
 mencement of a new score, I should complain of it 
 more gravely. Writing so soon after we had parted, 
 you might claim that you had little to say ; yet I 
 thought (over that broiled oyster after the play) that 
 your voluble discourse would " put a girdle round the 
 earth" in less time than Ariel. I listened to you as a 
 child looks at the river, wondering when it would all 
 run by. Yet that might be partly disuse in listening 
 for I have grown rustic with a year s seclusion, I 
 found it in other things. My feet swelled with walk- 
 , ing on the pavement. My eyes were giddy with the 
 ! j multitude of people. My mouth became parched 
 | with the excitement of greetings, and surprises, and 
 the raising of my tones to the metropolitan pitch. I 
 was nearly exhausted by mid-day with the - infinite 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 29 
 
 deal of nothing." Homoeopathy alone can explain 
 why " patter versus clatter" did not finish me quite. 
 
 Ah ! how admirably Charles Matthews played that 
 night*! The papers have well named him the Mer 
 cury of comedians. His playing will probably create 
 a new school of play-writing something like what he 
 has aimed at (without sufficient study) in the pieces he 
 has written for himself. The finest thing I could im 
 agine in the dramatic way, would be a partnership (d 
 la Beaumont and Fletcher) between the stage knowl 
 edge and comic talent of Matthews, and the penetra 
 ting, natural, and observant humor of Boz. The true 
 " humor of the time" has scarcely been reached, on 
 the stage, since Moliere ; and it seems to me, that a 
 union of the talents of these two men (both very 
 young) might bring about a new era in high comedy. 
 Matthews has the advantage of having been from boy 
 hood conversant with the most polished society. He 
 was taken to Italy when a boy by one of the most 
 munificent and gay noblemen of England, an intimate 
 of his father, and, if I have been rightly informed, was 
 his companion for several years of foreign residence 
 and travel. I remember meeting him at a dinner-party 
 in London three or four years since, when probably 
 he had never thought seriously of the stage. Yet at 
 that time it was remarked by the person who sat next 
 me, that a better actor than his father was spoiled in 
 the son. He was making no particular effort at humor 
 on the occasion to which I refer; but the servants, in- I 
 eluding a fat butler of remarkable gravity, were forced 
 to ask permission to leave the room their laughter ] 
 becoming uncontrollable. He would doubtless have | 
 doubled his profits in this country had he come as a sin 
 gle star; but I trust his success will still be sufficient 
 to establish him in an annual orbit from east to west. 
 
 One goes to the city with fresh eyes after a year s 
 absence, and I was struck with one or two things, 
 which, in their gradual wax or wane, you do not seem i 
 to have remarked. What Te Deum has been chanted, ! 
 for example, over the almost complete disappearance 
 of the dandies ? I saw but two while I was in New- 
 York, and in them it was nature s caprice. They 
 would have been dandies equally in fig-leaves or wam 
 pum. The era of (studiously) plain clothes arrived 
 some years ago in England, where Count D Orsay, 
 and an occasional wanderer from Broadway, are the 
 only freshly-remembered apparitions of excessively I i 
 dressed men ; and slow as has been its advent to us, 
 it is sooner come than was predicted. I feared, 
 for one, that our European reputation of being the 
 most expensive and showy of nations was based upon 
 the natural extreme of our political character, and 
 would last as long as the republic. I am afraid 
 still, that the ostentation once shown in dress is but 
 turned into another channel, and that the equipages 
 of New- York more than supply the showiness abated 
 in the costume. But even this is a step onward. 
 Finery on the horse is better than finery on the own 
 er. The caparison of an equipage is a more manly 
 study than the toilet of the fine gentleman ; and pos 
 sesses, besides, the advantage of being left properly to 
 the saddler. On the whole, it struck me that the 
 countenance of Broadway had lost a certain flimsy and 
 tinsel character with which it used to impress me, and 
 had, in a manner, grown hearty and unpretentious. I 
 should be glad to know (and none can tell me better 
 than yourself) whether this is the outer seeming of 
 deeper changes in our character. Streets have ex 
 pressive faces, and I have long marked and trusted 
 them. It would be difficult to feel fantastic in the 
 sumptuous gravity of Bond street as difficult to feel 
 grave in the bright airiness of the Boulevard. In 
 these two thoroughfares you are made to feel the dis 
 tinctive qualities of England and France. What say 
 you of the changed expression of Broadway 1 
 
 Miss Martineau, of all travellers, has doubtless 
 written the most salutary book upon our manners 
 
 (malgre the womanish pique which distorted her 
 judgment of Everett and others), but there is one re 
 proach which she has recorded against us, in which 1 
 have felt some patriotic glory, but which I am begin 
 ning to fear we deserve no longer. The text of her 
 fault-finding is the Quixotic attentions of Americans 
 to women in public conveyances, apropos of a gentle 
 man s politeness who took an outside seat upon a 
 coach to give a lady room for her feet. From what I 
 could observe in my late two or three days travel, 1 
 think I could encourage Miss Martineau to return to 
 America with but a trifling risk of being too particularly 
 attended to, even were she incognita and young. We 
 owe this decadence of chivalry to Miss Martineau, I 
 think it may be safely said. In a country where every 
 person of common education reads every book of 
 travels in which his manners are discussed, the most 
 casual mention of a blemish, even by a less authority 
 than Miss Martineau, acts as an instant cautery. 1 
 venture to say that a young lady could scarcely be 
 found in the United States, who would not give you 
 on demand a complete list of our national faults and 
 foibles, as recorded by Hall, Hamilton, Trollope, and 
 Martineau. Why, they form the common staple of 
 conversation and jest. Ay, and of speculation ! Ham 
 ilton s book was scarcely dry from the press before or 
 ders were made out to an immense extent for egg-cups 
 and silver forks. Mrs. Trollope quite extinguished 
 the trade in spit-boxes, and made fortunes for the fin 
 ger-glass manufacturers ; and Captain Marryat, I un 
 derstand, is besieged in every city by the importers, to 
 know upon what deficiency of table furniture he in- 
 tends_to be severe. It has been more than once sug 
 gested (and his manners aided the idea) that Hamilton 
 was probably a travelling agent for the plated-fork 
 manufactories of Birmingham. And a fair caveat to 
 both readers and reviewers of future books of travels, 
 would be an inquiry touching their probable bearing 
 on English manufactures* I wotild not be illiberal to 
 Miss Martineau, but I would ask any candid person 
 whether the influx of thick shoes and cotton stockings, 
 simultaneously with her arrival in this country, could 
 have been entirely an unpremeditated coincidence? 
 
 We are indebted, I think, to the Astor House, for 
 one of the pleasantest changes that I noticed while 
 away and I like it the better, that it is a departure 
 from our general rule of imitating English habits too 
 exclusively. You were with us there, and can bear wit 
 ness to the delightful society we met at the ladies ordi 
 nary ; while the excellence of the table and service, 
 and the prevalence of well-bred company, had drawn 
 the most exclusive from their private parlors, and 
 given to the daily society of the drawing-room the 
 character of the gay and agreeable watering-places of 
 Germany. The solitary confinement of English ho 
 tels always seemed to me particularly unsuited to the 
 position and wants of the traveller. Loneliness is no 
 evil at home, where books and regular means of em 
 ployment are at hand ; but to be abandoned to four 
 walls and a pormanteau, in a strange city, of a rainy- 
 day, is what nothing but an Englishman would dream 
 of calling comfortable. It was no small relief to us, 
 on that drizzly and chilly autumn day, which you re 
 member, to descend to a magnificent drawing-room, 
 filled with some fifty or a hundred well-bred people, 
 and pass away the hours as they would be passed un 
 der similar circumstances in a hospitable country- 
 house in England. The beautiful architecture of the 
 Astor apartments, and the sumptuous elegance of the 
 furniture and table service, make it in a measure a pe 
 culiarity of the house ; but the example is likely to be 
 followed in other hotels and cities, and I hope it will 
 become a national habit, as in Germany, for strangers 
 to meet at their meals and in the public rooms. Life 
 seems to me too short for English exclusiveness in travel. 
 
 1 determined to come home by Wyoming, after you 
 left us, and took the boat to Philadelphia accordingly. 
 
30 
 
 THE MIRROR LIBRARY. 
 
 We passed two or three days in that clean and pleasant 
 city, and among other things made an excursion to 
 Laurel Hill certainly the most beautiful cemetery in 
 the world after the Necropolis of Scutari. Indeed, 
 the spot is selected with something like Turkish feel 
 ing ; for it seems as if it were intended to associate the 
 visits to the resting-places of the departed more with 
 our pleasures than our duties. The cemetery occu 
 pies a lofty promontory above the Schuylkill, possess 
 ing the inequality of surface so favorable to the ob 
 ject, and shaded with pines and other ornamental trees 
 of great age and beauty. The views down upon the 
 river, and through the sombre glades and alleys of the 
 burial-grounds, are unsurpassed for sweetness and re 
 pose. The elegance which marks everything Phila- 
 delphian, is shown already in the few monuments 
 erected. An imposing gateway leads you in from the 
 high road, and a freestone group, large as life, repre 
 senting old Mortality at work on an inscription, and 
 Scott leaning upon a tombstone to watch his toil, faces 
 the entrance. I noticed the area of one tomb en 
 closed by a chain of hearts, cast beautifully in iron. 
 The whole was laid out in gravel-walks, and there was 
 no grave without its flowers. I confess the spirit of 
 this sweet spot affected me deeply, and I look upon 
 this, and Mount Auburn at Cambridge, as delightful 
 indications of a purer growth in our national character 
 than politics and money-getting. It is a real-life 
 poetry, which reflects as much glory upon the age as 
 the birth of a Homer. 
 
 The sun has crept down to my paper, dear Doctor, 
 and the shadow of the bridge falls cooler than is good 
 for my rheumatism. I wish that the blessing of Ceres 
 upon Ferdinand and Miranda, 
 
 " Spring come to you at farthest, 
 In the very end of harvest," 
 
 might light on Glenmary. I enjoy winter when it 
 comes, but its approach is altogether detestable. It 
 is delightful to get home, however ; for, like Prospero, 
 in the play I have just quoted, there is a "delicate 
 Ariel" (content), who only waits on me in solitude. You 
 will carry out the allegory, and tell me I have Caliban 
 too, but to the rudeness of country monsters, I take as 
 kindly as Trinculo. And now I must to the woods, 
 and by the aid of these same "ancient and fish-like" 
 monsters, transplant me a tree or two before sunset. 
 Adieu. 
 
 LETTER XVIII. 
 
 OUR summer friends are flown, dear Doctor ; not a 
 leaf on the dogwood worth watching, though its flu 
 ted leaves were the last. Still the cottage looks sum 
 mery when the sun shines, for the fir-trees, which 
 were half lost among the flauntings of the deciduous 
 foliage, look out green and unchanged from the naked 
 branches of the grove, with neither reproach for our 
 neglect, nor boast over the departed. They are like 
 friends, who, in thinking of our need, forget all they 
 have laid up against us ; and, between them and the 
 lofty spirits of mankind, there is another point of re 
 semblance which I am woodsman enough to know. 
 Hew down those gay trees, whose leaves scatter at the 
 coming of winter, and they will sprout from the trod 
 den root more vigorously than before. The ever 
 green, once struck to the heart, dies. If you are of 
 my mind, you would rather learn such a pretty mock 
 of yourself in nature, than catch a fish with a gold 
 ring in his maw. 
 
 A day or two since, very much such another bit of 
 country wisdom dropped into my ears, which I thought 
 might be available in poetry, albeit the proof be un- 
 poetical. Talking with my neighbor, the miller, about 
 sawing lumber for a stable I am building, I discovered, 
 incidentally, that the mill will do more work between 
 sunset and dawn, than in the same number of hours 
 
 by daylight. Without reasoning upon it, the miller 
 knows practically that streams run faster at night. The 
 increased heaviness of the air, and the withdrawal of 
 the attraction of light, are probably the causes.* But 
 there is a neat tail for a sonnet coiled up in the fact, 
 and you may blow it with a long breath to Tom Moore. 
 
 Many thanks for your offer of shopping for us, but 
 you do injustice to the "cash stores" of Owego when 
 you presume that there is anything short of " a hair 
 off the great Chain s beard," which is not found in 
 their inventory. By the way, there is one article of 
 which I feel the daily want, and as you live among au 
 thors who procure them ready made for ballads and 
 romances, perhaps you can send me one before the 
 canal freezes. I mean a venerable hermit, who hav 
 ing passed through all the vicissitudes of human life, 
 shall have nothing earthly to occupy him but to live 
 in the woods and dispense wisdom, gratis, to all corn 
 ers. I don t know whether, in your giddy town voca 
 tions, it has ever occurred to you to turn short upon 
 yourself, in the midst of some grave but insignificant 
 routine, and inquire (of the gentleman within) wheth 
 er this is the fulfilment of your destiny ; whether these 
 little nothings are the links near your eye of the great 
 chain, which you fancy, in your elevated hours, con 
 nects you with something kindred to the stars. It is 
 oftenest in fine weather that I thus step out of myself, 
 and retiring a little space, borrow the eyes of my bet 
 ter angel, and take a look at the individual I have evac 
 uated. You shall see him yourself, dear Doctor, with 
 three strokes of the pen ; and in giving your judgment 
 of the dignity of his pursuits, perform the office to 
 which I destine the hermit above bespoken. 
 
 It is not the stout fellow, with the black London 
 hat, somewhat rusty, who stands raking away cobs 
 from the barn-floor, though the hat has seen worship 
 ful society (having fallen on those blessed days when 
 hats are as inseparable from the wearer as s/lk stock 
 ing or culotte), and sports that breadth of brim by 
 which you know me as far off as your indigenous om 
 nibus. That s Jem, the groom, to whom, with all its 
 reminiscences, the hat is but a tile. Nor is it the half 
 sailor-looking, world-worn, never-smiling man, who is 
 plying a flail upon that floor of corn, with a look as if 
 he had learned the stroke with a cutlass, though in his 
 ripped and shredded upper garment, you might recog 
 nise the frogged and velvet redingote, native of the 
 Rue de la Paix, which has fluttered on the Symple- 
 gades, and flapped the dust of the Acropolis. That 
 is my tenant in the wood, who, having passed his youth 
 and middle age with little content in a more responsi 
 ble sphere of life, lias limited his wishes to solitude 
 and a supply of the wants of nature ; and though quite 
 capable of telling story for story with my old fellow- 
 traveller, probably thinks of it only to wish its ravelled 
 frogs were horn buttons, and its bursted seams less 
 penetrable by the rain. 
 
 And a third person is one of my neighbors, who can 
 see nothing done without showing you a " cuter 
 way," and who, sitting on the sill of the barn, is amu 
 sing himself, quite of his own accord, with beheading, 
 cleaning, and picking an unfortunate duck, whose leg 
 was accidentally broken by the flail. His voluntary 
 occupation is stimulated by neither interest nor good 
 nature, but is simply the itching to be doing some 
 thing, which in one shape or another, belongs to ev 
 ery genuine Jonathan. Near him, in cowhide boots, 
 frock of fustian, and broad-brimmed sombrero of coarse 
 straw, stands, breathing from a bout with the flail, the 
 individual from whom I have stepped apart, and upon 
 whose morning s worth of existence you shall put a 
 philosopher s estimate. 
 
 I presume my three hours labor might be done for 
 about three shillings my mind, meantime, being en 
 tirely occupied with what I was about, calculating the 
 number of bushels to the acre, the price of corn far 
 ther down the river, and between whiles, discussing 
 
LETTERS FROM UNDER A BRIDGE. 
 
 31 
 
 the merits of a patent corn-sheller, which we had 
 abandoned for the more laborious but quicker process 
 of thrashing. 
 
 " Purty cute tool !" says my neighbor, giving the 
 machine a look out of the corner of his yellow eye, 
 "but teoo slow ! Corn ought to come off ravin dis 
 tracted. Taint no use to eat it up in labor. Where 
 was that got out ?" 
 
 " Twas invented in Albany, I rather think." 
 " Wai, I guess t want. It s a Varmount notion. 
 Rot them Green Mountingeers ! they re a spiling 
 the country. People won t work when them things 
 lay round. Have you heern of a machine for botton- 
 ing your gallowses behind?" 
 " No, I have not." 
 
 " Wai, I ve been expecting on t. There aint no 
 other hard work they haint economized. Is them 
 your hogs in the garding ?" 
 
 Three vast porkers had nosed open the gate, during 
 the discussion, and were making the best of their op 
 portunities. After a vigorous chase, the latch was 
 closed upon them securely, and my neighbor resumed 
 his duck. 
 
 " Is there no way of forcing people to keep those 
 brutes at home," I asked of my silent tenant. 
 
 " Yes, sir. The law provides that you may shut 
 them up, and send word to the owners to come and 
 take them away." 
 
 " Wai ! It s a chore, if you ever tried it, to catch 
 a hog if he s middlin spry, and when he s cotch, 
 you ve got to feed him, by law, till he s sent for ; and 
 it don t pay, mister." 
 
 " But you can charge for the feed," says the other. 
 " Pesky little, I tell ye. Pig fodder s cheap, and 
 they don t pay you for carrying on t to em, nor for 
 catching the critters. It s a losin consarn." 
 " Suppose I shoot them." 
 
 " Sartin you can. The owner 11 put his vally on it, 
 and you can have as much pork at that price as 11 fill 
 your barn. The hull neighb r hood 11 drive their 
 hogs into your garding." 
 
 I saw that my neighbor had looked at the matter all I 
 round ; but I was sure, from his manner, that he could, j 
 if encouraged, suggest a remedy for the nuisance. 
 
 " I would give a bushel of that handsome corn," said 
 I, " to know how to be rid of them." 
 
 " Be so perlite as to measure it out, mister, while I 
 head in that hog. I ll show you how the deacon kept 
 em out of the new buryin ground while the fence was 
 buildin ." 
 
 He laid down the duck, which was, by this time, 
 fairly picked, and stood a moment looking at the three j 
 hogs, now leisurely turning up the grass at the road- 
 side. For a reason which I did not at the moment j 
 conceive, he presently made a dash at the thinnest of j 
 the three, a hungry-looking brute, built with an ap- j 
 proach to the greyhound, and missed catching him by 
 an arm s length. Unluckily for the hog, however, the 
 road was lined with crooked rail-fence, which deceived 
 him with constant promise of escape by a short turn, I 
 and by a skilful heading off, and a most industrious 
 chase of some fifteen minutes, he was cornered at last, 
 and secured by the hind leg. 
 
 " A hog," said he, dragging him along with the 
 greatest gravity, "hates a straight line like pizen. If 
 they d run right in eend, you d never catch em in | 
 natur. Like some folks, aint it ? Boy, fetch me a j 
 skrimmage of them whole corn." 
 
 He drove the hog before him, wheelbarrow fashion, 
 into an open cow-pen, and put up the bars. The boy 
 (his son, who had been waiting for him outside the barn) 
 brought him a few ears of ripe corn, and as soon as the 
 hog had recovered his breath a little, he threw them 
 into the pen, and drew out a knife from his pocket, 
 which he whetted on the rail before him. 
 
 " Now," said he, as the voracious animal, unaccus 
 
 tomed to such appetizing food, seized ravenously on 
 the corn, "it s according to law to take up a stray hog 
 and feed him, aint it?" 
 
 " Certainly." 
 
 By this time the greedy creature began to show symp 
 toms of choking, and my friend s design became clearer. 
 
 " And it s Christian charity," he continued, letting 
 down the bars, and stepping in as the hog rolled upon 
 his side, " not to let your neighbor lose his critters by 
 choking, it you can kill em in time to save their meat, 
 ain t it ?" 
 
 Certainly." 
 
 "Wai!" said he, cutting the animal s throat, "you 
 can send word to the owner of that pork to come and 
 take it away, and if he don t like to salt down at a min 
 ute s notice, he ll keep the rest at hum, and pay you 
 for your corn. And that s the way the deacon sarved 
 my hogs, darn his Jong face, and I eat pork till I was 
 sick of the sight on t." 
 
 A bushel of corn being worth about six shillings, 1 
 had paid twice the worth of my own morning s work for 
 this very Yankee expedient. My neighbor borrowed 
 a bag, shouldered his grist, and trudged off to the 
 mill, and relinquishing my flail to Jem, I leaned over 
 the fence in the warm autumn sunshine, and with my 
 eyes on the swift yet still bosom of the river below, 
 fell to wondering, as 1 said before, whether the hour 
 of which I have given you a picture, was a fitting link 
 in a wise man s destiny, The day was one to give 
 birth to great resolves, bright, elastic, and genial ; and 
 the leafless trees, so lorn and comfortless in cloudier 
 times, seemed lifting into the sky with heroic endu 
 rance, while the swollen Owaga, flowing on with twice 
 the summer s depth, seemed gathering soul to defy the 
 fetters of winter. There was something inharmonious 
 with little pursuits in everything I could see. Such 
 air and sunshine, I thought, should overtake one in 
 some labor of philanthropy, in some sacrifice for 
 friend or country, in the glow of some noble composi 
 tion, or, if in the exercise of physical energy, at least to 
 some large profit. Yet a few shillings expressed the 
 whole result of my morning s employment, and the 
 society by which my thoughts had been colored were 
 such as I have described. Still this is "farming," and 
 so lived Cincinnatus. 
 
 Now, dear Doctor, you can be grand among your 
 gallipots, and if your eye turns in upon yourself, you 
 may reflect complacently on the almost sublime ends 
 of the art of healing ; but resolve me, if you please, 
 ny little problem. What state of the weather should 
 I live up to ? My present avocations, well enough in 
 i gray day, or a rainy, or a raw, are quite put out of 
 countenance by a blue sky and a genial sun. If it 
 .vere always like to-day, I should be obliged to seek 
 distinction in some way. There would be no looking 
 such a sky in the face three days consecutively, bust 
 ed always with pigs and corn. You see the use of a 
 icrmit to settle such points. But adieu, while I have 
 room to write it. 
 
 LETTER TO THE UNKNOWN PURCHASER AND NEXT 
 OCCUPANT OF GLENMARY. 
 
 SIR : In selling you the dew and sunshine ordained 
 .o fall hereafter on this bright spot of earth the 
 vaters on their way to this sparkling brook the tints 
 nixed for the flowers of that enamelled meadow, and 
 he songs bidden to be sung in coining summers by 
 he feathery builders in Glenmary, I know not whether 
 o wonder more at the omnipou>ncf of money, or at 
 my own impertinent audacity toward Nature. How 
 you can buy the right to exclude at will every other 
 creature made in God s image from sitting by this 
 )rook, treading on that carpet of flowers, or lying lis- 
 ening to the birds in the shade of these glorious trees 
 
32 
 
 THE MIRROR LIBRARY. 
 
 how I can sell it you, is a mystery not understood 
 by the Indian, and dark, I must say to me. 
 
 "Lord of the soil," is a title which conveys your 
 privileges but poorly. You are master of waters flow 
 ing at this moment, perhaps, in a river of Judea, or 
 floating in clouds over some spicy island of the tropics, 
 bound hither after many changes. There are lilies 
 and violets ordered for you in millions, acres of sun 
 shine in daily instalments, and dew nightly in propor 
 tion. There are throats to be tuned with song, and 
 wings to be painted with red and gold, blue and yel 
 low; thousands of them, and all tributaries to you. 
 Your corn is ordered to be sheathed in silk, and lifted 
 high to the sun. Your grain is to be duly bearded 
 and stemmed. There is perfume distilling for your 
 clover, and juices for your grasses and fruits. Ice 
 will be here for your wine, shade for your refreshment 
 at noon, breezes and showers and snow-flakes; all in 
 their season, and all " deeded to you for forty dollars 
 the acre ! Gods ! what a copyhold of property for a 
 fallen world !" 
 
 Mine has been but a short lease of this lovely and 
 well-endowed domain (the duration of a smile of for 
 tune, five years, scarce longer than a five-act play) ; 
 but as in a play we sometimes live through a life, 
 it seems to me that I have lived a life at Glenmary. 
 Allow me this, and then you must allow me the priv 
 ilege of those who, at the close of life, leave something 
 behind them : that of writing out my loill. Though I 
 depart this life, I would fain, like others, extend my 
 ghostly hand into the future ; and if wings are to be 
 borrowed or stolen where I go, you may rely on my 
 hovering around and haunting you, in visitations not 
 restricted by cock-crowing. 
 
 Trying to look at Glenmary through your eyes, sir, 
 I see too plainly that I have not shaped my ways as if 
 expecting a successor in my lifetime. I did not, I am 
 free to own. I thought to have shuffled off my mor 
 tal coil tranquilly here ; flitting at last in company 
 with some troop of my autumn leaves, or some bevy 
 of spring blossoms, or with snow in the thaw ; my 
 tenants at my back, as a landlord may say. I have 
 counted on a life-interest in the trees, trimming them 
 accordingly ; and in the squirrels and birds, encour 
 aging them to chatter and build and fear nothing ; no 
 guns permitted on the premises. I have had my will 
 of this beautiful stream. I have carved the woods into 
 a shape of my liking. I have propagated the despised 
 sumach and the persecuted hemlock and "pizen lau 
 rel." And " no end to the weeds dug up and set out 
 again," as one of my neighbors delivers himself. I 
 have built a bridge over Glenmary brook, which the 
 town looks to have kept up by " the place," and we 
 have plied free ferry over the river, I and my man 
 Tom, till the neighbors, from the daily saving of the 
 two miles round, have got the trick of it. And be 
 twixt the aforesaid Glenmary brook and a certain 
 muddy and plebeian gutter formerly permitted to join 
 company with, and pollute it, I have procured a di 
 vorce at much trouble and pains, a guardian duty en 
 tailed of course on my successor. 
 
 First of all, sir, let me plead for the old trees of 
 Glenmary ! Ah ! those friendly old trees ! The cot 
 tage stands belted in with them, a thousand visible 
 from the door, and of stems and branches worthy of the 
 great valley of the Susquehannah. For how much 
 music played without thanks am I indebted to those 
 leaf-organs of changing tone ? for how many whisper 
 ings of thought breathed like oracles into my ear? for 
 how many new shapes of beauty moulded in the 
 leaves by the wind ? for how much companionship, 
 solace, and welcome ? Steadfast and constant is the 
 countenance of such friends, God be praised for then- 
 staid welcome and sweet fidelity ! If I love them bet 
 ter than some things human, it is no fault of am- 
 bitiousness in the trees. They stand where they did. 
 But in recoiling from mankind, one may find them the 
 
 next kindliest things, and be glad of dumb friendship. 
 Spare those old trees, gentle sir! 
 
 In the smooth walk which encircles the meadow be 
 twixt that solitary Olympian sugar-maple and the mar 
 gin of the river, dwells a portly and venerable toad ; 
 who (if I may venture to bequeath you my friends) 
 must be commended to your kindly consideration. 
 Though a squatter, he was noticed in our first rambles 
 along the stream, five years since, for his ready civility 
 in yielding the way, not hurriedly, however, nor with 
 an obsequiousness unbecoming a republican, but de 
 liberately and just enough ; sitting quietly on the grass 
 till our passing by gave him room again on the warm 
 and trodden ground. Punctually after the April 
 cleansing of the walk, this jewelled habitue, from his 
 indifferent lodgings hard by, emerges to take his pleas 
 ure in the sun ; and there, at any hour when a gentle 
 man is likely to be abroad, you may find him, patient 
 on his os coccygis, or vaulting to his asylum of high 
 grass. This year, he shows, I am grieved to remark, 
 an ominous obesity, likely to render him obnoxious to 
 the female eye, and, with the trimness of his shape, 
 has departed much of that measured alacrity which 
 first won our regard. He presumes a little on your 
 allowance for old age; and with this pardonable weak 
 ness growing upon him, it seems but right that his 
 position and standing should be tenderly made known 
 to any new-comer on the premises. In the cutting of 
 the next grass, slice me not up my fat friend, sir! nor 
 set your cane down heedlessly in his modest domain. 
 He is "mine ancient," and I would fain do him a 
 good turn with you. 
 
 For my spoilt family of squirrels, sir, I crave nothing 
 but immunity from powder and shot. They require 
 coaxing to come on the same side of the tree with 
 you, and though saucy to me, I observe that they com 
 mence acquaintance invariably with a safe mistrust. 
 One or two of them have suffered, it is true, from too 
 hasty a confidence in my greyhound Maida, but the 
 beauty of that gay fellow was a trap against which na 
 ture had furnished them with no warning instinct ! 
 (A fact, sir, which would prettily point a moral !) The 
 large hickory on the edge of the lawn, and the black 
 walnut over the shoulder of the flower-garden, have 
 been, through my dynasty, sanctuaries inviolate for 
 squirrels. I pray you, sir, let them not be "reformed , 
 out," under your administration. 
 
 Of our feathered connexions and friends, we are 
 most bound to a pair of Phebe-birds and a merry Bob- 
 o -Lincoln, the first occupying the top of the your>; 
 maple near the door of the cottage, and the latter ex 
 ecuting his bravuras upon the clump of alder-busht s 
 in the meadow, though, in common with many a ga^ - 
 plumaged gallant like himself, his whereabout after dark 
 is a dark mystery. He comes every year from his rice- 
 plantation in Florida to pass the summer at Glenmary. 
 Pray keep him safe from percussion-caps, and let no 
 urchin with a long pole poke down our trusting Phe- 
 bes; anmials in that same tree for three summers. 
 There are humming-birds, too, whom we have com 
 plimented and looked sweet upon, but they can not be 
 identified from morning to morning. And there is a 
 golden oriole who sings through May on a dog-wood 
 tree by the brook-side, but he has fought shy of o jr 
 crumbs and coaxing, and let him go ! We are males 
 for his betters, with all his gold livery . "With these 
 reservations, sir, I commend the birds to your friend 
 ship and kind keeping. 
 
 And now, sir, I have nothing else to ask, save or.ly 
 your watchfulness over the small nook reserved from 
 this purchase of seclusion and loveliness. In the sha 
 dy depths of the small glen above you, among the wild- 
 flowers and music, the music of the brook babbling 
 over rocky steps, ia, a spot sacred to love and memo 
 ry. Keep it inviolate, and as much of the happiness 
 of Glenmary as we can leave behind, stay with you for 
 recompense !