GIFT OF 
 
 THOMAS RUTHERFORD BAOOH 
 AL LIBRARY 
 

FIRESIDE TRAVELS 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
 
 WITH INTRODUCTION 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM P. TRENT 
 
 " Travelling makes a man sit still in his old age with satis- 
 faction, and travel over the world again in his chair and bed 
 by discourse and thoughts" 
 
 THE VOYAGE OF ITALY, BY RICHARD LASSELS, Gent. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1906, 
 BY THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 
 
To 
 
 w. w. s. 
 
 WHO carves his thought in marble will not scorn 
 These pictured bubbles, if so far they fly; 
 They will recall days ruddy but with morn, 
 Not red like these late past or drawing nigh ! 
 
 284770 
 
THE greater part of this volume was printed ten 
 years ago in Putnam s Monthly and Graham s Maga 
 zine. The additions (most of them about Italy) 
 have been made up. as the original matter was, from 
 old letters and journals written on the spot. My 
 wish was to describe not so much what I went to see. 
 as what I saw that was most unlike what one sees at 
 home. If the reader find entertainment, he will find 
 all I hoped to give him. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO .... 3 
 
 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 5$ 
 
 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL IN ITALY AND ELSEWHERE. 
 
 AT SEA 101 
 
 IN THE MEDITERRANEAN 114 
 
 ITALY 122 
 
 A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC . . .182 
 
 vii 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 ONE would scarcely guess from its peaceful, at 
 tractive title and its genial contents that the little 
 volume here presented began its existence as a book 
 and existence as a book, it should be remembered, 
 is something very different from existence in the form 
 of scattered articles in magazines in the fourth 
 year of that great war between the States in which 
 the intensely patriotic Lowell took so fervid an in 
 terest. The "Fireside Travels" of such a man at 
 such a time must have been actually turned to the 
 fields and thickets and swamps of Virginia, where 
 Lee with his diminishing forces was bravely but 
 vainly contesting the advance of Grant and his well- 
 recruited army. "The President s Policy," "Mc- 
 Clellan s Report," "The Rebellion: its Causes and 
 Consequences," these items from Lowell s bibliog 
 raphy for the year of grace or, less ironically, the 
 year of strife 1864 seem much more appropriate 
 to the epoch than a sketch of by-gone Cambridge, 
 a journal of woodland life, a collection of traveller s 
 notes. Newly assumed editorial duties on the old 
 and influential North American Review, where he 
 could display some at least of the energy and acumen 
 he had shown as a journalist in the anti-slavery cause, 
 had in their selves nothing incompatible with the 
 
X INTRODUCTION. 
 
 character of the times or of the versatile man part 
 poet, part professor, part critic, part publicist; but 
 extracting articles from ten -year-old magazines, re 
 vising them, and seeing them through the press in a 
 new form would seem to be, mutatis mutandis, the 
 occupation of a Herrick rather than of a Lowell 
 during a great civil war. 
 
 A moment s reflection, however, shows us that this 
 is an entirely superficial view of the matter. Lowell 
 was no exception to the rule that in times of stress 
 the spirit craves and needs the contrast and relaxation 
 afforded by excursions of the imagination or the 
 memory or both into the enchanted regions of the 
 ideal, whether of the golden past or of the golden 
 future. Perhaps, as he corrected the proofs of his 
 new volume practically his seventh appearance be 
 tween boards, but only his second as a writer of prose 
 - Lowell s thoughts turned to old Cambridge, 1 where 
 men destined to prominence in field or council had 
 strolled as careless and happy college youths, or to 
 a little grave in Rome, where a tiny boy 2 lay buried 
 who could never sport under the Harvard elms and 
 add academic lustre to an honored name. 
 
 Why "Fireside Travels" was published when it 
 was, and what Lowell thought about the book at the 
 time, are matters upon which his correspondence and 
 
 1 The use of this phrase at once recalls the " Old Cam 
 bridge " of Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to which 
 readers of the first of the essays in this volume will do well to 
 turn. 
 
 2 Walter Lowell, James Russell Lowell s only son, born 
 22d Dec., 1850; died gth June, 1852. Scudder s "James 
 Russell Lowell," II., 418. 
 
INTRODUCTION. xi 
 
 the chief biographical sources of information appear 
 to throw no light whatsoever. His letters of 1864 
 show plainly that his active mind frequently turned 
 away from thoughts of politics and carnage. He 
 congratulates Mr. Howells on the latter s " Venetian 
 letters in the Advertiser ." He tells Professor Norton 
 that he is enjoying his vacation with proofs every day 
 
 the proofs being those of the first volume of a 
 frustrated series of select old plays. He drops, with 
 his accustomed facility, into doggerel of the inten 
 tional and somewhat bearable variety but nowhere 
 does he say a word about " Fireside Travels." Mr. 
 Scudder s index does not record any mention of it in 
 the two chapters of one hundred and fifty pages 
 devoted to Lowell s life between 1858 and. 1872. Nor 
 is the case much improved when we turn back ten 
 years to learn something about the component parts 
 of the volume when they first appeared. 
 
 "A Moosehead Journal" was published in Novem 
 ber, 1853, in that promising but short-lived periodical, 
 Putnam s Magazine, of which Lowell s friend, C. F. 
 Briggs, was one of the editors. Mr. Scudder tells us 
 that Briggs received the contribution enthusiastically 
 and that it "was in effect a journal, sent home" to 
 Lowell s wife, "of an excursion made by Lowell in 
 the summer of 1853 w ^ n m * s nephew Charles." l In 
 September the author, writing to his editor, remarked : 
 
 "Don t cut it in halves. It will make but eleven 
 
 1 The " Young Telemachus," General Charles Russell 
 Lowell, Jr., who fell at the battle of Cedar Creek. His widow, 
 Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell, became one of the best-known 
 philanthropists of New York City. 
 
xii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 pages, 1 and is much better all together. If it is dull, 
 the public won t thank you for making two doses of it; 
 if entertaining, they will be glad to have it all at once." 
 One scarcely believes that Lowell really thought his 
 article dull; one has no doubt whatsoever as to his 
 editorial sagacity. 
 
 "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago" appeared in 
 Putnam s for April and May, 1854. It then bore 
 the title which ten years later Lowell reserved for his 
 entire volume those seductive words, " Fireside 
 Travels." According to Mr. Scudder, the germ of 
 the paper was a sketch of the painter -poet Washington 
 Allston, which, in September, 1853, Lowell began for 
 Putnam s, but did not put to separate use. The 
 verses to Menenius, happily few in number, were 
 taken from another contribution intended for Put 
 nam s, the unprinted portion of the long serio-comic 
 poem "Our Own," which Mr. Scudder, curiously 
 enough, conceived to have been written in Alexan 
 drines, and the readers of Putnam s in 1853, ^ ess 
 curiously, wished discontinued as soon as possible. 
 Writing to Briggs, Lowell affirmed, as well he might 
 without conceit, that his sketch of Cambridge was 
 done as nobody but he could do it, for no one else 
 knew the old town so well. "Tt is better than that 
 Moosehead thing," he wrote, "and Maria liked it." 
 The last three words have a pathos of their own, when 
 we remember that the lovely and talented wife, who 
 had done so much to keep Lowell s genius from 
 diffusing itself in flats and shallows, "went home," to 
 1 It made over twelve. 
 
INTRODUCTION. xiii 
 
 use her husband s words, on October 27, 1853. She 
 never saw in print the delightful essay that had 
 charmed her in its unfinished state. 
 
 Neither did she see the printed records of the 
 Italian journey she had made with her husband and 
 children in 1851 and 1852, for they were first published 
 as "Leaves from my Italian Journey" in Graham s 
 Magazine for April, May, and July, 1854. But she 
 had seen the land of romance with him, even if she 
 had buried her little son there, and Lowell had doubt 
 less read to her the interesting letters to friends at 
 home which served as first sketches for some pages of 
 the essays. She had also seen her husband and the 
 Edelmann Storg (the sculptor William Wetmore Story) 
 with their friends act in two amateur representations 
 of "A Midsummer Night s Dream," and to have seen 
 Lowell, in the Eternal City, taking the parts of Pyra- 
 mus and Bottom must have afforded much more 
 entertainment than anybody ever got or is likely to 
 get out of Lowell s writings about Italy, full of clever 
 ness though these undoubtedly are. 
 
 It was not to be expected that when he gathered 
 them into a book, Lowell would leave his articles 
 precisely as they stood ten years before. On the 
 whole, however, he made comparatively few changes 
 of importanre in "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago" and 
 in "A Moosehead Journal," nor in later revisions was 
 anything essential added. A reference to Beowulf, a 
 quotation from Fuller, may be present or absent with 
 out the average reader being the wiser or thinking of 
 Lowell as much less than the widest ranger among 
 
xiv INTRODUCTION. 
 
 books and the best quoter from them to be found in 
 the ranks of American men of letters. With " Leaves 
 from my Journal in Italy and Elsewhere" the case is 
 somewhat different. The two sections entitled "At 
 Sea" and "In the Mediterranean" do not appear to 
 have been printed in Graham s, and they are not to 
 be identified, at least under those titles, in Mr. Scud- 
 der s bibliography. Of the remainder, about twenty- 
 five pages that pleased the reader of 1864 were denied, 
 for some reason or other, to the reader of 1854. 
 Among the added pages were the reflections on 
 "material antiquity" that close "A Few Bits of Roman 
 Mosaic," the characteristically bold confession with 
 regard to Michael Angelo in the same essay, and the 
 amusing incident of the Italian and the dead parrot 
 which he was willing to give up to the customs officer, 
 not the least diverting digression in "Italy." Later, 
 Lowell added a few pages and omitted one of the most 
 atrocious of all his witticisms, that about Milton s 
 cataract, which, however, was revived to plague the 
 American poet s memory in an article devoted to him 
 nearly thirty years afterwards by a noted British 
 critic. We may now put bibliography behind us 
 with the remark that, when he collected his essays, 
 the Harvard professor was enabled to correct his 
 Italian, and, in at least one case, to get rid of a false 
 gender in Latin by using an equivalent English noun. 
 Linguistic facility is a great blessing, but it has its 
 drawbacks. 
 
 What now is to be said in praise of a book which 
 for more than forty years has charmed thousands of 
 
INTRODUCTION. XV 
 
 readers who never saw Lowell, nearly as much as it 
 did the artist Story when, at the close of 1864, he read 
 it in a London edition and recalled the delightful ex 
 cursions he had taken with its author? Certainly 
 there is nothing new to say about it. The Lowell who 
 had already revealed himself as a poet, a humorist, 
 there are many people who think "The Biglow 
 Papers" his greatest achievement, a lover of books, 
 showed himself here again in these three roles and in 
 a fourth already familiar and the most natural of all, 
 that of a genuinely patriotic American, who could 
 appreciate what Europe had to offer without waver 
 ing in his belief that his native land was the fairest 
 and most favored under the sun. This Lowell, as 
 well as Lowell the brilliant journalist and editor and 
 the wide-awake traveller and genial companion, had 
 been known for years before "Fireside Travels" ap 
 peared, and was to be known as a favorite figure to 
 Americans for many a year to come. As has been 
 said, however, a book makes a different sort of im 
 pression from that produced by magazine articles, and 
 it is probable that the publication of "Fireside 
 Travels" did something to reveal Lowell, the essayist, 
 to the world. When "Among my Books" appeared 
 in 1870 and "My Study Windows" in 1872, the role 
 of authoritative critic was added to that of essayist, 
 and American literature could boast another piose 
 writer of eminence. Perhaps the success of "Fire 
 side Travels" had something to do with the writing of 
 "A Great Public Character," "My Garden Acquaint 
 ance," and "A Good Word for Winter," which would 
 
xvi INTRODUCTION. 
 
 not seem out of place in that volume, as well as with 
 the writing of the more technically critical essays on 
 Dryden and Chaucer that appeared in the later 
 collections. 
 
 So much at least we can say with safety. It is 
 probably still too early to pronounce with confidence 
 how much of these volumes will weather all the shocks 
 of time, or how far Lowell, whose brilliance no one 
 can doubt, will prove a satisfying and so a standard 
 or classic writer of prose. It is hard, indeed, to 
 imagine that a time will ever come when the essential 
 portions of "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago" the 
 pictures of the barber and the deacons and the vener 
 able artist and the old President and the Greek Pro 
 fessor crossed in love will cease to delight. As long 
 as Harvard is Harvard and New England is New Eng 
 land, and as long as men and women in other parts 
 of America reverence them for the contributions they 
 have made to the national life, so long, it would seem, 
 will Lowell s exquisitely loyal and tenderly humorous 
 pages be read with affectionate reverence. It would 
 be a little rash, however, to say as much, or nearly as 
 much, about the journal and the notes of the ebullient 
 traveller. In 1864 they had their value. They con 
 tinued, though in a very individual fashion, the work 
 begun by Irving and Cooper and Willis and Long 
 fellow and Bryant the work of spreading before 
 eager American eyes the treasures of European cul 
 ture and of opening those same eyes to the natural 
 beauties of the new world itself. Lowell was a man 
 of wider and richer culture, of more active imagina- 
 
INTRODUCTION. xvii 
 
 tion, of livelier fancy, and, it is needless to say, of 
 more exuberant humor than any of his predecessors, 
 or of his contemporaries, like Bayard Taylor and 
 Curtis. But what he did in " A Moosehead Journal" 
 and in his Italian notes, while it differed immensely 
 in manner, did not differ essentially in purpose from 
 what they had done and were doing. Their work has 
 aged, mainly because a better-educated and a more 
 widely travelled generation has outgrown it, or at 
 least has need for new interpreters. It seems no 
 treason to Lowell s memory to say- that protably his 
 similar work will be outgrown, if it has not teen 
 superseded already. Its form, sprightly and clever 
 as it is, can hardly save it, for each generation has its 
 own standards of sprightliness and cleverness. 
 
 There is a point, however, that must be considered 
 in this connection before we can be warranted in 
 relying to any great extent upon the above line of 
 reasoning. Lowell s descriptions of his experiences, 
 in Maine and Italy may belong to a category of litera 
 ture that speedily becomes obsolete ; but they are full 
 of an element that is far from perishable and that has 
 saved many a piece of writing the form and general 
 substance of which seemed to doom it to destruction. 
 It was not the beauties and mysteries of nature or 
 the charm and power of an old civil izaticn that 
 specially riveted the eyes and stimulated the thoughts 
 of Lowell the traveller. It was the men rnd women 
 he met. Just as with " Cambridge Thirty Years A go," 
 it is the human interest of "A Moosehead Journal" 
 and "Leaves from My Journal," that keeps one read- 
 
Xviii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 ing them to the last page. It is Uncle Zeb, and Mr. 
 X, and Leopoldo, and the stout Italian landlady that 
 stand out, with the old Cambridge worthies, when we 
 have closed the book. They seem as human to us as 
 they doubtless did to the magazine readers of 1854. 1 
 But if they are human to us, will they not, in all proba 
 bility, be human to our grandchildren ? Probably they 
 will be, to such at least of them as turn to this book 
 of Lowell s; but questions of style and of the propor 
 tion of interesting to uninteresting material will enter 
 into the determination of the number of readers " Fire 
 side Travels" will have two generations hence. That, 
 however, is a long time to look ahead. 
 
 It is almost needless to say that the most interest 
 ing exhibition of human nature given in " Fireside 
 Travels" is made by Lowell himself. How irresist 
 ible he is in his good spirits and his wit; how im 
 possible it is for him to check his poetic fancy, which 
 .suggests figures of speech altogether too numerous 
 and unrestrained for the comfort of sober, decorous 
 prose; how generous to a fault he is in quoting from 
 the old books he loves and wishes to recommend to 
 his readers. It is fortunate that " Fireside Travels" 
 is not included among the classics that must be an 
 notated for the use of schools, since it would be diffi 
 cult to find editors sufficiently widely read to track 
 the divagating Lowell into all his by-paths of learn 
 ing. Probably if he had quoted less, if he had for- 
 
 l It is a pleasure to find that Mr. Leon H. Vincent in his 
 recent book, " American Literary Masters," has emphasized 
 this point, which Lowell himself made at the close of "A 
 Moosehead Journal." 
 
INTRODUCTION. XIX 
 
 borne to drop into verse of his own composing, if he 
 had ruthlessly cut out the more facile of his epigrams, 
 such as "our glass of naval fashion and our mould of 
 aquatic form," he might have given us a book less 
 amenable to critical censure; but, then, would he 
 have given us so much of his irresponsible, attractive 
 self? He might easily have improved his prose style, 
 yet in making it what it is now the fashion to call 
 " distinguished," he might still more easily have de 
 prived it of the human, unaffected qualities that 
 render it alluring to many readers, despite its technical 
 imperfections. For one phrase like "the ever-renew 
 ing unassuetude" that we have to forgive, there are 
 dozens that we wish to remember. We continue, after 
 Lowell, to assert that "hitherto Boswell is quite as 
 unique as Shakespeare." We admire the epigram 
 matic power displayed in "Morals can never be safely 
 embodied in the constable," and we forget that a few 
 lines lower the humor of "that model of the hospitable 
 old English gentleman, Mr. Comus!" is very forced 
 and thin. 
 
 Lowell was unfortunate in this book on two occa 
 sions, when dealing with Milton, because he forgot 
 that there are times when the instincts of the gentle 
 man must act as a posse to apprehend and restrain 
 the lawless sallies of the wit. But, as a rule, his 
 references to writers and books show what a sure 
 instinct and what a sound equipment he had for 
 criticism, and the independence with which he ex 
 presses his judgments is often truly comforting. He 
 gives proofs of his genuine democracy, of his sym- 
 
XX INTRODUCTION. 
 
 pathy with the higher features of mediaeval civiliza 
 tion, of his interest in political reform, of his fine 
 capacity for friendship. In short, the Lowell of the 
 " Fireside Travels" is in all essential respects a large, 
 genial nature full of life and imagination and culture, 
 and ready to ripen into the critic, scholar, and pub 
 licist, who, in his old age, commanded the respect of 
 the English-speaking world. 
 
 W. P. TRENT. 
 
FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 
 
 A MEMOIR ADDRESSED TO THE EDELMANN STORG IN 
 ROME. 
 
 IN those quiet old winter evenings, around our 
 Roman fireside, it was not seldom, my dear Storg, 
 that we talked of the advantages of travel, and in 
 speeches not so long that our cigars would forget their 
 fire (the measure of just conversation) debated the 
 comparative advantages of the Old and New Worlds. 
 You will remember how serenely I bore the imputa 
 tion of provincialism, while I asserted that those 
 advantages were reciprocal; that an orbed and bal 
 anced life would revolve between the Old and the 
 New as opposite, but not antagonistic poles, the true 
 equator lying somewhere midway between them. I 
 asserted also, that there were two epochs at which 
 a man might travel, before twenty, for pure enjoy 
 ment, and after thirty, for instruction. At twenty, 
 the eye is sufficiently delighted with merely seeing; 
 new things are pleasant only because they are not 
 old; and we take everything heartily and naturally 
 in the right way, for even mishaps are like knives, 
 3 
 
4 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the 
 blade or the handle. After thirty, we carry along 
 our scales, with lawful weights stamped by experi 
 ence, and our chemical tests acquired by study, with 
 which to ponder and assay all arts, institutions, and 
 manners, and to ascertain either their absolute worth 
 or their merely relative value to ourselves. On the 
 whole, I declared myself in favor of the after thirty 
 method, was it partly (so difficult is it to distin 
 guish between opinions and personalities) because I 
 had tried it myself, though with scales so imperfect 
 and tests so inadequate? Perhaps so, but more be 
 cause I held that a man should have travelled thor 
 oughly round himself and the great terra incognita 
 just outside and inside his own threshold, before 
 he undertook voyages of discovery to other worlds. 
 " Far countries he can safest visit who himself is 
 doughty," says Beowulf. Let him first thoroughly 
 explore that strange country laid down on the maps 
 as SEAUTON; let him look down into its craters, and 
 find whether they be burnt-out or only smouldering; 
 let him know between the good and evil fruits of its 
 passionate tropics; let him experience how health 
 ful are its serene and high -lying table-lands; let him 
 be many times driven back (till he wisely consent to 
 be baffled) from its speculative northwest passages 
 that lead mostly to the dreary solitudes of a sunless 
 world, before he think himself morally equipped for 
 travels to more distant regions. But does he com 
 monly even so much as think of this, or, while buying 
 amplest trunks for his corporeal apparel, does it once 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 5 
 
 occur to him how very small a portmanteau will 
 contain all his mental and spiritual outfit? It is 
 more often true that a man who could scarce be in 
 duced to expose his unclothed body even to a village 
 of prairie-dogs, will complacently display a mind as 
 naked as the day it was born, without so much as a 
 fig-leaf of acquirement on it, in every gallery of 
 Europe, 
 
 " Not caring, so that sumpter-horse, the back, 
 Be hung with gaudy trappings, in what coarse, 
 Yea, rags most beggarly, they clothe the soul." 
 
 If not with a robe dyed in the Tyrian purple of imagi 
 native culture, if not with the close-fitting, work -day 
 dress of social or business training, at least, my 
 dear Storg, one might provide himself with the merest 
 waist-clout of modesty ! 
 
 But if it be too much to expect men to traverse 
 and survey themselves before they go abroad, we might 
 certainly ask that they should be familiar with their 
 own villages. If not even that, then it is of little 
 import whither they go; and let us hope that, by 
 seeing how calmly their own narrow neighborhood 
 bears their departure, they may be led to think 
 that the circles of disturbance set in motion by the 
 fall of their tiny drop into the ocean of eternity, will 
 not have a radius of more than a week in any direc 
 tion; and that the world can endure the subtraction 
 of even a justice of the peace with provoking equa 
 nimity. In this way, at least, foreign travel may do 
 them good, may make them, if not wiser, at any 
 rate less fussy. Is it a great way to go to school, 
 
6 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 and a great fee to pay for the lesson ? We cannot give 
 too much for the genial stoicism which, when life flouts 
 us, and says, Put that in your pipe and smoke it ! can 
 puff away with as sincere a relish as if it were tobacco 
 of Mount Lebanon in a narghileh of Damascus. 
 
 After all, my dear Storg, it is to know things that 
 one has need to travel, and not men. Those force us 
 to come to them, but these come to us, sometimes 
 whether we will or no. These exist for us in every 
 variety in our own town. You may find your an 
 tipodes without a voyage to China; he lives there, 
 just round the next corner, precise, formal, the slave of 
 precedent, making all his teacups with a break in the 
 edge, because his model had one, and your fancy 
 decorates him with an endlessness of airy pigtail. 
 There, too, are John Bull, Jean Crapaud, Hans 
 Sauerkraut, Pat Murphy, and the rest. 
 
 It has been well said: 
 
 "He needs no ship to cross the tide, 
 Who, in the lives around him, sees 
 Fair window-prospects opening wide 
 O er history s fields on every side, 
 Rome, Egypt, England, Ind, and Greece. 
 
 " Whatever moulds of various brain 
 E er shaped the world to weal or woe, 
 Whatever empires wax and wane, 
 To him who hath not eyes in vain, 
 His village-microcosm can show." 
 
 But things are good for nothing out of their natural 
 habitat. If the heroic Barnum had succeeded in 
 transplanting Shakespeare s house to America, what 
 interest would it have had for us, torn out of its appro- 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. J 
 
 priate setting in softly-hilled Warwickshire, which 
 showed us that the most English of poets must be born 
 in the most English of counties ? I mean by a Thing 
 that which is not a mere spectacle, that which some 
 virtue of the mind leaps forth to, as it also sends forth 
 its sympathetic flash to the mind, as soon as they come 
 within each other s sphere of attraction, and, with 
 instantaneous coalition, form a new product, 
 knowledge. 
 
 Such, in the understanding it gives us of early 
 Roman history, is the little territory around Rome, 
 the gentis cunabula, without a sight of which Livy 
 and Niebuhr and the maps are vain. So, too, 
 one must go to Pompeii and the Museo Borbonico, to 
 get a true conception of that wondrous artistic nature 
 of the Greeks, strong enough, even in that petty 
 colony, to survive foreign conquest and to assimilate 
 barbarian blood, showing a grace and fertility of in 
 vention whose Roman copies Rafaello himself could 
 only copy, and enchanting even the base utensils of 
 the kitchen with an inevitable sense of beauty to which 
 we subterranean Northmen have not yet so much as 
 dreamed of climbing. Mere sights one can see quite 
 as well at home. Mont Blanc does not tower more 
 grandly in the memory than did the dream-peak 
 which loomed afar on the morning horizon of hope, 
 nor did the smoke-palm of Vesuvius stand more erect 
 and fair, with tapering stem and spreading top, in that 
 Parthenopean air, than under the diviner sky of 
 imagination. I know what Shakespeare says about 
 homekeeping youths, and I can fancy what you will 
 
8 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 add about America being interesting only as a phe 
 nomenon, and uncomfortable to live in, because we 
 have not yet done with getting ready to live. But 
 is not your Europe, on the other hand, a place where 
 men have done living for the present, and of value 
 chiefly because of the men who had done living in it 
 long ago ? And if in our rapidly-moving country one 
 feel sometimes as if he had his home on a railroad 
 train, is there not also a satisfaction in knowing that 
 one is going somewhere? To what end visit Europe, 
 if people carry with them, as most do, their old paro 
 chial horizon, going hardly as Americans even, much 
 less as men? Have we not both seen persons abroad 
 who put us in mind of parlor gold-fish in their vase, 
 isolated in that little globe of their own element, in 
 capable of communication with the strange world 
 around them, a show themselves, while it was always 
 doubtful if they could see at all beyond the limits of 
 their portable prison ? The wise man travels to dis 
 cover himself; it is to find himself out that he goes 
 out of himself and his habitual associations, trying 
 everything in turn till he find that one activity, that 
 royal standard, sovran over him by divine right, 
 toward which all the disbanded powers of his nature 
 and the irregular tendencies of his life gather joyfully, 
 as to the common rallying-point of their loyalty. 
 
 All these things we debated while the ilex logs upon 
 the hearth burned down to tinkling coals, over which 
 a gray, soft moss of ashes grew betimes, mocking the 
 poor wood with a pale travesty of that green and 
 gradual decay on forest-floors, its natural end. Al- 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 9 
 
 ready the clock at the Cappuccini told the morning 
 quarters, and on the pauses of our talk no sound 
 intervened but the muffled hoot of an owl in the near 
 convent-garden, or the rattling tramp of a patrol of 
 that French army which keeps him a prisoner in his 
 own city who claims to lock and unlock the doors of 
 heaven. But still the discourse would eddy round 
 one obstinate rocky tenet of mine, for I maintained, 
 you remember, that the wisest man was he who 
 stayed at home; that to see the antiquities of the Old 
 World was nothing, since the youth of the world was 
 really no farther away from us than our own youth; 
 and that, moreover, we had also in America things 
 amazingly old, as our boys, for example. Add, that 
 in the end, this antiquity is a matter of comparison, 
 which skips from place to place as nimbly as Emer 
 son s Sphinx, and that one old thing is good only till 
 we have seen an older. England is ancient till we go 
 to Rome; Etruria dethrones Rome, but only to pass 
 this sceptre of antiquity which so lords it over our 
 fancies to the Pelasgi, from whom Egypt straight 
 way wrenches it, to give it up in turn to older India. 
 And whither then? As well rest upon the first step, 
 since the effect of what is old upon the mind is single 
 and positive, not cumulative. As soon as a thing is 
 past, it is as infinitely far away from us as if it had 
 happened millions of years ago. And if the learned 
 Huet be correct, who reckoned that all human thoughts 
 and records could be included in ten folios, what so 
 frightfully old as we ourselves, who can, if we choose, 
 hold in our memories every syllable of recorded time, 
 
10 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 from the first crunch of Eve s teeth in the apple 
 downward, being thus ideally contemporary with 
 hoariest Eld? 
 
 14 The pyramids built up with newer might 
 To us are nothing novel, nothing strange." 
 
 Now, my dear Storg, you know my (what the phren 
 ologists call) inhabitiveness and adhesiveness, how 
 I stand by the old thought, the old thing, the old 
 place, and the old friend, till I am very sure I have 
 got a better, and even then migrate painfully. Re 
 member the old Arabian story, and think how hard 
 it is to pick up all the pomegranate-seeds of an oppo 
 nent s argument, and how, as long as one remains, 
 you are as far from the end as ever. Since I have you 
 entirely at my mercy, (for you cannot answer me under 
 five weeks,) you will not be surprised at the advent of 
 this letter. I had always one impregnable position, 
 which was, that, however good other places might be, 
 there was only one in which we could be born, and 
 which therefore possessed a quite peculiar and in 
 alienable virtue. We had the fortune, which neither 
 of us have had reason to call other than good, to 
 journey together through the green, secluded valley 
 of boyhood; together we climbed the mountain wall 
 which shut in, and looked down upon, those Italian 
 plains of early manhood; and, since then, we have 
 met sometimes by a well, or broken bread together at 
 an oasis in the arid desert of life, as it truly is. With 
 this letter I propose to make you my fellow-traveller 
 in one of those fireside voyages which, as we grow 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. II 
 
 older, we make oftener and oftener through our own 
 past. Without leaving your elbow-chair, you shall 
 go back with me thirty years, which will bring you 
 among things and persons as thoroughly preterite as 
 Romulus or Numa. For so rapid are our changes 
 in America, that the transition from old to new, the 
 shifting from habits and associations to others entirely 
 different, is as rapid almost as the> passing in of one 
 scene and the drawing out of another on the stage. 
 And it is this which makes America so interesting to 
 the philosophic student of history and man. Here, 
 as in a theatre, the great problems of anthropology 
 which in the Old World were ages in solving, but which 
 are solved, leaving only a dry net result are com 
 pressed, as it were, into the entertainment of a few 
 hours. Here we have I know not how many epochs 
 of history and phases of civilization contemporary 
 with each other, nay, within five minutes of each 
 other, by the electric telegraph. In two centuries we 
 have seen rehearsed the dispersion of man from a 
 small point over a whole continent; we witness with 
 our own eyes the action of those forces which govern 
 the great migration of the peoples now historical in 
 Europe; we can watch the action and reaction of 
 different races, forms of government, and higher or 
 lower civilizations. Over there, you have only the 
 dead precipitate, demanding tedious analysis; but 
 here the elements are all in solution, and we have only 
 to look to know them all. History, which every day 
 makes less account of governors and more of man, 
 must find here the compendious key to all that picture- 
 
12 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 writing of the Past. Therefore it is, my dear Storg, 
 that we Yankees may still esteem our America a place 
 worth living in. But calm your apprehensions; I 
 do not propose to drag you with me on such an his 
 torical circumnavigation of the globe, but only to show 
 you that (however needful it may be to go abroad for 
 the study of aesthetics) a man who uses the eyes of his 
 heart may find here also pretty bits of what may be 
 called the social picturesque, and little landscapes 
 over which that Indian-summer atmosphere of the 
 Past broods as sweetly and tenderly as over a Roman 
 ruin. Let us look at the Cambridge of thirty years 
 since. 
 
 The seat of the oldest college in America, it had, of 
 course, some of that cloistered quiet which charac 
 terizes all university towns. Even now delicately- 
 thoughtful A. H. C. tells me that he finds in its intel 
 lectual atmosphere a repose which recalls that of 
 grand old Oxford. But, underlying this, it had an 
 idiosyncrasy of its own. Boston was not yet a city, 
 and Cambridge was still a country village, with its own 
 habits and traditions, not yet feeling too strongly the 
 force of suburban gravitation. Approaching it from 
 the west by what was then called the New Road (it is 
 called so no longer, for we change our names when 
 ever we can, to the great detriment of all historical 
 association), you would pause on the brow of Symonds 
 Hill to enjoy a view singularly soothing and placid. 
 In front of you lay the town, tufted with elms, lin 
 dens, and horse-chestnuts, which had seen Massa 
 chusetts a colony, and were fortunately unable to 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 13 
 
 emigrate with the Tories by whom, or by whose 
 fathers, they were planted. Over it rose the noisy 
 belfry of the College, the square, brown tower of the 
 church, and the slim, yellow spire of the parish meet 
 ing-house, by no means ungraceful, and then an 
 invariable characteristic of New England religious 
 architecture. On your right, the Charles slipped 
 smoothly through green and purple salt-meadows, 
 darkened, here and there, with the blossoming black - 
 grass as with a stranded cloud-shadow. Over these 
 marshes, level as water, but without its glare, and with 
 softer and more soothing gradations of perspective, 
 the eye was carried to a horizon of softly-rounded hills. 
 To your left hand, upon the Old Road, you saw some 
 half-dozen dignified old houses of the colonial time, 
 all comfortably fronting southward. If it were early 
 June, the rows of horse-chestnuts along the fronts 
 of these houses showed, through every crevice of their 
 dark heap of foliage, and on the end of every drooping 
 limb, a cone of pearly flowers, while the hill behind 
 was white or rosy with the crowding blooms of various 
 fruit-trees. There is no sound, unless a horseman 
 clatters over the loose planks of the bridge, while his 
 antipodal shadow glides silently over the mirrored 
 bridge below, or unless, 
 
 " O winged rapture, feathered soul of spring, 
 Blithe voice of woods, fields, waters all in one, 
 Pipe blown through by the warm, mild breath of June, 
 Shepherding her white flocks of woolly clouds, 
 The bobolink has come, and climbs the wind 
 With rippling wings that quiver not for flight, 
 But only joy, or, yielding to its will, 
 Runs down, a brook of laughter, through the air." 
 
14 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 Such was the charmingly rural picture which he 
 who, thirty years ago, went eastward over Symonds 
 Hill had given him for nothing, to hang in the Gallery 
 of Memory. But we are a city now and Common 
 Councils have yet no notion of the truth (learned long 
 ago by many a European hamlet) that picturesqueness 
 adds to the actual money value of a town. To save a 
 few dollars in gravel, they have cut a kind of dry ditch 
 through the hill, where you suffocate with dust in sum 
 mer, or flounder through waist-deep snow-drifts in 
 winter, with no prospect but the crumbling earth-walls 
 on either side. The landscape was carried away 
 cart-load by cart-load, and, dumped down on the 
 roads, forms a part of that unfathomable pudding, 
 which has, I fear, driven many a teamster and pedes 
 trian to the use of phrases not commonly found in 
 English dictionaries. 
 
 We called it "the Village" then (I speak of Old 
 Cambridge), and it was essentially an English village, 
 quiet, unspeculative, without enterprise, sufficing to 
 itself, and only showing such differences from the 
 original type as the public school and the system of 
 town government might superinduce. A few houses, 
 chiefly old, stood around the bare Common, with 
 ample elbow-room, and old women, capped and spec 
 tacled, still peered through the same windows from 
 which they had watched Lord Percy s artillery rumble 
 by to Lexington, or caught a glimpse of the handsome 
 Virginia General who had come to wield our home 
 spun Saxon chivalry. People were still living who 
 regretted the late unhappy separation from the mother 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 15 
 
 island, who had seen no gentry since the Vassalls went, 
 and who thought that Boston had ill kept the day of 
 her patron saint, Botolph, on the iyth of June, 1775. 
 The hooks were to be seen from which had swung the 
 hammocks of Burgoyne s captive redcoats. If mem 
 ory does not deceive me, women still washed clothes 
 in the town spring, clear as that of Bandusia^ One 
 coach sufficed for all the travel to the metropolis. 
 Commencement had not ceased to be the great holiday 
 of the Puritan Commonwealth, and a fitting one it 
 was, the festival of Santa Scholastica, whose tri 
 umphal path one may conceive strewn with leaves of 
 spelling-book instead of bay. The students (scholars 
 they were called then) wore their sober uniform, not 
 ostentatiously distinctive or capable of rousing demo 
 cratic envy, and the old lines of caste were blurred 
 rather than rubbed out, as servitor was softened into 
 beneficiary. The Spanish king was sure that the 
 gesticulating student was either mad or reading Don 
 Quixote, and if, in those days, you met a youth swing 
 ing his arms and talking to himself, you might conclude 
 that he was either a lunatic or one who was to appear 
 in a "part" at the next Commencement. A favorite 
 place for the rehearsal of these orations was the re 
 tired amphitheatre of the Gravel-pit, perched unre 
 garded on whose dizzy edge, I have heard many a 
 burst of plusquam Ciceronian eloquence, and (often 
 repeated) the regular saluto vos, pr<zstantissim<z, etc., 
 which every year (with a glance at the gallery) causes 
 a flutter among the fans innocent of Latin, and delights 
 to applauses of conscious superiority the youth almost 
 
1 6 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 % 
 
 as innocent as they. It is curious, by the way, to note 
 how plainly one can feel the pulse of self in the plaudits 
 of an audience. At a political meeting, if the enthu 
 siasm of the lieges hang fire, it may be exploded at 
 once by an allusion to their intelligence or patriotism ; 
 and at a literary festival, the first Latin quotation 
 draws the first applause, the clapping of hands being 
 intended as a tribute to our own familiarity with that 
 sonorous tongue, and not at all as an approval of the 
 particular sentiment conveyed in it. For if the orator 
 should say, "Well has Tacitus remarked, Americani 
 omnes quddam m natures jure A dignissimi," it would 
 be all the same. But the Gravel-pit was patient, if 
 irresponsive; nor did the declaimer always fail to 
 bring down the house, bits of loosened earth falling 
 now and then from the precipitous walls, their cohe 
 sion perhaps overcome by the vibrations of the voice, 
 and happily satirizing the effect of most popular dis 
 courses, which prevail rather with the earthy than the 
 spiritual part of the hearer. Was it possible for us 
 in those days to conceive of a greater potentate than 
 the President of the University, in his square doctor s 
 cap, that still filially recalled Oxford and Cambridge ? 
 If there was a doubt, it was suggested only by the 
 Governor, and even by him on artillery-election days 
 alone, superbly martial with epaulets and buckskin 
 breeches, and bestriding the war-horse, promoted to 
 that solemn duty for his tameness and steady habits. 
 Thirty years ago, the town had indeed a character. 
 Railways and omnibuses had not rolled flat all little 
 social prominences and peculiarities, making every 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. I/ 
 
 man as much a citizen everywhere as at home. No 
 Charlestown boy could come to our annual festival 
 without fighting to avenge a certain traditional porcine 
 imputation against the inhabitants of that historic 
 locality, and to which our youth gave vent in fanciful 
 imitations of the dialect of the sty, or derisive shouts 
 of "Charlestown hogs!" The penny newspaper had 
 not yet silenced the tripod of the barber, oracle of 
 news. Everybody knew everybody, and all about 
 everybody, and village wit, whose high change was 
 around the little market-house in the town square, 
 had labelled every more marked individuality with 
 nicknames that clung like burs. Things were estab 
 lished then, and men did not run though all the fig 
 ures on the dial of society so swiftly as now, when 
 hurry and competition seem to have quite unhung 
 the modulating pendulum of steady thrift and compe 
 tent training. Some slow -minded persons even fol 
 lowed their father s trade, a humiliating spectacle, 
 rarer every day. We had our established loafers, 
 topers, proverb-mongers, barber, parson, nay, post 
 master, whose tenure was for life. The great political 
 engine did not then come down at regular quadrennial 
 intervals, like a nail-cutting machine, to make all 
 official lives of a standard length, and to generate lazy 
 and intriguing expectancy. Life flowed in recog 
 nized channels, narrower perhaps, but with all the 
 more individuality and force. 
 
 There was but one white-and-yellow-washer, whose 
 own cottage, fresh-gleaming every June through 
 grape-vine and creeper, was his only sign and adver- 
 
1 8 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 tiscment. He was said to possess a secret, which died 
 with him like that of Luca della Robbia, and certainly 
 conceived all colors but white and yellow to savor of 
 savagery, civilizing the stems of his trees annually with 
 liquid lime, and meditating how to extend that candent 
 baptism even to the leaves. His pie-plants (the best 
 in town), compulsory monastics, blanched under bar 
 rels, each in his little hermitage, a vegetable Certosa. 
 His fowls, his ducks, his geese, could not show so much 
 as a gray feather among them, and he would have 
 given a year s earnings for a white peacock. The 
 flowers which decked his little door-yard were whitest 
 China-asters and goldenest sunflowers, which last, 
 backsliding from their traditional Parsee faith, used 
 to puzzle us urchins not a little by staring brazenly 
 every way except towards the sun. Celery, too, he 
 raised, whose virtue is its paleness, and the silvery 
 onion, and turnip, which, though outwardly conform 
 ing to the green heresies of summer, nourish a purer 
 faith subterraneously, like early Christians in the 
 catacombs. In an obscure corner grew the sanguine 
 beet, tolerated only for its usefulness in allaying the 
 asperities of Saturday s salt-fish. He loved winter 
 better than summer, because Nature then played the 
 whitewasher, and challenged with her snows the 
 scarce inferior purity of his overalls and neck-cloth. 
 I fancy that he never rightly liked Commencement, 
 for bringing so many black coats together. He 
 founded no school. Others might essay his art and 
 were allowed to try their prentice hands on fences and 
 the like coarse subjects, but the ceiling of every house- 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 1 9 
 
 wife waited on the leisure of Newman (ichneumon 
 the students called him for his diminutiveness), nor 
 would consent to other brush than his. There was 
 also but one brewer, Lewis, who made the village 
 beer, both spruce and ginger, a grave and amiable 
 Ethiopian, making a discount always to the boys, and 
 wisely, for they were his chiefest patrons. He wheeled 
 his whole stock in a white-roofed handcart, on whose 
 front a sign-board presented at either end an insur 
 rectionary bottle; yet insurgent after no mad Gallic 
 fashion, but soberly and Saxonly discharging itself 
 into the restraining formulary of a tumbler, symbolic 
 of orderly prescription. The artist had struggled 
 manfully with the difficulties of his subject, but had 
 not succeeded so well that we did not often debate in 
 which of the twin bottles Spruce was typified, and in 
 which Ginger. We always believed that Lewis men 
 tally distinguished between them, but by some pecul 
 iarity occult to exoteric eyes. This ambulatory chapel 
 of the Bacchus that gives the colic, but not inebriates, 
 only appeared at the Commencement holidays, and the 
 lad who bought of Lewis laid out his money well, 
 getting respect as well as beer, three sirs to every glass, 
 "Beer, sir? yes, sir: spruce or ginger, sir?" I 
 can yet recall the innocent pride with which I walked 
 away after that somewhat risky ceremony, (for a 
 bottle sometimes blew up,) dilated not alone with car 
 bonic-acid gas, but with the more ethereal fixed air 
 of that titular flattery. Nor was Lewis proud. When 
 he tried his fortunes in the capital on Election-days, 
 and stood amid a row of rival venders in the very 
 
20 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 flood of custom, he never forgot his small fellow- 
 citizens, but welcomed them with an assuring smile, 
 and served them with the first. 
 
 The barber s shop was a museum, scarce second to 
 the larger one of Greenwood in the metropolis. The 
 boy who was to be clipped there was always accom 
 panied to the sacrifice by troops of friends, who thus 
 inspected the curiosities gratis. While the watchful 
 eye of R. wandered to keep in check these rather un 
 scrupulous explorers the unpausing shears would 
 sometimes overstep the boundaries of strict tonsorial 
 prescription, and make a notch through which the 
 phrenological developments could be distinctly seen. 
 As Michael Angelo s design was modified by the 
 shape of his block, so R., rigid in artistic proprieties, 
 would contrive to give an appearance of design to this 
 aberration, by making it the key-note to his work, and 
 reducing the whole head to an appearance of prema 
 ture baldness. What a charming place it was, 
 how full of wonder and delight! The sunny little 
 room, fronting southwest upon the Common, rang 
 with canaries and Java sparrows, nor were the familiar 
 notes of robin, thrush, and bobolink wanting. A 
 large white cockatoo harangued vaguely, at intervals, 
 in what we believed (on R. s authority) to be the 
 Hottentot language. He had an unveracious air, but 
 what inventions of former grandeur he was indulging 
 in, what sweet South-African Argos he was remem 
 bering, what tropical heats and giant trees by uncon- 
 jectured rivers, known only to the wallowing hippo 
 potamus, we could only guess at. The walls were 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 21 
 
 covered with curious old Dutch prints, beaks of alba 
 tross and penguin, and whales teeth fantastically 
 engraved. There was Frederick the Great, with head 
 drooped plottingly, and keen side-long glance from 
 under the three-cornered hat. There hung Bona 
 parte, too, the long-haired, haggard general of Italy, 
 his eyes sombre with prefigured destiny; and there 
 was his island grave ; the dream and the fulfilment. 
 Good store of sea-fights there was also; above all, 
 Paul Jones in the Bonhomme Richard: the smoke 
 rolling courteously to leeward, that we might see him 
 dealing thunderous wreck to the two hostile vessels, 
 each twice as large as his own, and the reality of the 
 scene corroborated by streaks of red paint leaping from 
 the mouth of every gun. Suspended over the fire 
 place, with the curling-tongs, were an Indian bow and 
 arrows, and in the corners of . the room stood New 
 Zealand paddles and war-clubs, quaintly carved. The 
 model of a ship in glass we variously estimated to be 
 worth from a hundred to a thousand dollars, R. 
 rather favoring the higher valuation, though never 
 distinctly committing himself. Among these wonders, 
 the only suspicious one was an Indian tomahawk, 
 which had too much the peaceful look of a shingling- 
 hatchet. Did any rarity enter the town, it gravitated 
 naturally to these walls, to the very nail that waited to 
 receive it, and where, the day after its accession, it 
 seemed to have hung a lifetime. We always had 
 a theory that R. was immensely rich, (how could he 
 possess so much and be otherwise?) and that he pur 
 sued his calling from an amiable eccentricity. He 
 
22 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 was a conscientious artist, and never submitted it to 
 the choice of his victim whether he would be perfumed 
 or not. Faithfully was the bottle shaken and the 
 odoriferous mixture rubbed in, a fact redolent to the 
 whole school-room in the afternoon. Sometimes the 
 persuasive tonsor would impress one of the attendant 
 volunteers, and reduce his poll to shoe-brush crisp- 
 ness, at cost of the reluctant ninepence hoarded for 
 Fresh Pond and the next half-holiday. So purely 
 indigenous was our population then, that R. had a 
 certain exotic charm, a kind of game flavor, by being 
 a Dutchman. 
 
 Shall the two groceries want their vales sacer, where 
 E. & W. I. goods and country prodooce were sold 
 with an energy mitigated by the quiet genius of the 
 place, and where strings of urchins waited, each with 
 cent in hand, for the unweighed dates (thus giving an 
 ordinary business transaction all the excitement of a 
 lottery), and buying, not only that cloying sweetness, 
 but a dream also of Egypt, and palm-trees, and Arabs, 
 in which vision a print of the Pyramids in our geog 
 raphy tyrannized like that taller thought of Cowper s? 
 
 At one of these the unwearied students used to ply 
 a joke handed down from class to class. Enter A, 
 and asks gravely, "Have you any sour apples, 
 Deacon?" 
 
 "Well, no, I have n t any just now that are exactly 
 sour; but there s the bell-flower apple, and folks that 
 like a sour apple generally like that." (Exit A.) 
 
 Enter B. "Have you any sweet apples, Deacon?" 
 
 "Well, no, I have n t any just now that are exactly 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 23 
 
 sweet; but there s the bell-flower apple, and folks 
 that like a sweet apple generally like that." (Exit B.) 
 There is not even a tradition of any one s ever 
 having turned the wary Deacon s flank and his 
 Laodicean apples persisted to the end, neither one 
 thing nor another. Or shall the two town -constables 
 be forgotten, in whom the law stood worthily and 
 amply embodied, fit either of them to fill the uniform 
 of an English beadle? Grim and silent as Ninevite 
 statues they stood on each side of the meeting-house 
 door at Commencement, propped by long staves of 
 blue and red, on which the Indian with bow and arrow 
 and the mailed arm with the sword, hinted at the 
 invisible sovereignty of the state ready to reinforce 
 
 them, as 
 
 " For Achilles portrait stood a spear 
 Grasped in an armed hand." 
 
 Stalwart and rubicund men they were, second only, 
 if second, to S., champion of the county, and not in 
 capable of genial unbendings when the fasces were 
 laid aside. One of them still survives in octogenarian 
 vigor, the Herodotus of village and college legend, and 
 may it be long ere he depart, to carry with him the 
 pattern of a courtesy, now, alas ! old-fashioned, but 
 which might profitably make part of the instruction 
 of our youth among the other humanities ! Long 
 may R. M. be spared to us, so genial, so courtly, the 
 last man among us who will ever know how to lift a hat 
 with the nice graduation of social distinction ! Some 
 thing of a Jeremiah now, he bewails the decline of our 
 manners. "My children," he says, "say, Yes sir/ 
 
24 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 and No sir ; my grandchildren, Yes and No ; 
 and I am every day expecting to hear D n your 
 eyes ! for an answer when I ask a service of my 
 great-grandchildren. Why, sir, I can remember 
 when more respect was paid to Governor Hancock s 
 lackey at Commencement, than the Governor and all 
 his suite get now." M. is one of those invaluable 
 men who remember your grandfather, and value you 
 accordingly. 
 
 In those days the population was almost wholly 
 without foreign admixture. Two Scotch gardeners 
 there were, Rule, whose daughter (glimpsed per 
 haps at church, or possibly the mere Miss Harris of 
 fancy) the students nicknamed Anarchy or Miss Rule, 
 and later Fraser, whom whiskey sublimed into a 
 poet, full of bloody histories of the Forty-twa, and 
 showing an imaginary French bullet, sometimes in 
 one leg, sometimes in the other, and sometimes, 
 toward nightfall, in both. With this claim to military 
 distinction he adroitly contrived to mingle another to a 
 natural one, asserting double teeth all round his jaws, 
 and, having thus created two sets of doubts, silenced 
 both at once by a single demonstration, displaying 
 the grinders to the confusion of the infidel. 
 
 The old court-house stood then upon the square. 
 It has shrunk back out of sight now, and students box 
 and fence where Parsons once laid down the law, 
 and Ames and Dexter showed their skill in the fence 
 of argument, times have changed, and manners, 
 since Chief Justice Dana (father of Richard the First, 
 and grandfather of Richard the Second) caused to be 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 2$ 
 
 arrested for contempt of court a butcher who had 
 come in without a coat to witness the administration 
 of his country s laws, and who thus had his curiosity 
 exemplarily gratified. Times have changed also 
 since the cellar beneath it was tenanted by the twin- 
 brothers Snow. Oyster men were they indeed, 
 silent in their subterranean burrow, and taking the 
 ebbs and flows of custom with bivalvian serenity. 
 Careless of the months with an R in them, the maxim 
 of Snow (for we knew them but as a unit) was, "When, 
 ysters are good, they air good ; and when they ain t, 
 they is n t." Grecian F. (may his shadow never be 
 less !) tells this, his great laugh expected all the while 
 from deep vaults of chest, and then coming in at the 
 close, hearty, contagious, mounting with the meas 
 ured tread of a jovial but stately butler who brings 
 ancientest good-fellowship from exhaustless bins, 
 and enough, without other sauce, to give a flavor of 
 stalled ox to a dinner of herbs. Let me preserve here 
 an anticipatory elegy upon the Snows, written years 
 ago by some nameless college rhymer. 
 
 DIFFUGERE NIVES. 
 
 Here lies, or lie, decide the question, you, 
 
 If they were two in one or one in two, 
 
 P. & S. Snow, whose memory shall not fade, 
 
 Castor and Pollux of the oyster-trade : 
 
 Hatched from one egg, at once the shell they burst, 
 
 (The last, perhaps, a P. S. to the first,) 
 
 So homoousian both in look and soul, 
 
 So undiscernibly a single whole, 
 
 That whether P. was S., or S. was P., 
 
 Surpassed all skill in etymology; 
 
 One kept the shop at once, and all we know 
 
26 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 .Is that together they were the Great Snow, 
 
 A snow not deep, yet with a crust so thick 
 
 It never melted to the son of Tick ; 
 
 Perpetual ? nay, our region was too low, 
 
 Too warm, too southern, for perpetual Snow; 
 
 Still, like fair Leda s sons, to whom t was given 
 
 To take their turns in Hades and in Heaven, 
 
 Our new Dioscuri would bravely share 
 
 The cellar s darkness and the upper air; 
 
 Twice every year would each the shades escape, 
 
 And, like a sea-bird, seek the wave-washed Cape, 
 
 Where (Rumor voiced) one spouse sufficed for both; 
 
 No bigamist, for she upon her oath, 
 
 Unskilled in letters, could not make a guess 
 
 At any difference twixt P. and S. 
 
 A thing not marvellous, since Fame agrees 
 
 They were as little different as two peas, 
 
 And she, like Paris, when his Helen laid 
 
 Her hand mid snows from Ida s top conveyed 
 
 To cool their wine of Chios, could not know, 
 
 Between those rival candors, which was Snow. 
 
 Whiche er behind the counter chanced to be 
 
 Oped oysters oft, his clam-shells seldom he ; 
 
 If e er he laughed, t was with no loud guffaw, 
 
 The fun warmed through him with a gradual thaw; 
 
 The nicer shades of wit were not his gift, 
 
 Nor was it hard to sound Snow s simple drift; 
 
 His were plain jokes, that many a time before 
 
 Had set his tarry messmates in a roar, 
 
 When floundering cod beslimed the deck s wet planks,- 
 
 The humorous specie of Newfoundland banks. 
 
 But Snow is gone, and, let us hope, sleeps well, 
 Buried (his last breath asked it) in a shell ; 
 Fate with an oyster-knife sawed off his thread, 
 And planted him upon his latest bed. 
 
 Him on the Stygian shore my fancy sees 
 Noting choice shoals for oyster colonies, 
 Or, at a board stuck full of ghostly forks, 
 Opening for practice visionary Yorks. 
 And whither he has gone, may we too go, 
 Since no hot place were fit for keeping Snow ! 
 
 Jam satis nivis. 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 2/ 
 
 Cambridge has long had its port, but the greater part 
 of its maritime trade was, thirty years ago, intrusted 
 to a single Argo, the sloop Harvard, which belonged 
 to the College, and made annual voyages to that vague 
 Orient known as Down East, bringing back wood 
 that, in those days, gave to winter life at Harvard a 
 crackle and a cheerfulness, for the loss of which the 
 greater warmth of anthracite hardly compensates. 
 New England life, to be genuine, must have in it some 
 sentiment of the sea, it was this instinct that printed 
 the device of the pine-tree on the old money and the 
 old flag, and these periodic ventures of the sloop 
 Harvard made the old Viking fibre vibrate in the 
 hearts of all the village boys. What a vista of mystery 
 and adventure did her sailing open to us ! With what 
 pride did we hail her return ! She was our scholiast 
 upon Robinson Crusoe and the mutiny of the Bounty. 
 Her captain still lords it over our memories, the greatest 
 sailor that ever sailed the seas, and we should not 
 look at Sir John Franklin himself with such admiring 
 interest as that with which we enhaloed some larger 
 boy who had made a voyage in her, and had come 
 back without braces (gallowses we called them) to his 
 trousers, and squirting ostentatiously the juice of that 
 weed which still gave him little private returns of 
 something very like sea-sickness. All our shingle 
 vessels were shaped and rigged by her, who was our 
 glass of naval fashion and our mould of aquatic form. 
 We had a secret and wild delight in believing that 
 she carried a gun, and imagined her sending grape and 
 canister among the treacherous savages of Oldtown. 
 
28 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 Inspired by her were those first essays at navigation 
 on the Winthrop duck-pond, of the plucky boy who 
 was afterwards to serve two famous years before the 
 mast. The greater part of what is now Cambridge - 
 port was then (in the native dialect) a huckleberry 
 pastur. Woods were not wanting on its outskirts, of 
 pine, and oak, and maple, and the rarer tupelo with 
 downward limbs. Its veins did not draw their blood 
 from the quiet old heart of the village, but it had a 
 distinct being of its own, and was rather a great cara 
 vansary than a suburb. The chief feature of the 
 place was its inns, of which there were five, with vast 
 barns and court -yards, which the railroad was to make 
 as silent and deserted as the palaces of Nimroud. 
 Great white-topped wagons, each drawn by double 
 files of six or eight horses, with its dusty bucket swing 
 ing from the hinder axle, and its grim bull-dog trotting 
 silent underneath, or in midsummer panting on the 
 lofty perch beside the driver, (how elevated thither 
 baffled conjecture,) brought all the wares and products 
 of the country to their mart and seaport in Boston. 
 These filled the inn-yards, or were ranged side by 
 side under broad-roofed sheds, and far into the night 
 the mirth of their lusty drivers clamored from the red- 
 curtained bar-room, while the single lantern, swaying 
 to and fro in the black cavern of the stables, made a 
 Rembrandt of the group of ostlers and horses below. 
 There were, besides the taverns, some huge square 
 stores where groceries were sold, some houses, by 
 whom or why inhabited was to us boys a problem, 
 and, on the edge of the marsh, a currier s shop, where 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 29 
 
 at high tide, on a floating platform, men were always 
 beating skins in a way to remind one of Don Quixote s 
 fulling mills. Nor did these make all the Port. As 
 there is always a Coming Man who never comes, so 
 there is a man who always comes (it may be only a 
 quarter of an hour) too early. This man, so far as the 
 Port is concerned, was Rufus Davenport. Looking 
 at the marshy flats of Cambridge, and considering 
 their nearness to Boston, he resolved that there should 
 grow up a suburban Venice. Accordingly, the 
 marshes were bought, canals were dug, ample for the 
 commerce of both Indies, and four or five rows of 
 brick houses were built to meet the first wants of the 
 wading settlers who were expected to rush in 
 WHENCE ? This singular question had never occurred 
 to the enthusiastic projector. There are laws which 
 govern human migrations quite beyond the control 
 of the speculator, as many a man with desirable 
 building-lots has discovered to his cost. Why mortal 
 men will pay more for a chess-board square in that 
 swamp, than for an acre on the breezy upland close 
 by, who shall say? And again, why, having shown 
 such a passion for your swamp, they are so coy of 
 mine, who shall say? Not certainly any one who, 
 like Davenport, had got up too early for his genera 
 tion. If we could only carry that slow, imperturbable 
 old clock of Opportunity, that never strikes a second 
 too soon or too late, in our fobs, and push the hands 
 forward as we can those of our watches! With a 
 foreseeing economy of space which now seems ludi 
 crous, the roofs of this forlorn -hope of houses were 
 
30 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 made flat, that the swarming population might have 
 where to dry their clothes. But A.u.c. 36 showed 
 the same view as A.u.c. i, only that the brick 
 blocks looked as if they had been struck by a malaria. 
 The dull weed upholstered the decaying wharves, and 
 the only freight that heaped them was the kelp and 
 eel -grass left by higher floods. Instead of a Venice, 
 behold a Torzelo ! The unfortunate projector took 
 to the last refuge of the unhappy book-making, 
 and bored the reluctant public with what he called a 
 right-aim Testament, prefaced by a recommendation 
 from General Jackson, who perhaps, from its title, 
 took it for some treatise on ball -practice. 
 
 But even Cambridgeport, my dear Storg, did not 
 want associations poetic and venerable. The stranger 
 who took the "Hourly" at Old Cambridge, if he were 
 a physiognomist and student of character, might per 
 haps have had his curiosity excited by a person who 
 mounted the coach at the Port. So refined was his 
 whole appearance, so fastidiously neat his apparel, 
 but with a neatness that seemed less the result of care 
 and plan, than a something as proper to the man as 
 whiteness to the lily, that you would have at once 
 classed him with those individuals, rarer than great 
 captains and almost as rare as great poets, whom 
 Nature sends into the world to fill the arduous office 
 / of Gentleman. Were you ever emperor of that 
 Barataria which under your peaceful sceptre would 
 present, of course, a model of government, this re 
 markable person should be Duke of Bienseance and 
 Master of Ceremonies. There are some men whom 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 31 
 
 destiny has endowed with the faculty of external neat 
 ness, whose clothes are repellent of dust and mud, 
 whose unwithering white neck-cloths persevere to the 
 day s end, unappeasably seeing the sun go down upon 
 their starch, and whose linen makes you fancy them 
 heirs in the maternal line to the instincts of all the 
 washerwomen from Eve downward. There are 
 others whose inward natures possess this fatal clean 
 ness, incapable of moral dirt spot. You are not long 
 in discovering that the stranger combines in himself 
 both these properties. A nimbus of hair, fine as an 
 infant s, and early white, showing refinement of organ 
 ization and the predominance of the spiritual over the 
 physical, undulated and floated around a face that 
 seemed like pale flame, and over which the flitting 
 shades of expression chased each other, fugitive and 
 gleaming as waves upon a field of rye. It was a 
 countenance that, without any beauty of feature, was 
 very beautiful. I have said that it looked like pale 
 flame, and can find no other words for the impression 
 it gave. Here was a man all soul, whose body seemed 
 a lamp of finest clay, whose service was to feed with 
 magic oils, rare and fragrant, that wavering fire which 
 hovered over it. You, who are an adept in such mat 
 ters, would have detected in the eyes that artist-look 
 which seems to see pictures ever in the air, and 
 which, if it fall on you, makes you feel as if all 
 the world were a gallery, and yourself the rather 
 indifferent Portrait of a Gentleman hung therein. 
 As the stranger brushes by you in alighting, you 
 detect a single incongruity, a smell of dead tobacco- 
 
32 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 smoke. You ask his name, and the answer is, 
 "Mr. Allston." 
 
 "Mr. Allston!" and you resolve to note down at 
 once in your diary every look, every gesture, every 
 word of the great painter? Not in the least. You 
 have the true Anglo-Norman indifference, and most 
 likely never think of him again till you hear that one 
 of his pictures has sold for a great price, and then 
 contrive to let your grandchildren know twice a week 
 that you met him once in a coach, and that he .said, 
 "Excuse me, sir," in a very Titianesque manner, when 
 he stumbled over your toes in getting out. Hitherto 
 Boswell is quite as unique as Shakespeare, jfhe 
 country-gentleman, journeying up to London, in 
 quires of Mistress Davenant at the Oxford inn the 
 name of his pleasant companion of the night before. 
 "Master Shakespeare, an t please your worship." 
 And the Justice, not without a sense of the unbending, 
 says, "Truly, a merry and conceited gentleman !" It 
 is lucky for the peace of great men that the world 
 seldom finds out contemporaneously who its great 
 men are, or, perhaps, that each man esteems himself 
 the fortunate he who shall draw the lot of memory 
 from the helmet of the future. Had the eyes of some 
 Stratford burgess been achromatic telescopes, capable 
 of a perspective of two hundred years! But, even 
 then, would not his record have been fuller of says Fs 
 than says he s? Nevertheless, it is curious to con 
 sider from what infinitely varied points of view we 
 might form our estimate of a great man s character, 
 when we remember that he had his points of contact 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 33 
 
 with the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick- 
 maker, as well as with the ingenious A, the sublime 
 B, and the Right Honorable C. If it be true that no 
 man ever clean forgets everything, and that the act 
 of drowning (as is asserted) forthwith brightens up all 
 those o er-rusted impressions, would it not be a curious 
 experiment, if, after a remarkable person s death, the 
 public, eager for minutest particulars, should gather 
 together all who had ever been brought into relations 
 with him, and, submerging them to the hair s-breadth 
 hitherward of the drowning-point, subject them to 
 strict cross-examination by the Humane Society, as 
 soon as they become conscious between the resusci 
 tating blankets? All of us probably have brushed 
 against destiny in the street, have shaken hands with 
 it, fallen asleep with it in railway carriages, and knocked 
 heads with it in some one or other of its yet unrecog 
 nized incarnations. 
 
 Will it seem like presenting a tract to a colporteur, 
 my dear Storg, if I say a word or two about an artist 
 to you over there in Italy? Be patient, and leave 
 your button in my grasp yet a little longer. A person 
 whose opinion is worth having once said to me, that, 
 however one s notions might be modified by going to 
 Europe, one always came back with a higher esteem 
 for Allston. Certainly he is thus far the greatest 
 English painter of historical subjects. And only con 
 sider how strong must have been the artistic bias in 
 him, to have made him a painter at all under the cir 
 cumstances. There were no traditions of art, so 
 necessary for guidance and inspiration. Blackburn, 
 
34 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 Smibert, Copley, Trumbull, Stuart, it was, after 
 all, but a Brentford sceptre which their heirs could 
 aspire to, and theirs were not names to conjure with, 
 like those from which Fame, as through a silver trum 
 pet, had blown for three centuries. Copley and 
 Stuart were both remarkable men; but the one 
 painted like an inspired silk mercer, and the other 
 seems to have mixed his colors with the claret of which 
 he and his generation were so fond. And what could a 
 successful artist hope for, at that time, beyond the 
 mere wages of his work ? His picture would hang in 
 cramped back parlors, between deadly cross-fires of 
 lights, sure of the garret or the auction -room erelong, 
 in a country where the nomad population carry no 
 household gods with them but their five wits and 
 their ten fingers. As a race, we care nothing about 
 Art; but the Puritan and the Quaker are the only 
 Englishmen who have had pluck enough to confess it. 
 If it were surprising that Allston should have become 
 a painter at all, how almost miraculous that he should 
 have been a great and original one ! We call him 
 original deliberately, because, though his school is 
 essentially Italian, it is of less consequence where a 
 man buys his tools than what use he makes of them. 
 Enough English artists went to Italy and came back 
 painting history in a very Anglo-Saxon manner, and 
 creating a school as melodramatic as the French, 
 without its perfection in technicalities. But Allston 
 carried thither a nature open on the southern side, 
 and brought it back so steeped in rich Italian sun 
 shine that the east winds (whether physical or intel- 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 35 
 
 lectual) of Boston and the dusts of Cambridgeport 
 assailed it in vain. To that bare wooden studio one 
 might go to breathe Venetian air, and, better yet, 
 the very spirit wherein the elder brothers of Art 
 labored, etherealized by metaphysical speculation, 
 and sublimed by religious fervor. The beautiful old 
 man ! Here was genius with no volcanic explosions 
 (the mechanic result of vulgar gunpowder often), 
 but lovely as a Lapland night; here was fame, not 
 sought after nor worn in any cheap French fashion as 
 a ribbon at the button-hole, but so gentle, so retiring, 
 that it seemed no more than an assured and em 
 boldened modesty; here was ambition, undebased by 
 rivalry and incapable of the sidelong look; and all 
 these massed and harmonized together into a purity 
 and depth of character, into a tone, which made the 
 daily life of the man the greatest masterpiece of the 
 artist. 
 
 But let us go back to the Old Town. Thirty years 
 since, the Muster and the Cornwallis allowed some 
 vent to those natural instincts which Puritanism 
 scotched, but not killed. The Cornwallis had entered 
 upon the estates of the old Guy-Fawkes procession, 
 confiscated by the Revolution. It was a masquerade, 
 in which that grave and suppressed humor, of which 
 the Yankees are fuller than other people, burst through 
 all restraints, and disported itself in all the wildest 
 vagaries of fun. Commonly the Yankee in his pleas 
 ures suspects the presence of Public Opinion as a 
 detective, and accordingly is apt to pinion himself 
 in his Sunday suit. It is a curious commentary on 
 
36 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 the artificiality of our lives, that men must be dis 
 guised and masked before they will venture into the 
 obscurer corners of their individuality, and display the 
 true features of their nature. One remarked it in 
 the Carnival, and one especially noted it here among 
 a race naturally self -restrained ; for Silas and Ezra 
 and Jonas were not only disguised as Redcoats, Con 
 tinentals, and Indians, but not unfrequently disguised 
 in drink also. It is a question whether the Lyceum 
 where the public is obliged to comprehend all vagrom 
 men, supplies the place of the old popular amuse 
 ments. A hundred and fifty years ago, Cotton Mather 
 bewails the carnal attractions of the tavern and the 
 training-field, and tells of an old Indian who imper 
 fectly understood the English tongue, but desperately 
 mastered enough of it (when under sentence of death) 
 to express a desire for instant hemp rather than listen 
 to any more ghostly consolations. Puritanism I 
 am perfectly aware how great a debt we owe it tried 
 over again the old experiment of driving out nature 
 with a pitchfork, and had the usual success. It was 
 like a ship inwardly on fire, whose hatches must be 
 kept hermetically battened down; for the admittance 
 of an ounce of Heaven s own natural air would ex 
 plode it utterly. Morals can never be safely embodied 
 in the constable. Polished, cultivated, fascinating 
 Mephistopheles ! it is for the ungovernable breakings- 
 away of the soul from unnatural compressions that 
 thou waitest with a deprecatory smile. Then it is 
 that thou offerest thy gentlemanly arm to unguarded 
 youth for a pleasant stroll through the City of De- 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 37 
 
 struction, and, as a special favor, introducest him 
 to the bewitching Miss_Circe, and to that model 
 of the hospitable old English gentleman, Mr. 
 
 COJXLUS! 
 
 But the Muster and the Cornwallis were not 
 peculiar to Cambridge. Commencement-day was. 
 Saint Pedagogus was a worthy whose feast could be 
 celebrated by men who quarrelled with minced-pies, 
 and blasphemed custard through the nose. The 
 holiday preserved all the features of an English fair. 
 Stations were marked out beforehand by the town 
 constables, and distinguished by numbered stakes. 
 These were assigned to the different venders of small 
 wares and exhibitors of rarities, whose canvas booths, 
 beginning at the market-place, sometimes half en 
 circled the Common with their jovial embrace. Now 
 all the Jehoiada-boxes in town were forced to give 
 up their rattling deposits of specie, if not through the 
 legitimate orifice, then to the brute force of the ham 
 mer. For hither were come all the wonders of the 
 world, making the Arabian Nights seem possible, and 
 which we beheld for half price; not without min 
 gled emotions, pleasure at the economy, and shame 
 at not paying the more manly fee. Here the mummy 
 unveiled her withered charms, a more marvellous 
 Ninon, still attractive in her three-thousandth year. 
 Here were the Siamese twins ; ah ! if all such forced 
 and unnatural unions were made a show of! Here 
 were the flying horses (their supernatural effect in 
 jured like that of some poems by the visibility 
 of the man who turned the crank), on which, as we 
 
38 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 tilted at the ring, we felt our shoulders tingle with the 
 accolade, and heard the clink of golden spurs at our 
 heels. Are the realities of life ever worth half so 
 much as its cheats? And are there any feasts half so 
 filling at the price as those Barmecide ones spread 
 for us by Imagination? Hither came the Canadian 
 giant, surreptitiously seen, without price, as he 
 alighted, in broad day, (giants were always foolish,) 
 at the tavern. Hither came the great horse Columbus, 
 with shoes two inches thick, and more wisely intro 
 duced by night. In the trough of the town-pump 
 might be seen the mermaid, its poor monkey s head 
 carefully sustained above water, to keep it from drown 
 ing. There were dwarfs, also, who danced and sang, 
 and many a proprietor regretted the transaudient 
 properties of canvas, which allowed the frugal public 
 to share in the melody without entering the booth. Is 
 it a slander of J. H., who reports that he once saw a 
 deacon, eminent for psalmody, lingering near one of 
 those vocal tents, and, with an assumed air of abstrac 
 tion, furtively drinking in, with unhabitual ears, a 
 song, not secular merely, but with a dash of libertin 
 ism? The New England proverb says, "All deacons 
 are good, but there s odds in deacons." On these 
 days Snow became superterranean, and had a stand 
 in the square, and Lewis temperately contended with 
 the stronger fascinations of egg-pop. But space 
 would fail me to make a catalogue of everything. 
 No doubt, Wisdom also, as usual, had her quiet booth 
 at the corner of some street, without entrance-fee, 
 and, even at that rate, got never a customer the whole 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 39 
 
 day long. For the bankrupt afternoon there were 
 peep-shows, at a cent each. 
 
 But all these shows and their showmen are as clean 
 gone now as those of Caesar and Timour and Napo 
 leon, for which the world paid dearer. They are 
 utterly gone out, not leaving so much as a snuff be 
 hind, as little thought of now as that John Robins, 
 who was once so considerable a phenomenon as to be 
 esteemed the last great Antichrist and son of perdi 
 tion by the entire sect of Muggletonians. Were 
 Commencement what it used to be, I should be 
 tempted to take a booth myself, and try an experi 
 ment recommended by a satirist of some merit, whose 
 works were long ago dead and (I fear) deedeed to 
 boot. 
 
 " Menenius, thou who fain wouldst know how calmly men can 
 
 pass 
 Those biting portraits of themselves, disguised as fox or 
 
 ass, 
 
 Go borrow coin enough to buy a full-length psyche-glass, 
 Engage a rather darkish room in some well-sought position 
 And let the town break out with bills, so much per head 
 
 admission, 
 GREAT NATURAL CURIOSITY! ! THE BIGGEST LIVING 
 
 FOOL! ! 
 
 Arrange your mirror cleverly, before it set a stool, 
 Admit the public one by one, place each upon the seat, 
 Draw up the curtain, let him look his fill and then retreat. 
 Smith mounts and takes a thorough view, then comes 
 
 serenely down, 
 Goes home and tells his wife the thing is curiously like 
 
 Brown ; 
 Brown goes and stares, and tells his wife the wonder s core 
 
 and pith 
 
 Is that t is just the counterpart of that conceited Smith. 
 Life calls us all to such a show : Menenius, trust in me, 
 While thou to see thy neighbor smil st, he does the same 
 
 for thee." 
 
40 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 My dear Storg, would you come to my show, and, 
 instead of looking in my glass, insist on taking your 
 money s worth in staring at the exhibitor? 
 
 Not least among the curiosities which the day 
 brought together were some of the graduates, pos 
 thumous men, as it were, disentombed from country 
 parishes and district schools, but perennial also, in 
 whom freshly survived all the college jokes, and who 
 had no intelligence later than their Senior year. 
 These had gathered to eat the College dinner, and to 
 get the Triennial Catalogue (their libra d oro), re 
 ferred to oftener than any volume but the Concordance. 
 Aspiring men they were certainly, but in a right un 
 worldly way ; this scholastic festival opening a peace 
 ful path to the ambition which might else have devas 
 tated mankind with Prolusions on the Pentateuch, 
 or Genealogies of the Dormouse Family. For since 
 in the academic processions the classes are ranked in 
 the order of their graduation, and he has the best 
 chance at the dinner who has the fewest teeth to eat 
 it with, so, by degrees, there springs up a competition 
 in longevity, the prize contended for being the 
 oldest surviving graduateship. This is an office, it 
 is true, without emolument, but having certain ad 
 vantages, nevertheless. The incumbent, if he come 
 to Commencement, is a prodigious lion, and com 
 monly gets a paragraph in the newspapers once a 
 year with the (fiftieth) last survivor of Washington s 
 Life-Guard. If a clergyman, he is expected to ask 
 a blessing and return thanks at the dinner, a function 
 which he performs with centenarian longanimity, as 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 41 
 
 if he reckoned the ordinary life of man to be fivescore 
 years, and that a grace must be long to reach so far 
 away as heaven. Accordingly, this silent race is 
 watched, on the course of the Catalogue, with an 
 interest worthy of Newmarket; and as star after star 
 rises in the galaxy of death, till one name is left alone, 
 an oasis of life in the stellar desert, it grows solemn. 
 The natural feeling is reversed, and it is the solitary 
 life that becomes sad and monitory, the Stylites there 
 on the lonely top of his century-pillar, who has heard 
 the passing-bell of youth, love, friendship, hope, 
 of everything but immitigable eld. 
 
 Dr. K. was President of the University then, a man 
 of genius, but of genius that evaded utilization, a 
 great water-power, but without rapids, and flowing 
 with too smooth and gentle a current to be set turning 
 wheels and whirling spindles. His was not that rest 
 less genius of which the man seems to be merely the 
 representative, and which wreaks itself in literature or 
 politics, but of that milder sort, quite as genuine, and 
 perhaps of more contemporaneous value, which is 
 the man, permeating the whole life with placid force, 
 and giving to word, look, and gesture a meaning only 
 justifiable by our belief in a reserved power of latent 
 reinforcement. The man of talents possesses them 
 like so many tools, does his job with them, and there 
 an end ; but the man of genius is possessed by it, and 
 it makes him into a book or a life according to its 
 whim. Talent takes the existing moulds, and makes 
 its castings, better or worse, of richer or baser metal, 
 according to knack and opportunity; but genius is 
 
42 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 always shaping new ones, and runs the man in them, 
 so that there is always that human feel in its results 
 which gives us a kindred thrill. What it will make, 
 we can only conjecture, contented always with know 
 ing the infinite balance of possibility against which it 
 can draw at pleasure. Have you ever seen a man 
 whose check would be honored for a million pay his 
 toll of one cent? and has not that bit of copper, no 
 bigger than your own, and piled with it by the careless 
 toll -man, given you a tingling vision of what golden 
 bridges he could pass, into what Elysian regions of 
 taste and enjoyment and culture, barred to the rest 
 of us? Something like it is the impression made by 
 such characters as K. s on those who come in contact 
 with them. 
 
 There was that in the soft and rounded (I had 
 almost said melting) outlines of his face which re 
 minded one of Chaucer. The head had a placid yet 
 dignified droop like his. He was an anachronism, 
 fitter to have been Abbot of Fountains or Bishop 
 Golias, courtier and priest, humorist and lord spiritual, 
 all in one, than for the mastership of a provincial 
 college, which combined, with its purely scholastic 
 functions, those of accountant and chief of police. 
 For keeping books he was incompetent (unless it were 
 those he borrowed), and the only discipline he exer 
 cised was by the unobtrusive pressure of a gentle- 
 manliness which rendered insubordination to him 
 impossible. But the world always judges a man 
 (and rightly enough, too) by his little faults, which he 
 shows a hundred times a day, rather than by his great 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 43 
 
 virtues, which he discloses perhaps but once in a life 
 time, and to a single person, nay, in proportion as 
 they are rarer, and he is nobler, is shyer of letting their 
 existence be known at all. He was one of those mis 
 placed persons whose misfortune it is that their lives 
 overlap two distinct eras, and are already so impreg 
 nated with one that they can never be in healthy sym 
 pathy with the other. Born when the New England 
 clergy were still an establishment and an aristocracy, 
 and when office was almost always for life, and often 
 hereditary, he lived to be thrown upon a time when 
 avocations of all colors might be shuffled together in 
 the life of one man, like a pack of cards, so that you 
 could not prophesy that he who was ordained to-day 
 might not accept a colonelcy of filibusters to-morrow. 
 Such temperaments as his attach themselves, like 
 barnacles, to what seems permanent; but presently 
 the good ship Progress weighs anchor, and whirls 
 them away from drowsy tropic inlets to arctic waters 
 of unnatural ice. To such crustaceous natures, 
 created to cling upon the immemorial rock amid 
 softest mosses, comes the bustling Nineteenth Century 
 and says, "Come, come, bestir yourself and be prac 
 tical! get out of that old shell of yours forthwith!" 
 Alas ! to get out of the shell is to die ! 
 
 One of the old travellers in South America tells of 
 fishes that built their nests in trees (piscium et summa 
 hasit genus ulmo), and gives a print of the mother fish 
 upon her nest, while her mate mounts perpendicularly 
 to her without aid of legs or wings. Life shows plenty 
 of such incongruities between a man s place and his 
 
44 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 nature, (not so easily got over as by the traveller s 
 undoubting engraver,) and one cannot help fancying 
 that K. was an instance in point. He never en 
 countered, one would say, the attraction proper to 
 draw out his native force. Certainly, few men who 
 impressed others so strongly, and of whom so many 
 good things are remembered, left less behind them to 
 justify contemporary estimates. He printed nothing, 
 and was, perhaps, one of those the electric sparkles 
 of whose brains, discharged naturally and healthily 
 in conversation, refuse to pass through the noncon 
 ducting medium of the inkstand. His ana would 
 make a delightful collection. One or two of his official 
 ones will be in place here. Hearing that Porter s flip 
 (which was exemplary) had too great an attraction 
 for the collegians, he resolved to investigate the matter 
 himself. Accordingly, entering the old inn one day, 
 he called for a mug of it, and, having drunk it, said, 
 "And so, Mr. Porter, the young gentlemen come to 
 drink your flip, do they?" "Yes, sir, sometimes." 
 "Ah, well, I should think they would. Good day, 
 Mr. Porter," and departed, saying nothing more; for 
 he always wisely allowed for the existence of a certain 
 amount of human nature in ingenuous youth. At 
 another time the "Harvard Washington" asked leave 
 to go into Boston to a collation which had been offered 
 them. "Certainly, young gentlemen," said the Presi 
 dent, "but have you engaged any one to bring home 
 your muskets?" the College being responsible for 
 these weapons, which belonged to the State. Again, 
 when a student came with a physician s certificate, 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 45 
 
 and asked leave of absence, K. granted it at once, and 
 then added, "By the way, Mr. , persons inter 
 ested in the relation which exists between states of the 
 atmosphere and health have noticed a curious fact in 
 regard to the climate of Cambridge, especially within 
 the College limits, the very small number of deaths 
 in proportion to the cases of dangerous illness." This 
 is told of Judge W., himself a wit, and capable of en 
 joying the humorous delicacy of the reproof. 
 
 Shall I take Brahmin Alcott s favorite word, and 
 call him a daemonic man? No, the Latin genius is 
 quite old-fashioned enough for me, means the same 
 thing, and its derivative geniality expresses, moreover, 
 the base of K. s being. How he suggested cloistered 
 repose, and quadrangles mossy with centurial asso 
 ciations ! How easy he was, and how without creak 
 was every movement of his mind ! This life was good 
 enough for him, and the next not too good. The 
 gentleman-like pervaded even his prayers. His were 
 not the manners of a man of the world, nor of a man 
 of the other world either; but both met in him to 
 balance each other in a beautiful equilibrium. Pray 
 ing, he leaned forward upon the pulpit-cushion as for 
 conversation, and seemed to feel himself (without 
 irreverence) on terms of friendly but courteous, 
 familiarity with Heaven. The expression of his face 
 was that of tranquil contentment, and he appeared 
 less to be supplicating expected mercies than thankful 
 for those already found, as if he were saying the 
 gratias in the refectory of the Abbey of Theleme. 
 Under him flourished the Harvard Washington Corps, 
 
46 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 whose gyrating banner, inscribed Tarn Marti quam 
 Mer curio (atqui magis Lyceo should have been added), 
 on the evening of training-days was an accurate 
 dynamometer of Willard s punch or Porter s flip. 
 , It was they who, after being royally entertained by a 
 maiden lady of the town, entered in their orderly book 
 a vote that Miss Blank was a gentleman. I see them 
 now, returning from the imminent deadly breach of 
 the law of Rechab, unable to form other than the ser 
 pentine line of beauty, while their officers, brotherly 
 rather than imperious, instead of reprimanding, tear 
 fully embraced the more eccentric wanderers from 
 military precision. Under him the Med. Facs. took 
 their equal place among the learned societies of 
 Europe, numbering among their grateful honorary 
 members, Alexander, Emperor of all the Russias, who 
 (if College legends may be trusted) sent them in 
 return for their diploma a gift of medals confiscated 
 by the authorities. Under him the College fire- 
 engine was vigilant and active in suppressing any 
 tendency to spontaneous combustion among the 
 Freshmen, or rushed wildly to imaginary confla 
 grations, generally in a direction where punch was to 
 be had. All these useful conductors for the natural 
 electricity of youth, dispersing it or turning it harm 
 lessly into the earth, are taken away now, wisely 
 or not, is questionable. 
 
 An academic town, in whose atmosphere there is 
 always something antiseptic, seems naturally to draw 
 to itself certain varieties and to preserve certain 
 humors (in the Ben Jonsonian sense) of character, 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 47 
 
 men who come not to study so much as to be studied. 
 At the head-quarters of Washington once, and now 
 
 of the Muses, lived C , but before the date of these 
 
 recollections. Here for seven years (as the law was 
 then) he made his house his castle, sunning himself 
 in his elbow-chair at the front-door, on that seventh 
 day, secure from every arrest but Death s. Here long 
 survived him his turbaned widow, studious only of 
 Spinoza, and refusing to molest the canker-worms 
 that annually disleaved her elms, because we were all 
 vermicular alike. She had been a famous beauty 
 once, but the canker years had left her leafless, too; 
 and I used to wonder, as I saw her sitting always alone 
 at her accustomed window, whether she were ever 
 visited by the reproachful shade of him who (in spite 
 of Rosalind) died broken-hearted for her in her 
 radiant youth. 
 
 And this reminds me of J. F., who, also crossed in 
 love, allowed no mortal eye to behold his face for many 
 years. The eremitic instinct is not peculiar to the 
 Thebais, as many a New England village can testify; 
 and it is worthy of consideration that the Romish 
 Church has not forgotten this among her other points 
 of intimate contact with human nature. F. became 
 purely vespertinal, never stirring abroad till after dark. 
 He occupied two rooms, migrating from one to the 
 other, as the necessities of housewifery demanded, 
 thus shunning all sight of womankind, and being 
 practically more solitary in his dual apartment than 
 Montaigne s Dean of St. Hilaire in his single one. 
 When it was requisite that he should put his signature 
 
48 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 to any legal instrument, (for he was an anchorite of 
 ample means,) he wrapped himself in a blanket, allow 
 ing nothing to be seen but the hand which acted as 
 scribe. What impressed us boys more than any 
 thing else was the rumor that he had suffered his beard 
 to grow, such an anti-Sheffieldism being almost 
 unheard of in those days, and the peculiar ornament 
 of man being associated in our minds with nothing 
 more recent than the patriarchs and apostles, whose 
 effigies we were obliged to solace ourselves with weekly 
 in the Family Bible. He came out of his oysterhood 
 at last, and I knew him well, a kind-hearted man, who 
 gave annual sleigh-rides to the town-paupers, and 
 supplied the poor children with school-books. His 
 favorite topic of conversation was Eternity, and, like 
 many other worthy persons he used to fancy that 
 meaning was an affair of aggregation, and that lie 
 doubled the intensity of what he said by the sole aid 
 of the multiplication-table. " Eternity!" he used to 
 say, "it is not a day; it is not a year; it is not a hun 
 dred years; it is not a thousand years; it is not a 
 million years; no, sir," (the sir being thrown in to 
 recall wandering attention,) "it is not ten million 
 years!" and so on, his enthusiasm becoming a mere 
 frenzy when he got among his sextillions, till I some 
 times wished he had continued in retirement. He 
 used to sit at the open window during thunder-storms, 
 and had a Grecian feeling about death by lightning. 
 In a certain sense he had his desire, for he died sud 
 denly, not by fire from heaven, but by the red flash 
 of apoplexy, leaving his whole estate to charitable uses. 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 49 
 
 If K. were out of place as President, that was not 
 P. as Greek Professor. Who that ever saw him can 
 forget him, in his old age, like a lusty winter, frosty 
 but kindly, with great silver spectacles of the heroic 
 period, such as scarce twelve noses of these degen 
 erate days could bear? He was a natural celibate, 
 not dwelling "like the fly in the heart of the apple," 
 but like a lonely bee rather, absconding himself in 
 Hymettian flowers, incapable of matrimony as a soli 
 tary palm-tree. There was, to be sure, a tradition of 
 youthful disappointment, and a touching story which 
 L. told me perhaps confirms it. When Mrs. - 
 died, a carriage with blinds drawn followed the funeral 
 train at some distance, and, when the coffin had been 
 lowered into the grave, drove hastily away to escape 
 that saddest of earthly sounds, the first rattle of earth 
 upon the lid. It was afterwards known that the car 
 riage held a single mourner, our grim and un 
 demonstrative Professor. Yet I cannot bring myself 
 to suppose him susceptible to any tender passion after 
 that single lapse in the immaturity of reason. He 
 might have joined the Abderites in singing their mad 
 chorus from the Andromeda; but it would have been 
 in deference to the language merely, and with a silent 
 protest against the sentiment. I fancy him arrang 
 ing his scrupulous toilet, not for Amaryllis or Neaera, 
 but, like Machiavelli, for the society of his beloved 
 classics. His ears had needed no prophylactic wax 
 to pass the Sirens isle ; nay, he would have kept them 
 the wider open, studious of the dialect in which they 
 sang, and perhaps triumphantly detecting the 
 
50 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 digamma in their lay. A thoroughly single man, single- 
 minded, single-hearted, buttoning over his single 
 heart a single-breasted surtout, and wearing always a 
 hat of a single fashion, did he in secret regard the 
 dual number of his favorite language as a weakness? 
 The son of an officer of distinction in the Revolutionary 
 War, he mounted the pulpit with the erect port of a 
 soldier, and carried his cane more in the fashion of a 
 weapon than a staff, but with the point lowered, in 
 token of surrender to the peaceful proprieties of his 
 calling. Yet sometimes the martial instincts would 
 burst the cerements of black coat and clerical neck 
 cloth, as once, when the students had got into a fight 
 upon the training-field, and the licentious soldiery, 
 furious with rum, had driven them at point of bayonet, 
 to the College gates, and even threatened to lift their 
 arms against the Muses bower. Then, like Major 
 Goffe at Deerfield, suddenly appeared the gray- 
 haired P., all his father resurgent in him, and shouted: 
 "Now, my lads, stand your ground, you re in the 
 right now ! Don t let one of them set foot within the 
 College grounds!" Thus he allowed arms to get 
 the better of the toga, but raised it, like the Prophet s 
 breeches, into a banner, and carefully ushered re 
 sistance with a preamble of infringed right. Fidelity 
 was his strong characteristic, and burned equably in 
 him through a life of eighty-three years. He drilled 
 himself till inflexible habit stood sentinel before all 
 those postern-weaknesses which temperament leaves 
 unbolted to temptation. A lover of the scholar s herb 
 yet loving freedom more, and knowing that the animal 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 5 1 
 
 appetites ever hold one hand behind them for Satan 
 to drop a bribe in, he would never have two cigars in 
 his house at once, but walked every day to the shop 
 to fetch his single diurnal solace. Nor would he 
 trust himself with two on Saturdays, preferring (since 
 he could not violate the Sabbath even by that infini 
 tesimal traffic) to depend on Providential ravens, 
 which were seldom wanting in the shape of some 
 black-coated friend who knew his need, and honored 
 the scruple that occasioned it. He was faithful, also, 
 to his old hats, in which appeared the constant service 
 of the antique world, and which he preserved forever, 
 piled like a black pagoda under his dressing-table. 
 No scarecrow was ever the residuary legatee of his 
 " beavers, though one of them in any of the neighboring 
 peach-orchards would have been sovereign against 
 an attack of Freshmen. He wore them all in turn, 
 getting though all in the course of the year, like the 
 sun through the signs of the zodiac, modulating them 
 according to seasons and celestial phenomena, so that 
 never was spider-web or chickweed so sensitive a 
 weather-gauge as they. Nor did his political party 
 find him less loyal. Taking all the tickets, he would 
 seat himself apart, and carefully compare them with 
 the list of regular nominations as printed in his Daily 
 Advertiser, before he dropped his ballot in the box. 
 In less ambitious moments, it almost seems to me 
 that I would rather have had that slow, conscientious 
 vote of P. s alone, than to have been chosen Alderman 
 of the Ward ! 
 
 If you had walked to what was then Sweet Auburn 
 
52 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 by the pleasant Old Road, on some June morning 
 thirty years ago, you would very likely have met two 
 other characteristic persons, both phantasmagoric 
 now, and belonging to the past. Fifty years earlier, 
 the scarlet-coated, rapiered figures of Vassall, Lech- 
 mere, Oliver, and Brattle creaked up and down there 
 on red-heeled shoes, lifting the ceremonious three- 
 cornered hat, and offering the fugacious hospitalities 
 of the snuff-box. They are all shadowy alike now, 
 not one of your Etruscan Lucumos or Roman Consuls 
 more so, my dear Storg. First is W., his queue slender 
 and tapering, like the tail of a violet crab, held out 
 horizontally by the high collar of his shepherd s-gray 
 overcoat, whose style was of the latest when he studied 
 at Leyden in his hot youth. The age of cheap clothes 
 sees no more of those faithful old garments, as proper 
 to their wearers and as distinctive as the barks of 
 trees, and by long use interpenetrated with their very 
 nature. Nor do we see so many Humors (still in the 
 old sense) now that every man s soul belongs to the 
 Public, as when social distinctions were more marked, 
 and men felt that their personalities were their castles, 
 in which they could intrench themselves against the 
 world. Nowadays men are shy of letting their true 
 selves be seen, as if in some former life they had com 
 mitted a crime, and were all the time afraid of dis 
 covery and arrest in this. Formerly they used to 
 insist on your giving the wall to their peculiarities, and 
 you may still find examples of it in the parson or the 
 doctor of retired villages. One of W. s oddities was 
 touching. A little brook used to run across the street, 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 53 
 
 and the sidewalk was carried over it by a broad stone, 
 Of course there is no brook now. What use did that 
 little glimpse of a ripple serve, where the children used 
 to launch their chip fleets? W., in going over this 
 stone, which gave a hollow resonance to the tread, 
 had a trick of striking upon it three times with his 
 cane, and muttering, "Tom, Tom, Tom!" I used 
 to think he was only mimicking with his voice the 
 sound of the blows, and possibly it was that sound 
 which suggested his thought, for he was remembering 
 a favorite nephew, prematurely dead. Perhaps Tom 
 had sailed his boats there; perhaps the reverberation 
 under the old man s foot hinted at the hollowness of 
 life; perhaps the fleeting eddies of the water brought 
 to mind the jugaces annos. W., like P., wore amazing 
 spectacles, fit to transmit no smaller image than the 
 page of mightiest folios of Dioscorides or Hercules de 
 Saxonia, and rising full-disked upon the beholder 
 like those prodigies of two moons at once, portending 
 change to monarchs. The great collar disallowing 
 any independent rotation of the head, I remember he 
 used to turn his whole person in order to bring their 
 joci to bear upon an object. One can fancy that 
 terrified nature would have yielded up her secrets at 
 once, without cross-examination, at their first glare. 
 Through them he had gazed fondly into the great 
 mare s-nest of Junius, publishing his observations 
 upon the eggs found therein in a tall octavo. It was 
 he who introduced vaccination to this Western World. 
 Malicious persons disputing his claim to this distinc 
 tion, he published this advertisement: "Lost, a gold 
 
54 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 snuff-box, with the inscription, The Jenner of the 
 Old World to the Jenner of the New. Whoever shall 
 return the same to Dr. - - shall be suitably re 
 warded." It was never returned. Would the search 
 after it have been as fruitless as that of the alchemist 
 after his equally imaginary gold? Malicious persons 
 persisted in believing the box as visionary as the claim 
 it was meant to buttress with a semblance of reality. 
 He used to stop and say good morning kindly, and pat 
 the shoulder of the blushing school-boy who now, 
 with the fierce snow-storm wildering without, sits 
 and remembers sadly those old meetings and partings 
 in the June sunshine. 
 
 Then there was S., whose resounding "Haw, haw, 
 haw! by George!" positively enlarged the income 
 of every dweller in Cambridge. In downright, honest 
 good cheer and good neighborhood, it was worth five 
 hundred a year to every one of us. Its jovial thunders 
 cleared the mental air of every sulky cloud. Perpetual 
 childhood dwelt in him, the childhood of his native 
 Southern France, and its fixed air was all the time 
 bubbling up and sparkling and winking in his eyes. 
 It seemed as if his placid old face were only a mask 
 behind which a merry Cupid had ambushed himself, 
 peeping out all the while, and ready to drop it when 
 the play grew tiresome. Every word he uttered 
 seemed to be hilarious, no matter what the occasion. 
 If he were sick, and you visited him, if he had met 
 with a misfortune, (and there are few men so wise 
 that they can look even at the back of a retiring sor 
 row with composure,) it was all one; his great laugh 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 55 
 
 went off as if it were set like an alarm-clock, to run 
 down, whether he would or no, at a certain tick. 
 Even after an ordinary Good morning! (especially 
 if to an old pupil, and in French,) the wonderful Taw, 
 haw, haw! by George! would burst upon you unex 
 pectedly, like a salute of artillery on some holiday 
 which you had forgotten. Everything was a joke to 
 i him, that the oath of allegiance had been admin- 
 j istered to him by your grandfather, that he had 
 1 taught Prescott his first Spanish (of which he was 
 \proud), no matter what. Everything came to 
 \hirn marked by Nature Right side up, with care, and 
 \he kept it so. The world to him, as to all of us, was 
 like a medal, on the obverse of which is stamped the 
 image of Joy, and on the reverse that of Care. S. 
 never took the foolish pains to look at that other side, 
 even if he knew its existence ; much less would it have 
 occurred to him to turn it into view, and insist that his 
 friends should look at it with him. Nor was this a 
 mere outside good-humor; its source was deeper, in 
 a true Christian kindliness and amenity. Once, when 
 he had been knocked down by a tipsily-driven sleigh, 
 and was urged to prosecute the offenders, "No, no," 
 he said, his wounds still fresh, "young blood, young 
 blood! it must have its way; I was young myself." 
 Was! few men come into life so young as S. went out. 
 He landed in Boston (then the front door of America) 
 in 93, and, in honor of the ceremony, had his head 
 powdered afresh, and put on a suit of court-mourning 
 before he set foot on the wharf. My fancy always 
 dressed him in that violet silk, and his soul certainly 
 
56 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 wore a full court-suit. What was there ever like his 
 bow? It was as if you had received a decoration, 
 and could write yourself gentleman from that day 
 forth. His hat rose, regreeting your own, and, having 
 sailed through the stately curve of the old regime, 
 sank gently back over that placid brain, which har 
 bored no thought less white than the powder which 
 covered it. I have sometimes imagined that there 
 was a graduated arc over his head, invisible to other 
 eyes than his, by which he meted out to each his right 
 ful share of castorial consideration. I carry in my 
 memory three exemplary bows. The first is that of 
 an old beggar, who, already carrying in his hand a 
 white hat, the gift of benevolence, took off the black 
 one from his head also, and profoundly saluted me 
 with both at once, giving me, in return for my alms, 
 a dual benediction, puzzling as a nod from Janus 
 Bifrons. The second I received from an old Cardinal, 
 who was taking his walk just outside the Porta San 
 Giovanni at Rome. I paid him the courtesy due to 
 his age and rank. Forthwith rose, first, the Hat; 
 second, the hat of his confessor; third, that of another 
 priest who attended him; fourth, the fringed cocked- 
 hat of his coachman; fifth and sixth, the ditto, ditto, 
 of his two footmen. Here was an investment, 
 indeed; six hundred per cent interest on a single 
 bow! The third bow, worthy to be noted in 
 one s almanac among the other mirabilia, was that 
 of S., in which courtesy had mounted to the 
 last round of her ladder, and tried to draw it up 
 after her. 
 
CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 57 
 
 But the genial veteran is gone even while I am 
 writing this, and I will play Old Mortality no longer. 
 Wandering among these recent graves, my dear friend, 
 
 we may chance upon ; but no, I will not end my 
 
 sentence. I bid you heartily farewell! 
 
A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 
 
 ADDRESSED TO THE EDELMANN STORG AT THE 
 BAGNI DI LUCCA. 
 
 THURSDAY, nth August. I knew as little yester 
 day of the interior of Maine as the least penetrating 
 person knows of the inside of that great social mill 
 stone which, driven by the river Time, sets impera 
 tively agoing the several wheels of our individual 
 activities. Born while Maine was still a province of 
 native Massachusetts, I was as much a foreigner to it 
 as yourself, my dear Storg. I had seen many lakes, 
 ranging from that of Virgil s Cumaean to that of Scott s 
 Caledonian Lady; but Moosehead, within two days 
 of me, had never enjoyed the profit of being mirrored 
 in my retina. At the sound of the name, no remi- 
 niscential atoms (according to Kenelm Digby s 
 Theory of Association, as good as any) stirred and 
 marshalled themselves in my brain. The truth is, 
 we think lightly of Nature s penny shows, and esti 
 mate what we see by the cost of the ticket. Em- 
 pedocles gave his life for a pit-entrance to /Etna, and 
 no doubt found his account in it. Accordingly, the 
 clean face of Cousin Bull is imaged patronizingly in 
 Lake George, and Loch Lomond glasses the hurried 
 countenance of Jonathan, diving deeper in the streams 
 of European association (and coming up drier) than 
 
 58 
 
A MuOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 59 
 
 any other man. Or is the cause of our not caring to 
 see what is equally within the reach of all our neigh 
 bors to be sought in that aristocratic principle so 
 deeply implanted in human nature ? I knew a pauper 
 graduate who always borrowed a black coat, and came 
 to eat the Commencement dinner, not that it was 
 better than the one which daily graced the board of 
 the public institution in which he hibernated (so to 
 speak) during the other three hundred and sixty-four 
 days of the year, save in this one particular, that none 
 of his eleemosynary fellow-commoners could eat it. 
 If there are unhappy men who wish that they were as 
 the Babe Unborn, there are more who would aspire 
 to the lonely distinction of being that other figurative 
 personage, the Oldest Inhabitant. You remember 
 the charming irresolution of our dear Esthwaite, (like 
 Macheath between his two doxies,) divided between 
 his theory that he is under thirty, and his pride at 
 being the only one of us who witnessed the September 
 gale and the rejoicings at the Peace? Nineteen years 
 ago I was walking through the Franconia Notch, and 
 stopped to chat with a hermit, who fed with gradual 
 logs the unwearied teeth of a saw-mill. As the pant 
 ing steel slit off the slabs of the log, so did the less 
 willing machine of talk, acquiring a steadier up-and- 
 down motion, pare away that outward bark of con 
 versation which protects the core, and which, like 
 other bark, has naturally most to do with the weather, 
 the season, and the heat of the day. At length I asked 
 him the best point of view for the Old Man of the 
 Mountain. 
 
60 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 "Dunno, never see it." 
 
 Too young and too happy either to feel or affect the 
 Juvenalian indifference, I was sincerely astonished, 
 and I expressed it. 
 
 The log-compelling man attempted no justifica 
 tion, but after a little asked, "Come from Bawsn?" 
 
 "Yes" (with peninsular pride). 
 
 "Goodie to see in the vycinity o Bawsn." 
 
 "O yes!" I said, and I thought, see Boston 
 and die ! see the State-Houses, old and new, the cat 
 erpillar wooden bridges crawling with innumerable 
 legs across the flats of Charles ; see the Common, 
 largest park, doubtless, in the world, with its files 
 of trees planted as if by a drill-sergeant, and then for 
 your nunc dimittis ! 
 
 "I should like, awl, I should like to stan on Bunker 
 Hill. You ve ben there offen, likely?" 
 
 "N o o," unwillingly, seeing the little end of 
 the horn in clear vision at the terminus of this Socratic 
 perspective. 
 
 " Awl, my young frien , you ve larned neow thet 
 wut a man kin see any day for nawthin , childern half 
 price, he never doos see. Nawthin pay, nawthin 
 vally." 
 
 With mis modern instance of a wise saw, I departed, 
 deeply revolving these things with myself, and con 
 vinced that, whatever the ratio of population, the 
 average amount of human nature to the square mile 
 is the same the world over. I thought of it when I 
 saw people upon the Pincian wondering at the Al 
 chemist sun, as if he never burned the leaden clouds 
 
A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 6 1 
 
 to gold in sight of Charles Street. I thought of it when 
 I found eyes first discovering at Mont Blanc how 
 beautiful snow was. As I walked on, I said to myself, 
 There is one exception, wise hermit, it is just these 
 gratis pictures which the poet puts in his show-box, 
 and which we all gladly pay Wordsworth and the rest 
 for a peep at. The divine faculty is to see what every 
 body can look at. 
 
 While every well-informed man in Europe, from 
 the barber down to the diplomatist, has his view of 
 the Eastern Question, why should I not go personally 
 down East and see for myself? Why not, like Tan- 
 cred, attempt my own solution of the mystery of the 
 Orient, doubly mysterious when you begin the two 
 \words with capitals? You know my way of doing 
 things, to let them simmer in my mind gently for 
 months, and at last do them impromptu in a kind of 
 desperation, driven by the Eumenides of unfulfilled 
 purpose. So, after talking about Moosehead till 
 nobody believed me capable of going thither, I found 
 myself at the Eastern Railway station. The only 
 event of the journey hither (I am now at Waterville) 
 was a boy hawking exhilaratingly the last great rail 
 road smash, thirteen lives lost, and no doubt 
 devoutly wishing there had been fifty. This having 
 a mercantile interest in horrors, holding stock, as it 
 were, in murder, misfortune, and pestilence, must 
 have an odd effect on the human mind. The birds of 
 ill-omen, at whose sombre flight the rest of the world 
 turn pale, are the ravens which bring food to this 
 little outcast in the wilderness. If this lad give 
 
62 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 thanks for daily bread, it would be curious to inquire 
 what that phrase represents to his understanding. If 
 there ever be a plum in it, it is Sin or Death that puts 
 it in. Other details of my dreadful ride I will spare 
 you. Suffice it that I arrived here in safety, in 
 complexion like an Ethiopian serenader half got-up, 
 and so broiled and peppered that I was more like a 
 devilled kidney than anything else I can think of. 
 
 10 P.M. The civil landlord and neat chamber at 
 the "Elmwood House" were very grateful, and after 
 tea I set forth to explore the town. It has a good 
 chance of being pretty ; but, like most American 
 towns, it is in a hobbledehoy age, growing yet, and 
 one cannot tell what may happen. A child with 
 great promise of beauty is often spoiled by its second 
 teeth. There is something agreeable in the sense of 
 completeness which a walled town gives one. It is 
 entire, like a crystal, a work which man has suc 
 ceeded in finishing. I think the human mind pines 
 more or less where everything is new, and is better for 
 a diet of stale bread. The number of Americans who 
 visit the Old World is beginning to afford matter of 
 speculation to observant Europeans, and the deep 
 inspirations with which they breathe the air of an 
 tiquity, as if their mental lungs had been starved with 
 too thin an atmosphere. For my own part, I never 
 saw a house which I thought old enough to be torn 
 down. It is too like that Scythian fashion of knock 
 ing old people on the head. I cannot help thinking 
 that the indefinable something which we call char 
 acter is cumulative, that the influence of the same 
 
A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 63 
 
 climate, scenery, and associations for several genera 
 tions is necessary to its gathering head, and that the 
 process is disturbed by continual change of place. 
 The American is nomadic in religion, in ideas, in 
 morals, and leaves his faith and opinions with as 
 much indifference as the house in which he was born. 
 However, we need not bother: Nature takes care 
 not to leave out of the great heart of society either of 
 its two ventricles of hold-back and go-ahead. 
 
 It seems as if every considerable American town 
 must have its one specimen of everything, and so there 
 is a college in Waterville, the buildings of which are 
 three in number, of brick, and quite up to the average 
 ugliness which seems essential in edifices of this de 
 scription. Unhappily, they do not reach that extreme 
 of ugliness where it and beauty come together in the 
 clasp of fascination. We erect handsomer factories, 
 for cottons, woollens, and steam-engines, than for 
 doctors, lawyers, and parsons. The truth is, that, 
 till our struggle with nature is over, till this shaggy 
 hemisphere is tamed and subjugated, the workshop 
 will be the college whose degrees will be most valued. 
 Moreover, steam has made travel so easy that the 
 great university of the world is open to all comers, and 
 the old cloister system is falling astern. Perhaps it is 
 only the more needed, and, were I rich, I should like to 
 found a few lazyships in my Alma Mater as a kind of 
 counterpoise. The Anglo-Saxon race has accepted 
 the primal curse as a blessing, has deified work, and 
 would not have thanked Adam for abstaining from 
 the apple. They would have dammed the four rivers 
 
64 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 of Paradise, substituted cotton for fig-leaves among 
 the antediluvian populations, and commended man s 
 first disobedience as a wise measure of political 
 economy. But to return to our college. We cannot 
 have fine buildings till we are less in a hurry. We 
 snatch an education like a meal at a railroad-station. 
 Just in time to make us dyspeptic, the whistle shrieks, 
 and we must rush, or lose our places in the great train 
 of life. Yet noble architecture is one element of 
 patriotism, and an eminent one of culture, the finer 
 portions of which are taken in by unconscious ab 
 sorption through the pores of the mind from the 
 surrounding atmosphere. I suppose we must wait, 
 for we are a great bivouac as yet rather than a nation, 
 on the march from the Atlantic to the Pacific, 
 and pitch tents instead of building houses. Our 
 very villages seem to be in motion, following west 
 ward the bewitching music of some Pied Piper of 
 Hamelin. We still feel the great push toward sun 
 down given to the peoples somewhere in the gray 
 dawn of history. The cliff-swallow alone of all ani 
 mated nature emigrates eastward. 
 
 Friday, nth. The coach leaves Waterville at 
 five o clock in the morning, and one must breakfast 
 in the dark at a quarter past four, because a train 
 starts at twenty minutes before five, the passengers 
 by both conveyances being pastured gregariously. 
 So one must be up at half past three. The primary 
 geological formations contain no trace of man, and 
 it seems to me that these eocene periods of the day 
 are not fitted for sustaining the human forms of life. 
 
A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 6$ 
 
 One of the Fathers held that the sun was created to be 
 worshipped at his rising by the Gentiles. The more 
 reason that Christians (except, perhaps, early Chris 
 tians) should abstain from these heathenish cere 
 monials. As one arriving by an early train is wel 
 comed by a drowsy maid with the sleep scarce brushed 
 out of her hair, and finds empty grates and polished 
 mahogany, on whose arid plains the pioneers of break 
 fast have not yet encamped, so a person waked thus 
 unseasonably is sent into the world before his faculties 
 are up and dressed to serve him. It might have been 
 for this reason that my stomach resented for several 
 hours a piece of fried beefsteak which I forced upon 
 it, or, more properly speaking, a piece of that leathern 
 conveniency which in these regions assumes the name. 
 You will find it as hard to believe, my dear Storg, as 
 that quarrel of the Sorbonists, whether one should 
 say ego amat or no, that the use of the gridiron is un 
 known hereabout, and so near a river named after 
 St. Lawrence, too ! 
 
 To-day has been the hottest day of the season, yet 
 our drive has not been unpleasant. For a consider 
 able distance we followed the course of the Sebasti- 
 cook River, a pretty stream with alternations of dark 
 brown pools and wine-colored rapids. On each side 
 of the road the land has been cleared, and little one- 
 story farm-houses were scattered at intervals. But 
 the stumps still held out in most of the fields, and the 
 tangled wilderness closed in behind, striped here and 
 there with the slim white trunks of the elm. As yet 
 only the edges of the great forest have been nibbled 
 
66 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 away. Sometimes a root-fence stretched up its 
 bleaching antlers, like the trophies of a giant hunter. 
 Now and then the houses thickened into an unsocial- 
 looking village, and we drove up to the grocery to 
 leave and take a mail-bag, stopping again presently 
 to water the horses at some pallid little tavern, whose 
 one red-curtained eye (the bar-room) had been put 
 out by the inexorable thrust of Maine Law. Had 
 Shenstone travelled this road, he would never have 
 written that famous stanza of his; had Johnson, he 
 would never have quoted it. They are to real inns 
 as the skull of Yorick to his face. Where these vil 
 lages occurred at a distance from the river, it was 
 difficult to account for them. On the river-bank, a 
 saw-mill or a tannery served as a logical premise, and 
 saved them from total inconsequentiality. As we 
 trailed along, at the rate of about four miles an hour, 
 it was discovered that one of our mail -bags was miss 
 ing. "Guess somebody 11 pick it up," said the 
 driver coolly; " t any rate, likely there s nothin in 
 it." Who knows how long it took some Elam D. 
 or Zebulon K. to compose the missive intrusted to 
 that vagrant bag, and how much longer to persuade 
 Pamela Grace or Sophronia Melissa that it had really 
 and truly been written? The discovery of our loss 
 was made by at all man who sat next to me on the top 
 of the coach, every one of whose senses seemed to be 
 prosecuting its several investigation as we went along. 
 Presently, sniffing gently, he remarked: " Pears to 
 me s though I smelt sunthin . Ain t the aix het, 
 think?" The driver pulled up, and, sure enough. 
 
A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 6? 
 
 the off fore-wheel was found to be smoking. In three 
 minutes he had snatched a rail from the fence, made 
 a lever, raised the coach, and taken off the wheel, 
 bathing the hot axle and box with water from the 
 river. It was a pretty spot, and I was not sorry to 
 lie under a beech-tree (Tityrus-like, meditating over 
 my pipe) and watch the operations of the fire-annihi- 
 lator. I could not help contrasting the ready help 
 fulness of our driver, all of whose wits were about 
 him, current, and redeemable in the specie of action 
 on emergency, with an incident of travel in Italy, 
 where, under a somewhat similar stress of circum 
 stances, our vetturino had nothing for it but to dash 
 his hat on the ground and call on Sant Antonio, the 
 Italian Hercules. 
 
 There being four passengers for the Lake, a vehicle 
 called a mud-wagon was detailed at Newport for our 
 accommodation. In this we jolted and rattled along 
 at a livelier pace than in the coach. As we got 
 farther north, the country (especially the hills) gave 
 evidence of longer cultivation. About the thriving 
 town of Dexter we saw fine farms and crops. The 
 houses, too, became prettier; hop-vines were trained 
 about the doors, and hung their clustering thyrsi 
 over the open windows. A kind of wild rose (called 
 by the country folk the primrose) and asters were 
 planted about the door-yards, and orchards, com 
 monly of natural fruit, added to the pleasant home- 
 look. But everywhere we could see that the war 
 between the white man and the forest was still fierce, 
 and that it would be a long while yet before the axe 
 
68 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 was buried. The haying being over, fires blazed or 
 smouldered against the stumps in the fields, and the 
 blue smoke widened slowly upward through the quiet 
 August atmosphere. It seemed to me that I could 
 hear a sigh now and then from the immemorial pines, 
 as they stood watching these camp-fires of the inex 
 orable invader. Evening set in, and, as we crunched 
 and crawled up the long gravelly hills, I sometimes 
 began to fancy that Nature had forgotten to make the 
 corresponding descent on the other side. But ere 
 long we were rushing down at full speed; and, in 
 spired by the dactylic beat of the horses hoofs, I 
 essayed to repeat the opening lines of Evangeline. 
 At the moment I was beginning, we plunged into a 
 hollow, where the soft clay had been overcome by a 
 road of unhewn logs. I got through one line to this 
 corduroy accompaniment, somewhat as a country 
 choir stretches a short metre on the Protestant rock 
 of a long-drawn tune. The result was like this: 
 
 " Thihis ihis thehe fohorest prihihimeheval ; thehe murhur- 
 muring pihines hahand thehe hehemlohocks ! " 
 
 At a quarter past eleven, P.M., we reached Greenville, 
 (a little village which looks as if it had dripped down 
 from the hills, and settled in the hollow at the foot of 
 the lake,) having accomplished seventy-two miles in 
 eighteen hours. The tavern was totally extinguished. 
 The driver rapped upon the bar-room window, and 
 after a while we saw heat-lightnings of unsuccessful 
 matches followed by a low grumble of vocal thunder, 
 which I am afraid took the form of imprecation. 
 
A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 69 
 
 Presently there was a great success, and the steady 
 blur of lighted tallow succeeded the fugitive brilliance 
 of the pine. A hostler fumbled the door open, and 
 stood staring at but not seeing us, with the sleep 
 sticking out all over him. We at last contrived to 
 launch him, more like an insensible missile than an 
 intelligent or intelligible being, at the slumbering 
 landlord, who came out wide-awake, and welcomed 
 us as so many half-dollars, twenty-five cents each 
 for bed, ditto breakfast. O Shenstone, Shenstone ! 
 The only roost was in the garret, which had been made 
 into a single room, and contained eleven double-beds, 
 ranged along the walls. It was like sleeping in a 
 hospital. However, nice customs curtsy to eighteen- 
 hour rides, and we slept. 
 
 Saturday, i^th. This morning I performed my 
 toilet in the bar-room, where there was an abundant 
 supply of water, and a halo of interested spectators. 
 After a sufficient breakfast, we embarked on the little 
 steamer Moosehead, and were soon throbbing up 
 the lake. The boat, it appeared, had been chartered 
 by a party, this not being one of her regular trips. 
 Accordingly we were mulcted in twice the usual fee, 
 the philosophy of which I could not understand. 
 However, it always comes easier to us to comprehend 
 why we receive than why we pay. I dare say it was 
 quite clear to the captain. There were three or four 
 clearings on the western shore; but after passing 
 these, the lake became wholly primeval, and looked 
 to us as it did to the first adventurous Frenchman 
 who paddled across it. Sometimes a cleared point 
 
70 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 would be pink with the blossoming willow-herb, "a 
 cheap and excellent substitute" for heather, and, 
 like all such, not quite so good as the real thing. On 
 all sides rose deep-blue mountains, of remarkably 
 graceful outline, and more fortunate than common 
 in their names. There were the Big and Little Squaw, 
 the Spencer and Lily-bay Mountains. It was de 
 bated whether we saw Katahdin or not, (perhaps 
 more useful as an intellectual exercise than the assured 
 vision would have been,) and presently Mount Kineo 
 rose abruptly before us, in shape not unlike the island 
 of Capri. Mountains are called great natural fea 
 tures, and why they should not retain their names long 
 enough for them also to become naturalized, it is hard 
 to say. Why should every new surveyor rechristen 
 them with the gubernatorial patronymics of the cur 
 rent year? They are geological noses, and, as they 
 are aquiline or pug, indicate terrestrial idiosyncrasies. 
 A cosmical physiognomist, after a glance at them, 
 will draw no vague inference as to the character of the 
 country. The word nose is no better than any other 
 word; but since the organ has got that name, it is 
 convenient to keep it. Suppose we had to label our 
 facial prominences every season with the name of our 
 provincial governor, how should we like it? If the 
 old names have no other meaning, they have that of 
 age ; and, after all, meaning is a plant of slow growth, 
 as every reader of Shakespeare knows. It is well 
 enough to call mountains after their discoverers, for 
 Nature has a knack of throwing doublets, and some 
 how contrives it that discoverers have good names. 
 
A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 71 
 
 Pike s Peak is a curious hit in this way. But these 
 surveyors names have no natural stick in them. They 
 remind one of the epithets of poetasters, which peel 
 off like a badly gummed postage-stamp. The early 
 settlers did better, and there is something pleasant in 
 the sound of Graylock, Saddleback, and Great Hay 
 stack. 
 
 " I love those names 
 Wherewith the exiled farmer tames 
 Nature down to companionship 
 
 With his old world s more homely mood, 
 And strives the shaggy wild to clip 
 
 With arms of familiar habitude." 
 
 It is possible that Mount Marcy and Mount Hitch 
 cock may sound as well hereafter as Hellespont and 
 Peloponnesus, when the heroes, their namesakes, 
 have become mythic with antiquity. But that is to 
 look forward a great way. I am no fanatic for Indian 
 nomenclature, the name of my native district 
 having been Pigsgusset, but let us at least agree on 
 names for ten years. 
 
 There were a couple of loggers on board, in red 
 flannel shirts, and with rifles. They were the first I 
 had seen, and I was interested in their appearance. 
 They were tall, well-knit men, straight as Robin Hood, 
 and with a quiet, self-contained look that pleased me. 
 I fell into talk with one of them. 
 
 "Is there a good market for the farmers here in the 
 woods?" I asked. 
 
 "None better. They can sell what they raise at 
 their doors, and for the best of prices. The lum 
 berers want it all, and more." 
 
72 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 "It must be a lonely life. But then we all have to 
 pay more or less life for a living." 
 
 "Well, it is lonesome. Shouldn t like it. After 
 all, the best crop a man can raise is a good crop of 
 society. We don t live none too long, anyhow; and 
 without society a fellow could n t tell more n half the 
 time whether he was alive or not." 
 
 This speech gave me a glimpse into the life of the 
 lumberers camp. It was plain that there a man 
 would soon find out how much alive he was, there 
 he could learn to estimate his quality, weighed in the 
 nicest self-adjusting balance. The best arm at the 
 axe or the paddle, the surest eye for a road or for 
 the weak point of a jam, the steadiest foot upon the 
 squirming log, the most persuasive voice to the tug 
 ging oxen, all these things are rapidly settled, and 
 so an aristocracy is evolved from this democracy of the 
 woods, for good old mother Nature speaks Saxon still, 
 and with her either Canning or Kenning means King. 
 
 A string of five loons was flying back and forth in 
 long, irregular zigzags, uttering at intervals their wild, 
 tremulous cry, which always seems far away, like the 
 last faint pulse of echo dying among the hills, and 
 which is one of those few sounds that, instead of dis 
 turbing the solitude, only deepen and confirm it. On 
 our inland ponds they are usually seen in pairs, and I 
 asked if it were common to meet five together. My 
 question was answered by a queer-looking old man, 
 chiefly remarkable for a pair of enormous cowhide 
 boots, over which large blue trousers of frocking 
 strove in vain to crowd themselves. 
 
A MOOSE HEAD JOURNAL. 73 
 
 "Wahl, t ain t ushil," said he, "and it s called a 
 sign o rain comin , that is." 
 
 "Do you think it will rain?" 
 
 With the caution of a veteran auspex, he evaded a 
 direct reply. "Wahl, they du say it s a sign o rain 
 comin ," said he. 
 
 I discovered afterward that my interlocutor was 
 Uncle Zeb. Formerly, every New England town had 
 its representative uncle. He was not a pawnbroker, 
 but some elderly man who, for want of more defined 
 family ties, had gradually assumed this avuncular 
 relation to the community, inhabiting the border 
 land between respectability and the almshouse, with 
 no regular calling, but working at haying, wood- 
 sawing, whitewashing, associated with the demise of 
 pigs and the ailments of cattle, and possessing as much 
 patriotism as might be implied in a devoted attach 
 ment to "New England" with a good deal of sugar 
 and very little water in it. Uncle Zeb was a good 
 specimen of this palaeozoic class, extinct among us 
 for the most part, or surviving, like the Dodo, in the 
 Botany Bays of society. He was ready to contribute 
 (somewhat muddily) to all general conversation; but 
 his chief topics were his boots and the Roostick war. 
 Upon the lowlands and levels of ordinary palaver he 
 would make rapid and unlooked-for incursions; but 
 provision failing, he would retreat to these two fast 
 nesses, whence it was impossible to dislodge him, and 
 to which he knew innumerable passes and short cuts 
 quite beyond the conjecture of common woodcraft. 
 His mind opened naturally to these two subjects, like 
 
74 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 a book to some favorite passage. As the ear accus 
 toms itself to any sound recurring regularly, such as 
 the ticking of a clock, and, without a conscious effort 
 of attention, takes no impression from it whatever, 
 so does the mind find a natural safeguard against this 
 pendulum species of discourse, and performs its 
 duties in the parliament by an unconscious reflex 
 action, like the beating of the heart or the movement 
 of the lungs. If talk seemed to be flagging, our 
 Uncle would put the heel of one boot upon the toe of 
 the other, to bring it within point-blank range, and 
 say, "Wahl, I stump the Devil himself to make that 
 ere boot hurt my foot," leaving us no doubt whether 
 it were the virtue of the foot or its case which set at 
 naught the wiles of the adversary; or, looking up 
 suddenly, he would exclaim, " Wahl, we eat some beans 
 \ to the Roostick war, I tell you!" When his poor old 
 clay was wet with gin, his thoughts and words ac 
 quired a rank flavor from it, as from too strong a 
 fertilizer. At such times, too, his fancy commonly 
 reverted to a prehistoric period of his life, when he 
 singly had settled all the surrounding country, sub 
 dued the Injuns and other wild animals, and named 
 all the towns. 
 
 We talked of the winter-camps and the life there. 
 "The best thing is," said our Uncle, "to hear a long 
 squeal thru the snow. Git a good, cole, frosty 
 mornin , in Febuary say, an take an hitch the 
 critters on to a log that 11 scale seven thousan , an 
 it 11 squeal as pooty as an thin you ever hearn, I tell 
 you" 
 
A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 75 
 
 A pause. 
 
 "Lessee, seen Cal Hutchins lately?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 "Seems to me s though I hed n t seen Cal sence the 
 Roostick war. Wahl," etc., etc. 
 
 Another pause. 
 
 "To look at them boots you d think they was too 
 large; but kind o git your foot into em, and they re 
 as easy s a glove." (I observed that he never seemed 
 really to get his foot in, there was always a quali 
 fying kind o\) "Wahl, my foot can play in em like 
 a young hedgehog." 
 
 By this time we had arrived at Kineo, a flourish 
 ing village of one house, the tavern kept by Squire 
 Barrows. The Squire is a large, hearty man, with a 
 voice as clear and strong as a northwest wind and a 
 great laugh suitable to it. His table is neat and well 
 supplied, and he waits upon it himself in the good old 
 landlordly fashion. One may be much better off 
 here, to my thinking, than in one of those gigantic 
 Columbaria which are foisted upon us patient Ameri 
 cans for hotels, and where one is packed away in a 
 pigeon-hole so near the heavens that, if the comet 
 should flirt its tail (no unlikely thing in the month of 
 flies), one would be in danger of being brushed away. 
 Here one does not pay his diurnal three dollars for an 
 undivided five-hundredth part of the pleasure of 
 looking at gilt gingerbread. Here one s relations are 
 with the monarch himself, and one is not obliged to 
 wait the slow leisure of those "attentive clerks" whose 
 praises are sung by thankful deadheads, and to whom 
 
76 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 the slave who pays may feel as much gratitude as 
 might thrill the heart of a brown-paper parcel toward 
 the express-man who labels it and chucks it under his 
 counter. 
 
 Sunday, i^th. The loons were right. About 
 midnight it began to rain in earnest, and did not hold 
 up till about ten o clock this morning. "This is a 
 Maine dew," said a shaggy woodman cheerily, as he 
 shook the water out of his wide-awake, "if it don t 
 look out sharp, it 11 begin to rain afore it thinks on t." 
 The day was mostly spent within doors; but I found 
 good and intelligent society. We should have to be 
 shipwrecked on JuarL-Eernandez not to find men who 
 knew more than we. In these travelling encounters 
 one is thrown upon his own resources, and is worth 
 \ just what he carries about him. The social currency 
 of home, the smooth-worn coin which passes freely 
 among friends and neighbors, is of no account. We 
 are thrown back upon the old system of barter; and, 
 even with savages, we bring away only as much of the 
 wild wealth of the woods as we carry beads of thought 
 and experience, strung one by one in painful years, 
 to pay for them with. A useful old jackknife will buy 
 more than the daintiest Louis Quinze paper-folder 
 fresh from Paris. Perhaps the kind of intelligence 
 one gets in these out-of-the-way places is the best, 
 where one takes a fresh man after breakfast instead 
 of the damp morning paper, and where the magnetic 
 telegraph of human sympathy flashes swift news from 
 brain to brain. 
 
 Meanwhile, at a pinch, to-morrow s weather can be 
 
A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. JJ 
 
 discussed. The augury from the flight of birds is 
 favorable, the loons no longer prophesying rain. 
 The wind also is hauling round to the right quarter, 
 j according to some, to the wrong, if we are to believe 
 \ others. Each man has his private barometer of hope, 
 i the mercury in which is more or less sensitive, and 
 ^ the opinion vibrant with its rise or fall. Mine has an 
 index which can be moved mechanically. I fixed it 
 at set fair, and resigned myself. I read an old volume 
 of the Patent-Office Report on Agriculture, and 
 stored away a beautiful pile of facts and observations 
 for future use, which the current of occupation, at its 
 first freshet, would sweep quietly off to blank oblivion. 
 Practical application is the only mordant which will 
 set things in the memory. Study, without it, is gym 
 nastics, and not work, which alone will get intellectual 
 bread. One learns more metaphysics from a single 
 temptation than from all the philosophers. It is curious, 
 though, how tyrannical the habit of reading is, and 
 what shifts we make to escape thinking. There is no 
 bore we dread being left alone with so much as our 
 own minds. I have seen a sensible man study a stale 
 newspaper in a country tavern, and husband it as he 
 would an old shoe on a raft after shipwreck. Why 
 not try a bit of hibernation? There are few brains 
 that would not be better for living on their own fat a 
 little while. With these reflections, I, notwithstand 
 ing, spent the afternoon over my Report. If our own 
 experience is of so little use to us, what a dolt is he who 
 recommends to man or nation the experience of others ! 
 Like the mantle in the old ballad, it is always too 
 
78 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 short or too long, and exposes or trips us up. "Keep 
 out of that candle," says old Father Miller, "or you 11 
 get a singeing." "Pooh, pooh, father, I ve been 
 dipped in the new asbestos preparation," and jrozz! 
 it is all over with young Hopeful. How many warn 
 ings have been drawn from Pretorian bands, and 
 Janizaries, and Mamelukes, to make Napoleon III. 
 impossible in 1851 ! I found myself thinking the 
 same thoughts over again, when we walked later on 
 the beach and picked up pebbles. The old time- 
 ocean throws upon its shores just such rounded and 
 polished results of the eternal turmoil, but we only 
 see the beauty of those we have got the headache in 
 stooping for ourselves, and wonder at the dull brown 
 bits of common stone with which our comrades have 
 stuffed their pockets. Afterwards this little fable 
 came of it. 
 
 DOCTOR LOBSTER. 
 
 A PERCH, who had the toothache, once 
 Thus moaned, like any human dunce : 
 " Why must great souls exhaust so soon 
 Life s thin and unsubstantial boon ? 
 Existence on such sculpin terms, 
 Their vulgar loves and hard-won worms, 
 What is it all but dross to me, 
 Whose nature craves a larger sea; 
 Whose inches, six from head to tail, 
 Enclose the spirit of a whale ; 
 Who, if great baits were still to win, 
 By watchful eye and fearless fin 
 Might with the Zodiac s awful twain 
 Room for a third immortal gain? 
 Better the crowd s unthinking plan, 
 The hook, the jerk, the frying-pan ! 
 O Death, thou ever roaming shark, 
 Ingulf me in eternal dark ! " 
 
A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 79 
 
 The speech was cut in two by flight : 
 
 A real shark had come in sight; 
 
 No metaphoric monster, one 
 
 It soothes despair to call upon, 
 
 But stealthy, sidelong, grim, I wis, 
 
 A bit of downright Nemesis ; 
 
 While it recovered from the shock, 
 
 Our fish took shelter neath a rock : 
 
 This was an ancient lobster s house, 
 
 A lobster of prodigious nous, 
 
 So old that barnacles had spread 
 
 Their white encampments o er its head, 
 
 And of experience so stupend, 
 
 His claws were blunted at the end, 
 
 Turning life s iron pages o er, 
 
 That shut and can be oped no more. 
 
 Stretching a hospitable claw, 
 
 " At once," said he, " the point I saw; 
 
 My dear young friend, your case I rue, 
 
 Your great-great-grandfather I knew; 
 
 He was a tried and tender friend 
 
 I know, I ate him in the end : 
 
 In this vile sea a pilgrim long, 
 
 Still my sight s good, my memory strong; 
 
 The only sign that age is near 
 
 Is a slight deafness in this ear ; 
 
 I understand your case as well 
 
 As this my old familiar shell ; 
 
 This sorrow s a new-fangled notion, 
 
 Come in since first I knew the ocean; 
 
 We had no radicals, nor crimes, 
 
 Nor lobster-pots, in good old times; 
 
 Your traps and nets and hooks we owe 
 
 To Mr ssieurs Louis Blanc and Co. ; 
 
 I say to all my sons and daughters, 
 
 Shun Red Republican hot waters; 
 
 No lobster ever cast his lot 
 
 Among the reds, but went to pot : 
 
 Your trouble s in the jaw. you said ? 
 
 Come, let me just nip off your head, 
 
 And, when a new one comes, the pain 
 
 Will never trouble you again : 
 
 Nay, nay, fear naught : t is nature s law. 
 
 Four times I Ve lost this starboard claw; 
 
 And still, erelong, another grew, 
 
 Good as the old, and better too ! " 
 
80 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 The perch consented, and next day 
 An osprey, marketing that way, 
 Picked up a fish without a head, 
 Floating with belly up, stone dead. 
 
 Sharp are the teeth of ancient saws, 
 And sauce for goose is gander s sauce; 
 But perch s heads are n t lobster s claws. 
 
 Monday, i^th. The morning was fine, and we 
 were called at four o clock. At the moment my door 
 was knocked at, I was mounting a giraffe with that 
 charming nil admirari which characterizes dreams, to 
 visit Prester John. Rat-tat-tat-tat ! upon my door 
 and upon the horn gate of dreams also. I remarked 
 to my skowhegan (the Tatar for giraffe -driver) that 
 I was quite sure the animal had the raps, a com 
 mon disease among them, for I heard a queer knock 
 ing noise inside him. It is the sound of his joints, O 
 Tambourgi ! (an Oriental term of reverence,) and 
 proves him to be of the race of El Keirat. Rat-tat- 
 tat-too! and I lost my dinner at the Prester s, em 
 barking for a voyage to the Northwest Carry instead. 
 Never use the word canoe, my dear Storg, if you wish 
 to retain your self-respect. Birch is the term among 
 us backwoodsmen. I never knew it till yesterday; 
 but, like a true philosopher, I made it appear as if I 
 had been intimate with it from childhood. The 
 rapidity with which the human mind levels itself to 
 the standard around it gives us the most pertinent 
 warning as to the company we keep. It is as hard 
 for most characters to stay at their own average point 
 
A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 8 1 
 
 in all companies, as for a thermometer to say 65 for 
 twenty-four hours together. I like this in our friend 
 Johannes Taurus^ that he carries everywhere and 
 maintains his insular temperature, and will have 
 everything accommodate itself to that. Shall I con 
 fess that this morning I would rather have broken the 
 moral law, than have endangered the equipoise of the 
 birch by my awkwardness? that I should have been 
 prouder of a compliment to my paddling, than to 
 have had both my guides suppose me the author of 
 Hamlet? Well, Cardinal Richelieu used to jump 
 over chairs. 
 
 We were to paddle about twenty miles; but we 
 made it rather more by crossing and recrossing the 
 lake. Twice we landed, once at a camp, where we 
 found the cook alone, baking bread and gingerbread. 
 Monsieur Soyer would have been startled a little 
 by this shaggy professor, this Pre-Raphaelite of 
 cookery. He represented the salaratus period of the 
 art, and his bread was of a brilliant yellow, like those 
 cakes tinged with saffron, which hold out so long 
 against time and the flies in little water-side shops of 
 seaport towns, dingy extremities of trade fit to 
 moulder on Lethe wharf. His water was better, 
 squeezed out of ice-cold granite in the neighboring 
 mountains, and sent through subterranean ducts to 
 sparkle up by the door of the camp. 
 
 "There s nothin so sweet an hulsome as your real 
 spring water," said Uncle Zeb, "git it pure. But it s 
 dreffle hard to git it that ain t got sunthin the matter 
 of it. Snow-water 11 burn a man s inside out, I 
 
82 FIRESIDE TRA VELS. 
 
 larned that to the Roostick war, and the snow 
 lays terrible long on some o thes ere hills. Me an 
 Eb Stiles was up old Ktah dn once jest about this time 
 o year, an we come acrost a kind o holler like, 
 as full o snow as your stockin s full o your 
 foot. / see it fust, an took an rammed a settin - 
 pole ; wahl, it. was all o twenty foot into t, an 
 could n t fin no bottom. I dunno as there s snow 
 water enough in this to do no hurt. I don t somehow 
 seem to think that real spring water s so plenty as it 
 used to be." And Uncle Zeb, with perhaps a little 
 over-refinement of scrupulosity, applied his lips to the 
 Ethiop ones of a bottle of raw gin, with a kiss that 
 drew out its very soul, a basia that Secundus might 
 have sung. He must have been a wonderful judge 
 of water, for he analyzed this, and detected its latent 
 snow simply by his eye, and without the clumsy 
 process of tasting. I could not help thinking that 
 he had made the desert his dwelling-place chiefly 
 in order to enjoy the ministrations of this one fair 
 spirit unmolested. 
 
 We pushed on. Little islands loomed trembling 
 between sky and water, like hanging gardens. Grad 
 ually the filmy trees defined themselves, the aerial 
 enchantment lost its potency, and we came up with 
 common prose islands that had so late been magical 
 and poetic. The old story of the attained and un- 
 attained. About noon we reached the head of the 
 lake, and took possession of a deserted wongen, in 
 which to cook and eat our dinner. No Jew, I am 
 sure, can have a more thorough dislike of salt pork 
 
A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 83 
 
 than I have in a normal state, yet I had already eaten 
 it raw with hard bread for lunch, and relished it 
 keenly. We soon had our tea-kettle over the fire, 
 and before long the cover was chattering with the es 
 caping steam, which had thus vainly begged of all 
 men to be saddled and bridled, till James Watt one 
 day happened to overhear it. One of our guides shot 
 three Canada grouse, and these were turned slowly 
 between the fire and a bit of salt pork, which dropped 
 fatness upon them as it fried. Although my fingers 
 were certainly not made before knives and forks, yet 
 they served as a convenient substitute for those more 
 ancient inventions. We sat round, Turk-fashion, and 
 ate thankfully, while a party of aborigines of the Mos 
 quito tribe, who had camped in the wongen before 
 we arrived, dined upon us. I do not know what the 
 British Protectorate of the Mosquitoes amounts to; 
 but, as I squatted there at the mercy of these blood 
 thirsty savages, I no longer wondered that the classic 
 Everett had been stung into a willingness for war on 
 the question. 
 
 "This ere d be about a complete place for a camp, 
 ef there was on y a spring o sweet water handy. 
 Frizzled pork goes wal, don t it? Yes, an sets wal, 
 too," said Uncle Zeb, and he again tilted his bottle, 
 which rose nearer and nearer to an angle of forty -five 
 at every gurgle. He then broached a curious dietetic 
 theory: "The reason we take salt pork along is cos 
 it packs handy: you git the greatest amount o board 
 in the smallest compass, let alone that it s more 
 nourishin than an thin else. It kind o don t disgest 
 
84 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 so quick, but stays by ye, anourishin ye all the 
 while. 
 
 "A feller can live wal on frizzled pork an good 
 spring- water, git it good. To the Roostick war we 
 did n t ask for nothin better, on y beans." (Tilt, 
 tilt, gurgle, gurgle.) Then, with an apparent feeling 
 of inconsistency, "But then, come to git used to a par 
 ticular kind o spring-water, an it makes a feller hard 
 to suit. Most all sorts o water taste kind o insipid 
 away from home. Now, I ve gut a spring to my 
 place that s as sweet wahl, it s as sweet as maple 
 sap. A feller acts about water jest as he does about 
 a pair o boots. It s all on it in gittin wonted. Now, 
 them boots," etc., etc. (Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle, 
 smack /) 
 
 All this while he was packing away the remains of 
 the pork and hard bread in two large firkins. This 
 accomplished, we reembarked, our uncle on his way 
 to the birch essaying a kind of song in four or five 
 parts, of which the words were hilarious and the tune 
 profoundly melancholy, and which was finished, and 
 the rest of his voice apparently jerked out of him in 
 one sharp falsetto note, by his tripping over the root 
 of a tree. We paddled a short distance up a brook 
 which came into the lake smoothly through a little 
 meadow not far off. We soon reached the Northwest 
 Carry, and our guide, pointing through the woods, 
 said : That s the Cannydy road. You can travel that 
 clearn to Kebeck, a hunderd an twenty mile," - 
 a privilege of which I respectfully declined to avail 
 myself. The offer, however, remains open to the 
 
A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 8$ 
 
 public. The Carry is called two miles; but this is 
 the estimate of somebody who had nothing to lug. I 
 had a headache and all my baggage, which, with a 
 traveller s instinct, I had brought with me. (P. S. 
 I did not even take the keys out of my pocket, and 
 both my bags were wet through before I came back. 
 My estimate of the distance is eighteen thousand six 
 hundred and seventy-four miles and three quarters, - 
 the fraction being the part left to be travelled after 
 one of my companions most kindly insisted on re 
 lieving me of my heaviest bag. I know very well that 
 the ancient Roman soldiers used to carry sixty pounds 
 weight, and all that; but I am not, and never shall be, 
 an ancient Roman soldier, no, not even in the 
 miraculous Thundering Legion. Uncle - Zeb slung 
 the two provender firkins across his shoulder, and 
 trudged along, grumbling that "he never see sech a 
 contrairy pair as them." He had begun upon a sec 
 ond bottle of his "particular kind o spring-water," 
 and, at every rest, the gurgle of this peripatetic foun 
 tain might be heard, followed by a smack, a frag 
 ment of mosaic song, or a confused clatter with the 
 cowhide boots, being an arbitrary symbol, intended 
 to represent the festive dance. Christian s pack gave 
 him not half so much trouble as the firkins gave Uncle 
 Zeb. It grew harder and harder to sling them, and 
 with every fresh gulp of the Batavian elixir, they got 
 heavier. Or rather, the truth was, that his hat grew 
 heavier, in which he was carrying on an extensive 
 manufacture of bricks without straw. At last affairs 
 reached a crisis, and a particularly favorable pitch 
 
86 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 offering, with a puddle at the foot of it, even ike boots 
 afforded no sufficient ballast, and away went our uncle, 
 the satellite firkins accompanying faithfully his head 
 long flight. Did ever exiled monarch or disgr ced 
 minister find the cause of his fall in himself ? Is there 
 not always a strawberry at the bottom of our cup of 
 life, on which we can lay all the blame of our devia 
 tions from the straight path? Till now Uncle Zeb 
 had contrived to give a gloss of volition to smaller 
 stumblings and gyrations, by exaggerating them into 
 an appearance of playful burlesque. But the present 
 case was beyond any such subterfuges. He held a 
 bed of justice where he sat, and then arose slowly, with 
 a stern determination of vengeance stiffening every 
 muscle of his face. But what would he select as the 
 culprit? "It s that cussed firkin," he mumbled to 
 himself. "I never knowed a firkin cair on so, no, 
 not in the Roostehicick war. There, go long, will 
 ye ? and don t come back till you ve larned how to 
 walk with a genelman!" And, seizing the unhappy 
 scapegoat by the bail, he hurled it into the forest. It 
 is a curious circumstance, that it was not the firkin 
 containing the bottle which was thus condemned to 
 exile. 
 
 The end of the Carry was reached at last, and, as 
 we drew near it, we heard a sound of shouting and 
 laughter. It came from a party of men making hay 
 of the wild grass in Seboomok meadows, which lie 
 around Seboomok pond, into which the Carry empties 
 itself. Their camp was near, and our two hunters set 
 out for it, leaving us seated in the birch on the plashy 
 
A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 87 
 
 border of the pond. The repose was perfect. An 
 other heaven hallowed and deepened the polished 
 lake, and through that nether world the fish-hawk s 
 double floated with balanced wings, or, wheeling 
 suddenly, flashed his whitened breast against the sun. 
 As the clattering kingfisher flew unsteadily across, 
 and seemed to push his heavy head along with ever- 
 renewing effort, a visionary mate flitted from down 
 ward tree to tree below. Some tall alders shaded us 
 from the sun, in whose yellow afternoon light the 
 drowsy forest was steeped, giving out that wholesome 
 resinous perfume, almost the only warm odor which 
 it is refreshing to breathe. The tame hay-cocks in 
 the midst of the wildness gave one a pleasant remi 
 niscence of home, like hearing one s native tongue in a 
 strange country. 
 
 Presently our hunters came back, bringing with 
 them a tall, thin, active-looking man, with black eyes, 
 that glanced unconsciously on all sides, like one of 
 those spots of sunlight which a child dances up and 
 down the street with a bit of looking-glass. This was 
 M., the captain of the hay-makers, a famous river- 
 driver, and who was to have fifty men under him next 
 winter. I could now understand that sleepless vigi 
 lance of eye. He had consented to take two of our 
 party in his birch to search for moose. A quick, 
 nervous, decided man, he got them into the birch, and 
 was off instantly, without a superfluous word. He 
 evidently looked upon them as he would upon a 
 couple of logs which he was to deliver at a certain 
 place. Indeed, I doubt if life and the world pre- 
 
88 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 sented themselves to Napier himself in a more loga 
 rithmic way. His only thought was to do the imme- 
 jdiate duty well, and to pilot his particular raft down 
 ;he crooked stream of life to the ocean beyond. The 
 birch seemed to feel him as an inspiring soul, and 
 slid away straight and swift for the outiet of the 
 pond. As he disappeared under the over-arching 
 alders of the brook, our two hunters could not repress 
 a grave and measured applause. There is never any 
 extravagance among these woodmen; their eye, ac 
 customed to reckoning the number of feet which a 
 tree will scale, is rapid and close in its guess of the 
 amount of stuff in a man. It was laudari a laudato, 
 however, for they themselves were accounted good 
 men in a birch. I was amused, in talking with them 
 about him, to meet with an instance of that tendency 
 of the human mind to assign some utterly improbable 
 reason for gifts which seem unaccountable. After 
 due praise, one of them said, "I guess he s got some 
 Injun in him," although I knew very well that the 
 speaker had a thorough contempt for the red-man, 
 mentally and physically. Here was mythology in a 
 small way, the same that under more favorable 
 auspices hatched Helen out of an egg and gave Merlin 
 an Incubus for a father. I was pleased with all I saw 
 of M. He was in his narrow sphere a true ara avfy>cov, 
 and the ragged edges of his old hat seemed to become 
 coronated as I looked at him. He impressed me 
 as a man really educated, that is, with his aptitudes 
 drawn out and ready for use. He was A. M. and 
 LL. D. in Woods College, Axe Master and Doc- 
 
A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 89 
 
 tor of Logs. Are not our educations commonly like 
 a pile of books laid over a plant in a pot ? The com 
 pressed nature struggles through at every crevice, but 
 can never get the cramp and stunt out of it. We 
 spend all our youth in building a vessel for our voy 
 age of life, and set forth with streamers flying; but 
 the moment we come nigh the great loadstone moun 
 tain of our proper destiny, out leap all our carefully 
 driven bolts and nails, and we get many a mouthful 
 of good salt brine, and many a buffet of the rough 
 water of experience, before we secure the bare right 
 to live. 
 
 We now entered the outlet, a long-drawn aisle of 
 alder, on each side of which spired tall firs, spruces, 
 and white cedars. The motion of the birch reminded 
 me of the- gondola, and they represent among the 
 water-craft the jelida, the cat tribe, stealthy, silent, 
 treacherous, and preying by night. I closed my eyes 
 and strove to fancy myself in the dumb city, whose 
 only horses are the bronze ones of St. Mark. But 
 Nature would allow no rival, and bent down an alder 
 bough to brush my cheek and recall me. Only the 
 1 robin sings in the emerald chambers of these tall sylvan 
 \palaces, and the squirrel leaps from hanging balcony 
 jto balcony. 
 
 The rain which the loons foreboded had raised the 
 west branch of the Penobscot so much, that a strong 
 current was setting back into the pond ; and, when at 
 last we brushed through into the river, it was full to 
 the brim, too full for moose, the hunters said. 
 Rivers with low banks have always the compensation 
 
9O FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 of giving a sense of entire fulness. The sun sank 
 behind its horizon of pines, whose pointed summits 
 notched the rosy west in an endless black sierra. At 
 the same moment the golden moon swung slowly up 
 in the east, like the other scale of that Homeric baL- 
 ance in which Zeus weighed the deeds of men. Sun 
 set and moonrise at once ! Adam had no more in 
 Eden except the head of Eve upon his shoulder. 
 The stream was so smooth, that the floating logs we 
 met seemed to hang in a glowing atmosphere, the 
 shadow-half being as real as the solid. And gradu 
 ally the mind was etherized to a like dreamy placidity, 
 till fact and fancy, the substance and the image, float 
 ing on the current of reverie, became but as the upper 
 and under halves of one unreal reality. 
 
 In the west still lingered a pale-green light. I do 
 not know whether it be from greater familiarity, but 
 it always seems to me that the pinnacles of pine-trees 
 make an edge to the landscape which tells better 
 against the twilight, or the fainter dawn before the 
 rising moon, than the rounded and cloud-cumulus 
 outline of hard-wood trees. 
 
 After paddling a couple of miles, we found the 
 arbored mouth of the little Malahoodus River, famous 
 for moose. We had been on the look-out for it, and 
 I was amused to hear one of the hunters say to the 
 other, to assure himself of his familiarity with the spot, 
 "You drove the West Branch last spring, didn t 
 you?" as one of us might ask about a horse. We did 
 not explore the Malahoodus far, but left the other 
 birch to thread its cedared solitudes, while we turned 
 
A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 91 
 
 back to try our fortunes in the larger stream. We 
 paddled on about four miles farther, lingering now 
 and then opposite the black mouth of a moose-path. 
 The incidents of our voyage were few, but quite as 
 exciting and provable as the items of the newspapers. 
 A stray log compensated very well for the ordinary 
 run of accidents, and the floating carkiss of a moose 
 which we met could pass muster instead of a singular 
 discovery of human remains by workmen in digging a 
 cellar. Once or twice we saw what seemed ghosts 
 of trees; but they turned out to be dead cedars, in 
 winding-sheets of long gray moss, made spectral by 
 the moonlight. Just as we were turning to drift back 
 down-stream, we heard a loud gnawing sound close 
 by us on the bank. One of our guides thought it a 
 hedgehog, the other a bear. I inclined to the bear, as 
 making tne adventure more imposing. A rifle was 
 fired at the sound, which began again with the most 
 provoking indifference, ere the echo, flaring madly at 
 first from shore to shore, died far away in a hoarse 
 sigh. 
 
 Half past Eleven, P.M. No sign of a moose yet. 
 The birch, it seems, was strained at the Carry, or the 
 pitch was softened as she lay on the shore during dinner, 
 and she leaks a little. If there be any virtue in the 
 sitzbad^ I shall discover it. If I cannot extract green 
 cucumbers from the moon s rays, I get something 
 quite as cool. One of the guides shivers so as to 
 shake the birch. 
 
 Quarter to Twelve, Later from the Freshet ! 
 The water in the birch is about three inches deep, but 
 
92 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 the dampness reaches already nearly to the waist. I am 
 obliged to remove the matches from the ground floor 
 of my trousers into the upper story of a breast-pocket. 
 Meanwhile, we are to sit immovable, for fear of 
 frightening the moose, which induces cramps. 
 
 Half past Twelve. A crashing is heard on the 
 left bank. This is a moose in good earnest. We are 
 besought to hold our breaths, if possible. My fingers 
 so numb, I could not, if I tried. Crash! crash! 
 again, and then a plunge, followed by dead stillness. 
 "Swimmin crik," whispers guide, suppressing all 
 unnecessary parts of speech, "don t stir." I, for 
 one, am not likely to. A cold fog which has been 
 gathering for the last hour has finished me. I fancy 
 myself one of those naked pigs that seem rushing out 
 of market-doors in winter, frozen in a ghastly attitude 
 of gallop. If I were to be shot myself, I should feel 
 no interest in it. As it is, I am only a spectator, having 
 declined a gun. Splash ! again ; this time the moose 
 is in sight, and click ! click ! one rifle misses fire after 
 the other. The fog has quietly spiked our batteries. 
 The moose goes crashing up the bank, and presently 
 we can hear it chewing its cud close by. So we lie in 
 wait, freezing. 
 
 At one o clock, I propose to land at a deserted 
 wongen I had noticed on the way up, where I will 
 make a fire, and leave them to refrigerate as much 
 longer as they please. Axe in hand, I go plunging 
 through waist-deep weeds dripping with dew, haunted 
 by an intense conviction that the gnawing sound we 
 had heard was a bear, and a bear at least eighteen 
 
A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 93 
 
 hands high. There is something pokerish about a 
 deserted dwelling, even in broad daylight; but here 
 in the obscure wood, and the moon filtering unwill 
 ingly through the trees! Well, I made the door at 
 last, and found the place packed fuller with darkness 
 than it ever had been with hay. Gradually I was 
 able to make things out a little, and began to hack 
 frozenly at a log which I groped out. I was relieved 
 presently by one of the guides. He cut at once into 
 one of the uprights of the building till he got some dry 
 splinters, and we soon had a fire like the burning of a 
 whole wood-wharf in our part of the country. My 
 companion went back to the birch, and left me to 
 keep house. First I knocked a hole in the roof (which 
 the fire began to lick in a relishing way) for a chimney, 
 and then cleared away a damp growth of "pison- 
 elder," to make a sleeping place. When the unsuc 
 cessful hunters returned, I had everything quite 
 comfortable, and was steaming at the rate of about 
 ten horse-power a minute. Young Telemachus was 
 sorry to give up the moose so soon, and, with the 
 teeth chattering almost out of his head, he declared 
 that he would like to stick it out all night. However, 
 he reconciled himself to the fire, and, making our 
 beds of some "splits" which we poked from the roof, 
 we lay down at half past two. I, who have inherited 
 a habit of looking into every closet before I go to bed, 
 for fear of fire, had become in two days such a stoic 
 of the woods, that I went to sleep tranquilly, certain 
 that my bedroom would be in a blaze before morning. 
 And so, indeed, it was; and the withes that bound 
 
94 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 it together being burned off, one of the sides fell in 
 without waking me. 
 
 Tuesday, i6th. After a sleep of two hours and a 
 half, so sound that it was as good as eight, we started 
 at half past four for the haymakers camp again. We 
 found them just getting breakfast. We sat down 
 upon the deacon-seat before the fire blazing between 
 the bedroom and the salle a manger, which were 
 simply two roofs of spruce-bark, sloping to the ground 
 on one side, the other three being left open. We found 
 that we had, at least, been luckier than the other party, 
 for M. had brought back his convoy without even see 
 ing a moose. As there was not room at the table for 
 all of us to breakfast together, these hospitable wood 
 men forced us to sit down first, although we resisted 
 stoutly. Our breakfast consisted of fresh bread, fried 
 salt pork, stewed whortleberries, and tea. Our kind 
 hosts refused to take money for it, nor would M. 
 accept anything for his trouble. This seemed even 
 more open-handed when I remembered that they had 
 brought all their stores over the Carry upon their 
 shoulders, paying an ache extra for every pound. If 
 their hospitality lacked anything of hard external 
 polish, it had all the deeper grace which springs only 
 from sincere manliness. I have rarely sat at a table 
 d hote which might not have taken a lesson from them 
 in essential courtesy. I have never seen a finer race 
 of men. They have all the virtues of the sailor, with 
 out that unsteady roll in the gait with which the ocean 
 proclaims itself quite as much in the moral as in the 
 physical habit of a man. They appeared to me to 
 
A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 95 
 
 have hewn out a short northwest passage through 
 wintry woods to those spice-lands of character which 
 we dwellers in cities must reach, if at all, by weary 
 voyages in the monotonous track of the trades. 
 
 By the way, as we were embirching last evening for 
 our moose-chase, I asked what I was to do with my 
 baggage. " Leave it here," said our guide, and he 
 laid the bags upon a platform of alders, which he bent 
 down to keep them beyond reach of the rising water. 
 
 " Will they be safe here?" 
 
 "As safe as they would be locked up in your house 
 at home." 
 
 And so I found them at my return; only the hay 
 makers had carried them to their camp for greater 
 security against the chances of the weather. 
 
 We got back to Kineo in time for dinner; and in 
 the afternoon, the weather being fine, went up the 
 mountain. As we landed at the foot, our guide 
 pointed to the remains of a red shirt and a pair of 
 blanket trousers. "That," said he, "is the reason 
 there s such a trade in ready-made clo es. A suit gits 
 pooty well wore out by the time a camp breaks up in 
 the spring, and the lumberers want to look about right 
 when they come back into the settlements, so they buy 
 somethin ready-made, and heave ole bust-up into the 
 bush." True enough, thought I, this is the Ready- 
 made Age. It is quicker being covered than fitted. 
 j So we all go to the slop-shop and come out uniformed, 
 every mother s son with habits of thinking and doing 
 cut on one pattern, with no special reference to his 
 peculiar build. 
 
96 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 Kineo rises 1750 feet above the sea, and 750 above 
 the lake. The climb is very easy, with fine outlooks 
 at every turn over lake and forest. Near the top is a 
 spring of water, which even Uncle Zeb might have 
 allowed to be wholesome. The little tin dipper was 
 scratched all over with names, showing that vanity, 
 at least, is not put out of breath by the ascent. O 
 Ozymandias, King of kings! We are all scrawling 
 on something of the kind. "My name is engraved 
 on the institutions of my country," thinks the states 
 man. But, alas ! institutions are as changeable as 
 tin-dippers; men are content to drink the same old 
 water, if the shape of the cup only be new, and our 
 friend gets two lines in the Biographical Dictionaries. 
 After all, these inscriptions, which make us smile up 
 here, are about as valuable as the Assyrian ones which 
 Hincks and Rawlinson read at cross-purposes. Have 
 we not Smiths and Browns enough, that we must 
 ransack the ruins of NimrQiid for more? Near the 
 spring we met a Bloomer ! It was the first chronic 
 one I had ever seen. It struck me as a sensible cos 
 tume for the occasion, and it will be the only wear in 
 the Greek Kalends, when women believe that sense 
 is an equivalent for grace. 
 
 The forest primeval is best seen from the top of a 
 mountain. It then impresses one by its extent, like 
 an Qrigntal_epic. To be in it is nothing, for then an 
 acre is as good as a thousand square miles. You 
 cannot see five rods in any direction, and the ferns, 
 mosses, and tree-trunks just around you are the best 
 of it. As for solitude, night will make a better one 
 
A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 97 
 
 with ten feet square of pitch dark; and mere size is 
 hardly an element of grandeur, except in works of 
 man, as the Colosseum. It is through one or the 
 other pole of vanity that men feel the sublime in moun 
 tains. It is either, How small great I am beside it ! 
 or, Big as you are, little I s soul will hold a dozen of 
 you. The true idea of a forest is not a selva selvaggia, 
 but something humanized a little, as we imagine the 
 forest of Arden, with trees standing at royal intervals, 
 a commonwealth, and not a communism. To 
 some moods, it is congenial to look over endless 
 leagues of unbroken savagery without a hint of man. 
 
 Wednesday. This morning fished. Telemachus 
 caught a laker of thirteen pounds and a half, and I an 
 overgrown cusk, which we threw away, but which I 
 found afterwards Agassiz would have been glad of, 
 for all is fish that comes to his net, from the fossil 
 down. The fish, when caught, are straightway 
 knocked on the head. A lad who went with us seem 
 ing to show an over-zeal in this operation, we re 
 monstrated. But he gave a good, human reason for 
 it, "He no need to ha gone and been a fish if he 
 did n t like it," an excuse which superior strength 
 or cunning has always found sufficient. It was some 
 comfort, in this case, to think that St. Jerome believed 
 in a limitation of God s providence, and that it did 
 not extend to inanimate things or creatures devoid of 
 reason. 
 
 Thus, my dear Storg, I have finished my Oriental 
 adventures, and somewhat, it must be owned, in the 
 diffuse Oriental manner. There is very little about 
 
9.8 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 Moosehead Lake in it, and not even the Latin name 
 f jr moose, which I might have obtained by sufficient 
 research. If I had killed one, I would have given you 
 his name in that dead language. I did not profess to 
 give you an account of the lake ; but a journal, and, 
 moreover, my journal, with a little nature, a little 
 human nature, and a great deal of I in it, which last 
 ingredient I take to be the true spirit of this species 
 of writing ; all the rest being so much water for tendei 
 throats which cannot take it neat. 
 
LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL 
 IN ITALY AND ELSE 
 WHERE. 
 
 
AT SEA. 
 
 THE sea was meant to be looked at from shore, as 
 mountains are from the plain. Lucretius made this 
 discovery long ago, and was blunt enough to blurt it 
 forth, romance and sentiment in other words, the 
 pretence of feeling what we do not feel being in 
 ventions of a later day. To be sure, Cicero used to 
 twaddle about Greek literature and philosophy, much 
 as people do about ancient art nowadays; but I 
 rather sympathize with those stout old Romans who 
 despised both, and believed that to found an empire 
 was as grand an achievement as to build an epic or to 
 carve a statue. But though there might have been 
 twaddle (as why not, since there was a Senate?) I 
 rather think Petrarch was the first choragus of that 
 sentimental dance which so long led young folks away 
 from the realities of life like the piper of Hamelin, and 
 whose succession ended, let us hope, with Chateau 
 briand. But for them, Byron, whose real strength lay 
 in his sincerity, would never have talked about the 
 "sea bounding beneath him like a steed that knows 
 his rider," and all that sort of thing. Even if it had 
 been true, steam has been as fatal to that part of the 
 romance of the sea as to hand-loom weaving. But 
 what say you to a twelve days calm such as we dozed 
 through in rnid-Atlantic and in mid-August? I 
 know nothing so tedious at once and exasperating 
 101 
 
IO2 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 as that regular slap of the wilted sails when the ship 
 rises and falls with the slow breathing of the sleeping 
 sea, one greasy, brassy swell following another, slow, 
 smooth, immitigable as the series of Wordsworth s 
 "Ecclesiastical Sonnets." Even at his best, Neptune, 
 in a t&te-ti-t&te, has a way of repeating himself, an 
 obtuseness to the ne quid nimis, that is stupefying. 
 It reminds me of organ music and my good friend 
 Sebastian Bach. A fugue or two will do very well ; 
 but a concert made up of nothing else is altogether 
 too epic for me. There is nothing so desperately 
 monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the 
 cruelty of pirates. Fancy an existence in which the 
 } coming up of a clumsy finback whale, who says Pooh ! 
 to you solemnly as you lean over the taffrail is an 
 (event as exciting as an election on shore ! The damp 
 ness seems to strike into the wits as into the lucifer- 
 matches, so that one may scratch a thought half a 
 dozen times and get nothing at last but a faint sputter, 
 the forlorn hope of fire, which only goes far enough to 
 leave a sense of suffocation behind it. Even smoking 
 becomes an employment instead of a solace. Who 
 less likely to come to their wit s end than W. M. T. 
 and A. H. C. ? Yet I have seen them driven to five 
 meals a day for mental occupation. I sometimes sit 
 and pity Noah ; but even he had this advantage over 
 all succeeding navigators, that, wherever he landed, 
 he was sure to get no ill news from home. He should 
 be canonized as the patron-saint of newspaper cor 
 respondents, being the only man whc ever had the 
 very last authentic intelligence from everywhere. 
 
AT SEA. IC>3 
 
 The finback whale recorded just above has much 
 the look of a brown-paper parcel, the whitish 
 stripes that run across him answering for the pack 
 thread. Hq has a kind of accidental hole in the top 
 of his head, through which he pooh-poohs the rest of 
 creation, and which looks as if it had been made by 
 the chance thrust of a chestnut rail. He was our first 
 event. Our second was harpooning a sunfish, which 
 basked dozing on the lap of the sea, looking so much 
 like the giant turtle of an alderman s dream, that I am 
 persuaded he would have made mock -turtle soup 
 rather than acknowledge his imposture. But he broke 
 away just as they were hauling him over the side, and 
 sank placidly through the clear water, leaving behind 
 him a crimson trail that wavered a moment and was 
 gone. 
 
 The sea, though, has better sights than these. 
 When we were up with the Azores, we began to meet 
 flying-fish and Portuguese men-of-war beautiful as 
 the galley of Cleopatra, tiny craft that dared these 
 seas before Columbus. I have seen one of the former 
 rise from the crest of a wave, and, glancing from 
 another some two hundred feet beyond, take a fresh 
 flight of perhaps as long. How Calderon would have 
 similized this pretty creature had he ever seen it! 
 How would he have run him up and down the gamut 
 of simile ! If a fish, then a fish with wings; if a bird, 
 then a bird with fins ; and so on, keeping up the poor 
 shuttlecock of a conceit as is his wont. Indeed, the 
 poor thing is the most killing bait for a comparison, 
 and I assure you I have three or four in my inkstand ; 
 
104 FIRESIDE TRAVELS, 
 
 but be calm, they shall stay there. Moore, who 
 looked on all nature as a kind of Gradus ad Parnas- 
 sum, a thesaurus of similitude, and spent his life in a 
 game of What is my thought like? with himself, did 
 the flying-fish on his way to Bermuda. So I leave 
 him in peace. 
 
 The most beautiful thing I have seen at sea, all the 
 more so that I had never heard of it, is the trail of a 
 shoal of fish through the phosphorescent water. It 
 is like a flight of silver rockets, or the streaming of 
 northern lights through that silent nether heaven. I 
 thought nothing could go beyond that rustling star- 
 foam which was churned up by our ship s bows, or 
 those eddies and disks of dreamy flame that rose and 
 wandered out of sight behind us. 
 
 T was fire our ship was plunging through, 
 Cold fire that o er the quarter flew ; 
 And wandering moons of idle flame 
 Grew full and waned, and went and came, 
 Dappling with light the huge sea snake 
 That slid behind us in the wake. 
 
 But there was something even more delicately rare 
 in the apparition of the fish, as they turned up in 
 gleaming furrows the latent moonshine which the 
 ocean seemed to have hoarded against these vacant 
 interlunar nights. In the Mediterranean one day, as 
 we were lying becalmed, I observed the water freckled 
 with dingy specks, which at last gathered to a pink 
 ish scum on the surface. The sea had been so phos 
 phorescent for some nights, that when the Captain 
 gave me my bath, by dousing me with buckets from 
 the house on deck, the spray flew off my head and 
 
AT SEA. IO5 
 
 shoulders in sparks. It occurred to me that this dirty- 
 looking scum might be the luminous matter, and I had 
 a pailful dipped up to keep till after dark. When I 
 went to look at it after nightfall, it seemed at first 
 perfectly dead ; but when I shook it, the whole broke 
 out into what I can only liken to milky flames, whose 
 lambent silence was strangely beautiful, and startled 
 me almost as actual projection might an alchemist. I 
 could not bear to be the death of so much beauty ; so 
 I poured it all overboard again. 
 
 Another sight worth taking a voyage for is that of 
 the sails by moonlight. Our course was "south and 
 by east, half south," so that we seemed bound for the 
 full moon as she rolled up over our wavering horizon. 
 Then I used to go forward to the bowsprit and look 
 back. Our ship was a clipper, with every rag set, 
 stunsails, sky-scrapers, and all; nor was it easy to 
 believe that such a wonder could be built of canvas as 
 that white many-storied pile of cloud that stooped 
 over me, or drew back as we rose and fell with the 
 waves. 
 
 These are all the wonders I can recall of my five 
 weeks at sea, except the sun. Were you ever alone 
 with the sun? You think it a very simple question; 
 but I never was, in the full sense of the word, till I was 
 held up to him one cloudless day on the broad buckler 
 of the ocean. I suppose one might have the same 
 feeling in the desert. I remember getting something 
 like it years ago, when I climbed alone to the top of a 
 mountain, and lay face up on the hot gray moss, 
 striving to get a notion of how an Arab might feel. It 
 
106 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 was my American commentary of the Koran, and not 
 a bad one. In a New England winter, too, when 
 everything is gagged with snow, as if some gigantic 
 physical geographer were taking a cast of the earth s 
 face in plaster, the bare knob of a hill will introduce 
 you to the sun as a comparative stranger. But at sea 
 you may be alone with him day after day, and almost 
 all day long. I never understood before that nothing 
 short of full daylight can give the supremest sense of 
 solitude. Darkness will not do so, for the imagina 
 tion peoples it with more shapes than ever were poured 
 from the frozen loins of the populous North. The 
 sun, I sometimes think, is a little grouty at sea, espe 
 cially at high noon, feeling that he wastes his beams on 
 those fruitless furrows. It is otherwise with the moon. 
 She " comforts the night," as Chapman finely says, 
 and I always found her a companionable creature. 
 
 In the ocean-horizon I took untiring delight. It 
 is the true magic-circle of expectation and conjecture 
 almost as good as a wishing-ring. What will rise 
 over that edge we sail toward daily and never over 
 take? A sail? an island? the new shore of the Old 
 World? Something rose every day, which I need not 
 have gone so far to see, but at whose levee I was a 
 much more faithful courtier than on shore. A cloud 
 less sunrise in mid-ocean is beyond comparison for 
 simple grandeur. It is like Dante s style, bare and 
 perfect. Naked sun meets naked sea, the true classic 
 of nature. There may be more sentiment in morning 
 on shore, the shivering fairy-jewelry of dew, the 
 silver point-lace of sparkling hoar-frost, but there 
 
AT SEA. lO/ 
 
 is also more complexity, more of the romantic. The 
 one savors of the elder Edda, the other of the Minne 
 singers. . 
 
 And I thus floating, lonely elf, 
 
 A kind of planet by myself, 
 
 The mists draw up and furl away, 
 
 And in the east a warming gray, 
 
 Faint as the tint of oaken woods 
 
 When o er their buds May breathes and broods, 
 
 Tells that the golden sunrise-tide 
 
 Is lapsing up earth s thirsty side, 
 
 Each moment purpling on the crest 
 
 Of some stark billow farther west : 
 
 And as the sea-moss droops and hears 
 
 The gurgling flood that nears and nears, 
 
 And then with tremulous content 
 
 Floats out each thankful filament, 
 
 So waited I until it came, 
 
 God s daily miracle, O shame 
 
 That 1 had seen so many days 
 
 Unthankful, without wondering praise, 
 
 Not recking more this bliss of earth 
 
 Than the cheap fire that lights my hearth! 
 
 But now glad thoughts and holy pour 
 
 Into my heart, as once a year 
 
 To San Miniato s open door, 
 
 In long procession, chanting clear, 
 
 Through slopes of sun, through shadows hoar, 
 
 The coupled monks slow-climbing sing, 
 
 And like a golden censer swing 
 
 From rear to front, from front to rear 
 
 Their alternating bursts of praise, 
 
 Till the roof s fading seraphs gaze 
 
 Down through an odorous mist, that crawls 
 
 Lingeringly up the darkened walls 
 
 And the dim arches, silent long, 
 
 Are startled with triumphant song. 
 
 I wrote yesterday that the sea still rimmed our 
 prosy lives with mystery and conjecture. But one 
 is shut up on shipboard like Montaigne in his tower, 
 with nothing to do but to review his own thoughts and 
 
108 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 contradict himself. Dire, redire, et me contredire, 
 will be the staple of my journal till I see land. I say 
 nothing of such matters as the montagna fauna on 
 which Ulysses wrecked; but since the sixteenth cen 
 tury could any man reasonably hope to stumble on one 
 of those wonders which were cheap as dirt in the days 
 of St. Saga? Faustus, Don Juan, and Tanhauser are 
 the last ghosts of legend, that lingered almost till the 
 Gallic cock-crow of universal enlightenment and dis 
 illusion. The Public School has done for Imagina 
 tion. What shall I see in Outre-Mer, or on the way 
 thither, but what can be seen with eyes? To be 
 sure, I stick by the sea-serpent, and would fain believe 
 that science has scotched, not killed him. Nor is he 
 to be lightly given up, for, like the old Scandinavian 
 snake, he binds together for us the two hemispheres 
 of Past and Present, of Belief and Science. He is the 
 link which knits us seaboard Yankees with our Nors*e 
 progenitors, interpreting between the age of the dragon 
 and that of the railroad-train. We have made ducks 
 and drakes of that large estate of wonder and delight 
 bequeathed to us by ancestral vikings, and this alone 
 remains to us unthrift heirs of Linn. 
 
 I feel an undefined respect for a man who has seen 
 the sea-serpent. He is to his brother-fishers what 
 the poet is to his fellow-men. Where they have seen 
 nothing better than a school of horse-mackerel, or the 
 idle coils of ocean around Half-way Rock, he has 
 caught authentic glimpses of the withdrawing mantle- 
 hem of the Edda age. I care not for the monster him 
 self. It is not the thing, but the belief in the thing, 
 
AT SEA. 
 
 that is dear to me. May it be long before Professor 
 Owen is comforted with the sight of his unfleshed 
 vertebrae, long before they stretch many a rood behind 
 Kimball s or Barnum s glass, reflected in the shallow 
 orbs of Mr. and Mrs. Public, which stare, but see not ! 
 When we read that Captain Spalding, of the pink- 
 stern Three Follies, has beheld him rushing through 
 the brine like an infinite series of bewitched mackerel 
 casks, we feel that the mystery of old Ocean, at least, 
 has not yet been sounded, that Faith and Awe 
 survive there unevaporate. I once ventured the 
 horse-mackerel theory to an old fisherman, browner 
 than a tomcod. "Hos-mackril !" he exclaimed in 
 dignantly, "hos-mackril be " (here he used a phrase 
 commonly indicated in laical literature by the same 
 sign which serves for Doctorate in Divinity), " don t 
 yer spose I know a hos-mackril?" The intonation 
 of that "/" would have silenced Professor Monk- 
 barns. Owen with his provoking pkoca forever. What 
 if one should ask him if he knew a trilobite ? 
 
 The fault of modern travellers is, that they see 
 nothing out of sight. They talk of eocene periods 
 and tertiary formations, and tell us how the world 
 looked to the plesiosaur. They take science (or 
 nescience) with them, instead of that soul of generous 
 trust their elders had. All their senses are sceptics and 
 doubters, materialists reporting things for other scep 
 tics to doubt still further upon. Nature becomes a 
 reluctant witness upon the stand, badgered with geolo 
 gist hammers and phials of acid. There have been 
 no travellers since those included in Hakluyt and 
 
IIO FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 Purchas, except Martin, perhaps, who saw an inch 
 or two into the invisible at the Orkneys. We have 
 peripatetic lecturers, but no more travellers. Trav 
 ellers stories are no longer proverbial. We have 
 picked nearly every apple (wormy or otherwise) 
 from the world s tree of knowledge, and that without 
 an Eve to tempt us. Two or three have hitherto 
 hung luckily beyond reach on a lofty bou^h shadow 
 ing the interior of Africa, but there is a German Doc 
 tor at this very moment pelting at them with sticks and 
 stones. It may be only next week, and these too, 
 bitten by geographers and geologists, will be thrown 
 away. 
 
 Analysis is carried into everything. Even Deity is 
 subjected to chemic tests. We must have exact 
 knowledge, a cabinet stuck full of facts pressed, dried, 
 or preserved in spirits, instead of the large, vague 
 . world our fathers had. With them science was 
 poetry; with us, poetry is science. Our modern 
 Eden is a hortus siccus. Tourists defraud rather 
 than enrich us. They have not that sense of aesthetic 
 proportion which characterized the elder traveller. 
 Earth is no longer the fine work of art it was, for noth 
 ing is left to the imagination. Job Hortop, arrived 
 at the height of the Bermudas, thinks it full time to 
 indulge us in a merman. Nay, there is a story told 
 by Webster, in his "Witchcraft," of a merman with a 
 mitre, who, on being sent back to his watery diocese 
 of finland, made what advances he could toward an 
 episcopal benediction by bowing his head thrice. 
 Doubtless he had been consecrated by St. Antony of 
 
A T SEA. I I I 
 
 Padua. A dumb bishop would be sometimes no 
 unpleasant phenomenon, by the way. Sir John 
 Hawkins is not satisfied with telling us about the 
 merely sensual Canaries, but is generous enough to 
 throw us in a handful of "certain flitting islands to 
 boot. Henry Hawkes describes the visible Mexican 
 cities, and then is not so frugal but that he can give 
 us a few invisible ones. Thus do these generous 
 ancient mariners make children of us again. Their 
 successors show us an earth effete and past bearing, 
 tracing out with the eyes of industrious fleas every 
 wrinkle and crowfoot. 
 
 The journals of the elder navigators are prose 
 Odysseys. The geographies of our ancestors were 
 works of fancy and imagination. They read poems 
 where we yawn over items. Their world was a huge 
 wonder-horn, exhaustless as that which Thor strove 
 to drain. Ours would scarce quench the small 
 thirst of a bee. No modern voyager brings back the 
 magical foundation stones of a Tempest. No Marco 
 Polo, traversing the desert beyond the city- of Lok, 
 would tell of things able to inspire the mind of Milton 
 with 
 
 " Calling shapes and beckoning shadows dire, 
 And airy tongues that syllable men s names 
 On sands and shores and desert wildernesses." 
 
 It was easy enough to believe the story of Dante, 
 when two thirds of even the upper- world were yet un- 
 traversed and unmapped. With every step of the 
 recent traveller our inheritance of the wonderful is 
 diminished. Those beautifully pictured notes of the 
 
112 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 Possible are redeemed at a ruinous discount in the 
 hard and cumbrous coin of the Actual. How are we 
 not defrauded and impoverished? Does California 
 vie with El Dorado? or are Bruce s Abyssinian kings 
 a set-off for Prester John? A bird in the bush is 
 worth two in the hand. And if the philosophers have 
 not even yet been able to agree whether the world 
 has any existence independent of ourselves, how do 
 we not gain a loss in every addition to the catalogue 
 of Vulgar Errors? Where are the fishes which nidi 
 ficated in trees? Where the monopodes sheltering 
 themselves from the sun beneath their single um 
 brella-like foot, umbrella-like in everything but 
 the fatal necessity of being borrowed? Where the 
 Acephali, with whom Herodotus, in a kind of ecstasy, 
 wound up his climax of men with abnormal top- 
 pieces? Where the Roc whose eggs are possibly 
 boulders, needing no far-fetched theory of glacier or 
 iceberg to account for them ? Where the tails of the 
 men of Kent ? Where the no legs of the bird of para 
 dise ? Where the Unicorn, with that single horn of his, 
 sovereign against all manner of poisons ? Where the 
 Fountain of Youth? Where that Thessalian spring, 
 which, without cost to the country, convicted and 
 punished perjurers? Where the Amazons of Orel- 
 lana? All these, and a thousand other varieties, we 
 have lost, and have got nothing instead of them 
 And those who have robbed us of them have stolen 
 that which not enriches themselves. It is so much 
 wealth cast into the sea beyond all approach of diving- 
 bells. We owe no thanks to Mr. J. E. Worcester, 
 

 AT SEA. 113 
 
 whose Geography we studied enforcedly at school. 
 Yet even he had his relentings, and in some softer 
 moment vouchsafed us a fine, inspiring print of 
 the Maelstrom, answerable to the twenty-four mile 
 diameter of its suction. Year by year, more and 
 more of the world gets disenchanted. Even the icy 
 privacy of the arctic and antarctic circles is invaded. 
 Our youth are no longer ingenious, as indeed no 
 ingenuity is demanded of them. Everything is ac 
 counted for, everything cut and dried, and the world 
 may be put together as easily as the fragments of a 
 dissected map. The Mysterious bounds nothing 
 now on the North, South, East, or West. We have 
 played Jack Horner with our earth, till there is never 
 a plum left in it. 
 
IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. 
 
 THE first sight of a shore so historical as that of 
 Europe gives an American a strange thrill. What 
 we always feel the artistic want of at home, is back 
 ground. It is all idle to say we are Englishmen, and 
 that English history is ours too. It is precisely in 
 this that we are not Englishmen, inasmuch as we. only 
 possess their history through our minds, and not by 
 life-long association with a spot and an idea we call 
 England. History without the soil it grew in, is more 
 instructive than inspiring, an acquisition, and not 
 an inheritance. It is laid away in our memories, and 
 does not run in our veins. Surely, in all that concerns 
 aesthetics, Europeans have us at an immense advan 
 tage. They start at a point which we arrive at after 
 weary years, for literature is not shut up in books, nor 
 art in galleries: both are taken in by unconscious 
 absorption through the finer pores of mind and char 
 acter in the atmosphere of society. We are not yet 
 out of our Crusoe-hood, and must make our own 
 tools as best we may. Yet I think we shall find the 
 good of it one of these days, in being thrown back 
 more wholly on nature; and our literature, when we 
 have learned to feel our own strength, and to respect 
 our own thought because it is ours, and not because 
 the European Mrs. Grundy agrees with it, will have 
 114 
 
IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. 115 
 
 a fresh flavor and a strong body that will recommend 
 it, especially as what we import is watered more and 
 more liberally with every vintage. 
 
 My first glimpse of Europe was the shore of Spain. 
 Since we got into the Mediterranean, we have been 
 becalmed for some days within easy view of it. All 
 along are fine mountains, brown all day, and with a 
 bloom on them at sunset like that of a ripe plum. 
 Here and there at their feet little white towns are 
 sprinkled along the edge of the water, like the grains 
 of rice dropped by the princess in the story. Some 
 times we see larger buildings on the mountain slopes, 
 probably convents. I sit and wonder whether the 
 farther peaks may not be the Sierra Morena (the 
 rusty saw) of Don Quixote. I resolve that they shall 
 be, and am content. Surely latitude and longitude 
 never showed me any particular respect, that I should 
 be over-scrupulous with them. 
 
 But after all, Nature, though she may be more 
 beautiful, is nowhere so entertaining as in man, and 
 the best thing I have seen and learned at sea is our 
 Chief Mate. My first acquaintance with him was 
 made over my knife, which he asked to look at, and, 
 after a critical examination, handed back to me, say 
 ing, "I should n t wonder if that ere was a good piece 
 o stuff." Since then he has transferred a part of his 
 regard for my knife to its owner. I like folks who 
 like an honest bit of steel, and take no interest what 
 ever in "your Raphaels, Correggios, and stuff." 
 There is always more than the average human nature 
 in a man who has a hearty sympathy with iron. It 
 
Il6 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 is a manly metal, with no sordid associations like gold 
 and silver. My sailor fully came up to my expecta 
 tion on further acquaintance. He might well be called 
 an old salt who had been wrecked on Spitzbergen 
 before I was born. He was not an American, but I 
 should never have guessed it by his speech, which was 
 the purest Cape Cod, and I reckon myself a good 
 taster of dialects. Nor was he less Americanized in 
 all his thoughts and feelings, a singular proof of the 
 ease with which our omnivorous country assimilates 
 foreign matter, provided it be Protestant, for he was 
 a man ere he became an American citizen. He used 
 to walk the deck with his hands in his pockets, in 
 seeming abstraction, but nothing escaped his eye. 
 How he saw, I could never make out, though I had a 
 theory that it was with his elbows. After he had taken 
 me (or my knife) into his confidence, he took care 
 that I should see whatever he deemed of interest to a 
 landsman. Without looking up, he would say, sud 
 denly, "Ther s a whale blowin clearn up to win ard," 
 or, "Them s porpises to leeward: that means change 
 o wind." He is as impervious to cold as a polar bear, 
 and paces the deck during his watch much as one of 
 those yellow hummocks goes slumping up and down 
 his cage. On the Atlantic, if the wind blew a gale 
 from the northeast, and it was cold as an English 
 summer, he was sure to turn out in a calico shirt and 
 trousers, his furzy brown chest half bare, and slippers, 
 without stockings. But lest you might fancy this to 
 have chanced by defect of wardrobe, he comes out 
 in a monstrous pea-jacket here in the Mediterranean, 
 
IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. llj 
 
 when the evening is so hot that Adam would have 
 been glad to leave off his fig-leaves. "It s a kind o 
 damp and unwholesome in these ere waters," he says, 
 evidently regarding the Midland Sea as a vile standing 
 pool, in comparison with the bluff ocean. At meals 
 he is superb, not only for his strengths, but his weak 
 nesses. He has somehow or other come to think me 
 a wag, and if I ask him to pass the butter, detects an 
 occult joke, and laughs as much as is proper for a mate. 
 For you must know that our social hierarchy on ship 
 board is precise, and the second mate, were he present, 
 would only laugh half as much as the first. Mr. X. 
 always combs his hair, and works himself into a black 
 frock-coat (on Sundays he adds a waistcoat) before 
 he comes to meals, sacrificing himself nobly and pain 
 fully to the social proprieties. The second mate, on 
 the other hand, who eats after us, enjoys the privilege 
 of shirt-sleeves, and is, I think, the happier man of 
 the two. We do not have seats above and below the 
 salt, as in old time, but above and below the white 
 sugar. Mr. X. always takes brown sugar, and it is 
 delightful to see how he ignores the existence of cer 
 tain delicates which he considers above his grade, 
 tipping his head on one side with an air of abstraction, 
 so that he may seem not to deny himself, but to omit 
 helping himself from inadvertence or absence of mind. 
 At such times he wrinkles his forehead in a peculiar 
 manner, inscrutable at first as a cuneiform inscrip 
 tion, but as easily read after you once get the key. 
 The sense of it is something like this: "I, X., know 
 my place, a height of wisdom attained by few. What- 
 
IlS FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 ever you may think, I do not see that currant jelly, 
 nor that preserved grape. Especially, a kind Provi 
 dence has made me blind to bowls of white sugar, and 
 deaf to the pop of champagne corks. It is much that 
 a merciful compensation gives me a sense of the 
 dingier hue of Havana, and the muddier gurgle of 
 beer. Are there potted meats? My physician has 
 ordered me three pounds of minced salt-junk at every 
 meal." There is such a thing, you know, as a ship s 
 husband : X. is the ship s poor relation. 
 
 As I have said, he takes also a below-the-white- 
 sugar interest in the jokes, laughing by precise point 
 of compass, just as he would lay the ship s course, all 
 yawing being out of the question with his scrupulous 
 decorum at the helm. Once or twice, I have got the 
 better of him, and touched him off into a kind of com 
 promised explosion, like that of damp fireworks, that 
 splutter and simmer a little, and then go out with pain 
 ful slowness and occasional relapses. But his fuse 
 is always of the unwillingest, and you must blow your 
 match, and touch him off again and again with the 
 same joke. Or rather, you must magnetize him 
 many times to get him en rapport with a jest. This 
 once accomplished, you have him, and one bit of fun 
 will last the whole voyage. He prefers those of one 
 syllable, the a-b abs of humor. The gradual fattening 
 of the steward, a benevolent mulatto with whiskers 
 and ear-rings, who looks as if he had been meant for 
 a woman, and had become a man by accident, as in 
 some of those stories of the elder physiologists, is an 
 abiding topic of humorous comment with Mr. X. 
 
IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. 1 19 
 
 "That ere stooard," he says, with a brown grin like 
 what you might fancy on the face of a serious and aged 
 seal, " s agittin as fat s a porpis. He was as thin s 
 a shingle when he come aboord last v yge. Them 
 trousis 11 bust yit. He don t darst take em off 
 nights, for the whole ship s company could n t git 
 him into em agin." And then he turns aside to enjoy 
 the intensity of his emotion by himself, and you hear 
 at intervals low rumblings, an indigestion of laughter. 
 He tells me of St. Elmo s fires, MarvelFs corposants, 
 though with him the original corpos santos has suf 
 fered a sea change, and turned to comepleasants, 
 pledges of fme weather. I shall not soon find a 
 pleasanter companion. It is so delightful to meet a 
 man who knows just what you do not. Nay, I think 
 the tired mind finds something in plump ignorance 
 like what the body feels in cushiony moss. Talk of 
 the sympathy of kindred pursuits ! It is the sympathy 
 of the upper and nether millstones, both forever grind 
 ing the same grist, and wearing each other smooth. 
 One has not far to seek for book-nature, artist- 
 nature, every variety of superinduced nature, in 
 short, but genuine human nature is hard to find. 
 And how good it is! Wholesome as a potato, fit 
 company for any dish. The freemasonry of culti 
 vated men is agreeable, but artificial, and I like 
 better the natural grip with which manhood recog 
 nizes manhood. 
 
 X. has one good story, and with that I leave him, 
 wishing him with all my heart that little inland farm 
 at last which is his calenture as he paces the windy 
 
I2O FIRESIDE 7^ RAVELS. 
 
 deck. One evening, when the clouds looked wild 
 and whirling, I asked X. if it was coming on to blow. 
 " No, I guess not," said he; "bumby the moon 11 
 be up, and scoff away that ere loose stuff." His 
 intonation set the phrase " scoff away" in quotation- 
 marks as plain as print. So I put a query in each 
 eye, and he went on. "Ther J was a Dutch cappen 
 onct, an his mate come to him in the cabin, where 
 he sot takin his schnapps, an says, Cappen, it s 
 agittin thick, an looks kin o squally; hed n t we s 
 good s shorten sail? Gimmy my alminick, says 
 the cappen. So he looks at it a spell, an says he, 
 The moon s due in less n half an hour, an she 11 
 scoff away ev ythin clare agin. So the mate he goes, 
 an bumby down he comes agin, an says, Cappen, 
 this ere s the allfiredest, powerfullest moon t ever 
 you did see. She s scoffed away the maintogallants l, 
 an she s to work on the foretops l now. Guess you d 
 better look in the alminick agin, an fin out when this 
 moon sets. So the cappen thought t was bout 
 time to go on deck. Dreadful slow them Dutch 
 cappens be." And X. walked away, rumbling in 
 wardly, like the rote of the sea heard afar. 
 
 And so we arrived at Malta. Did you ever hear 
 of one of those eating-houses, where, for a certain fee, 
 the guest has the right to make one thrust with a fork 
 into a huge pot, in which the whole dinner is bubbling, 
 getting perhaps a bit of boiled meat, or a potato, or else 
 nothing ? Well, when the great caldron of war is 
 seething, and the nations stand round it striving to 
 fish out something to their purpose from the mess, 
 
IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. 121 
 
 Britannia always has a great advantage in her trident. 
 Malta is one of the titbits she has impaled with that 
 awful implement. I was not sorry for it, when I 
 reached my clean inn, with its kindly English land 
 lady. 
 
ITALY. 
 
 THF impulse which sent the Edelmann Storg and 
 me to Subiaco was given something like two thousand 
 years ago. Had we not seen the Ponte Sant Antonio, 
 we should not have gone to Subiaco at this particular 
 time; and had the Romans been worse masons, or 
 more ignorant of hydrodynamics than they were, we 
 should never have seen the Ponte Sant Antonio. 
 But first we went to Tivoli, two carriage-loads of 
 us, a very agreeable mixture of English, Scotch, and 
 Yankees, on Tuesday, the 2oth April. I shall not 
 say anything about Tivoli. A water-fall in type is 
 likely to be a trifle stiffish. Old association and 
 modern beauty; nature and artifice; worship that 
 has passed away and the religion that abides forever; 
 the green gush of the deeper torrent and the white 
 evanescence of innumerable cascades, delicately pal 
 pitant as a fall of northern lights; the descendants 
 of Sabine pigeons flashing up to immemorial dove 
 cots, for centuries inaccessible to man, trooping with 
 noisy rooks and daws : the fitful roar and the silently 
 hovering iris, which, borne by the wind across the 
 face of the cliff, transmutes the travertine to momen 
 tary opal, and whose dimmer ghost haunts the moon 
 light, as well attempt to describe to a Papuan 
 savage that wondrous ode of Wordsworth which 
 rouses and stirs in the soul all its dormant instincts 
 
 122 
 
ITALY. 123 
 
 of resurrection as with a sound of the last trumpet. 
 No, it is impossible. Even Byron s pump sucks 
 sometimes, and gives an unpleasant dry wheeze, es 
 pecially, it seems to me, at Terni. It is guide-book 
 poetry, enthusiasm manufactured by the yard, which 
 the hurried traveller (John and Jonathan are always 
 in a hurry when they turn peripatetics) puts on when 
 he has not a rag of private imagination to cover his 
 nakedness withal. It must be a queer kind of love 
 that could " watch madness with unalterable mien," 
 when the patient, whom any competent physician 
 would have ordered into a strait-waistcoat long ago, 
 has shivered himself to powder down a precipice. 
 But there is no madness in the matter. Velino goes 
 over in his full senses, and knows perfectly well that 
 he shall not be hurt, that his broken fragments will 
 reunite more glibly than the head and neck of Orrilo. 
 He leaps exultant, as to his proper doom and fulfil 
 ment, and out of the mere waste and spray of his glory 
 the god of sunshine and song builds over the crown 
 ing moment of his destiny a triumphal arch beyond 
 the reach of time and pf decay. But Milton is the 
 only man who has got much poetry out of a cataract, 
 
 and that was a cataract in his eye. 
 
 The first day we made the Giro, coming back to a 
 merry dinner at the Sibilla in the evening. Then we 
 had some special tea, for the Italians think tea- 
 drinking the chief religious observance of the Inglesi, 
 
 and then we had fifteen pauls worth of illumina 
 tion, which wrought a sudden change in the scenery, 
 like those that seem so matter-of-course in dreams, 
 
124 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 turning the Claude we had seen in the morning into a 
 kind of Piranesi-Rembrandt. The illumination, by 
 the way, which had been prefigured to us by the en 
 thusiastic Italian who conducted it as something 
 second only to the Girandola, turned out to be one 
 blue-light, and two armfuls of straw. 
 
 The Edelmann Storg is not fond of pedestrian 
 locomotion, nay, I have even sometimes thought 
 that he looked upon the invention of legs as a private 
 and personal wrong done to himself. I am quite sure 
 that he inwardly believes them to have been a conse 
 quence of the fall, and that the happier Pre-Adam- 
 ites were monopodes, and incapable of any but a 
 vehicular progression. A carriage, with horses and 
 driver complete, he takes to be as simple a production 
 of nature as a potato. But he is fond of sketching^ 
 and after breakfast, on the beautiful morning of Wed 
 nesday, the 2ist, I persuaded him to walk out a mile 
 or two and see a fragment of aqueduct ruin. It is a 
 single glorious arch, buttressing the mountain -side 
 upon the edge of a sharp descent to the valley of the 
 Anio. The old road to Subiaco passes under it, and 
 it is crowned by a crumbling tower built in the Mid 
 dle Ages (whenever that was) against the Gaetani. 
 While Storg sketched, I clambered. Below you, 
 where the valley widens greenly toward other moun 
 tains, which the ripe Italian air distances with a 
 bloom like that on unplucked grapes, are more arches, 
 ossified arteries of what was once the heart of the 
 world. Storg s sketch was highly approved of by 
 Leopoldo, our guide, and by three or four peasants, 
 
ITALY. 125 
 
 who, being on their way to their morning s work in the 
 fields, had, of course, nothing in particular to do, and 
 stopped to see us see the ruin. Any one who has re 
 marked how grandly the Romans do nothing will be 
 slow to believe them an effete race. Their style is 
 as the colossal to all other, and the name of Eternal 
 City fits Rome also, because time is of no account 
 in it. The Roman always waits as if he could afford 
 it amply, and the slow centuries move quite fast 
 enough for him. Time is to other races the field of a 
 task-master, which they must painfully till; but to 
 the Roman it is an entailed estate, which he enjoys 
 and will transmit. The Neapolitan s laziness is that 
 of a loafer; the Roman s is that of a noble. The poor 
 Anglo-Saxon must count his hours, and look twice at 
 his small change of quarters and minutes; but the 
 Roman spends from a purse of Fortunatus. His 
 piccolo quarto (Tor a is like his grosso, a huge piece of 
 copper, big enough for a shield, which stands only 
 for a half-dime of our money. We poor fools of time 
 always hurry as if we were the last type of man, the 
 full stop with which Fate was closing the Colophon 
 of her volume, as if we had just read in our news 
 paper, as we do of the banks on holidays, IST The 
 world will close to-day at twelve o clock, an hour 
 earlier than usual. But the Roman is still an Ancient, 
 with a vast future before him to tame and occupy. 
 He and his ox and his plough are just as they were in 
 Virgil s time or Ennius s. We beat him in many 
 things; but in the impregnable fastness of his great 
 rich nature he defies us. 
 
126 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 We got back to Tivoli, Storg affirming that he 
 had walked fifteen miles. We saw the Temple of 
 Cough, which is not the Temple of Cough, though it 
 might have been a votive structure put up by some 
 Tiburtinc Dr. Wistar. We saw the villa of Mecaenas, 
 which is - iijt the villa of Mecaenas, and other equally 
 satisfactory antiquities. All our English friends 
 sketched the Citadel, of course, and one enthusiast 
 attempted a likeness of the fall, which I unhappily 
 mistook afterward for a semblance of the tail of one 
 of the horses on the Monte Cavallo. Then we went 
 to the Villa d Este, famous on Ariosto s account, 
 and which Ariosto never saw. But the laurels were 
 worthy to have made a chaplet for him, and the 
 cypresses and the views were as fine as if he had seen 
 them every day of his life. 
 
 Perhaps something I learned in going to see one of 
 the gates of the town is more to the purpose, and may 
 assist one in erecting the horoscope of Italia Unita. 
 When Leopoldo first proposed to drag me through 
 the mud to view this interesting piece of architecture, 
 I demurred. But as he was very earnest about it, and 
 as one seldom fails getting at a bit of character by sub 
 mitting to one s guide, I yielded. Arrived at the spot, 
 he put me at the best point of view, and said, 
 
 "Behold, Lordship!" 
 
 "I see nothing out of the common," said I. 
 
 " Lordship is kind enough here to look at a gate, 
 the like of which exists not in all Italy, nay, in the 
 whole world, I speak not of England," for he 
 thought me an Inglese. 
 
ITALY. 127 
 
 "I am not blind, Leopoldo ; where is the 
 miracle?" 
 
 "Here we dammed up the waters of the Anio, first 
 by artifice conducted to this spot, and, letting them 
 out upon the Romans, who stood besieging the town, 
 drowned almost a whole army of them. (Lordship 
 conceives?) They suspected nothing till they found 
 themselves all torn to pieces at the foot of the hill 
 yonder. (Lordship conceives?) Eh! per Bacco ! we 
 watered their porridge for them." 
 
 Leopoldo used we as Lord Buchan did /, meaning 
 any of his ancestors. 
 
 "But tell me a little, Leopoldo, how many years is 
 it since this happened?" 
 
 "Non saprei, signorla; it was in the antiquest 
 times, certainly; but the Romans never come to our 
 Fair, that we don t have blows about it, and perhaps a 
 stab or two. Lordship understands?* 
 
 I was quite repaid for my pilgrimage. I think I 
 understand Italian politics better for hearing Leo 
 poldo speak of the Romans, whose great dome is in 
 full sight of Tivoli, as a foreign nation. But what 
 perennial boyhood the whole story indicates ! 
 
 Storg s sketch of the morning s ruin was so success 
 ful that I seduced him into a new expedition to the 
 Ponte Sant Antonio, another aqueduct arch about 
 eight miles off. This was for the afternoon, and I 
 succeeded the more easily, as we were to go on horse 
 back. So I told Leopoldo to be at the gate of the 
 Villa of Hadrian, at three o clock, with three horses. 
 Leopoldo s face, when I said three, was worth seeing; 
 
128 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 for the poor fellow had counted on nothing more than 
 trotting beside our horses for sixteen miles, and getting 
 half a dollar in the evening. Between doubt and 
 hope, his face seemed to exude a kind of oil, which 
 made it shine externally, after having first lubricated 
 all the muscles inwardly. 
 
 "With three horses, Lordship?" 
 
 "Yes, three." 
 
 "Lordship is very sagacious. With three horses 
 they go much quicker. It is finished, then, and they 
 will have the kindness to find me at the gate with the 
 beasts, at three o clock precisely." 
 
 Leopoldo and I had compromised upon the term 
 "Lordship." He had found me in the morning cele 
 brating due rites before the Sibyl s Temple with strange 
 incense of the nicotian herb, and had marked me for 
 his prey. At the very high tide of sentiment, when 
 the traveller lies with oyster-like openness in the soft 
 ooze of reverie, do these parasitic crabs, the ciceroni, 
 insert themselves as his inseparable bosom companions. 
 Unhappy bivalve, lying so softly between thy two 
 shells, of the actual and the possible, the one sustain 
 ing, the other widening above thee, till, oblivious of 
 native mud, thou fanciest thyself a proper citizen only 
 of the illimitable ocean which floods thee, there is 
 no escape ! Vain are thy poor crustaceous efforts at 
 self -isolation. The foe henceforth is a part of thy 
 consciousness, thy landscape, and thyself, happy only 
 if that irritation breed in thee the pearl of patience 
 and of voluntary abstraction. 
 
 "Excellency wants a guide, very experienced, who 
 
ITALY. 129 
 
 has conducted with great mutual satisfaction many of 
 his noble compatriots." 
 
 Puff, puff, and an attempt at looking as if I did not 
 see him. 
 
 Excellency will deign to look at my book of testi 
 monials. When we return, Excellency will add his 
 own." 
 
 Puff, puff. 
 
 " Excellency regards the cascade, praceps Anio y as 
 the good Horatius called it." 
 
 I thought of the dissolve jrigus of the landlord in 
 Roderick Random, and could not help smiling. Leo- 
 poldo saw his advantage. 
 
 " Excellency will find Leopoldo, when he shall 
 choose to be ready." 
 
 "But I will positively not be called Excellency. I 
 am not an ambassador, nor a very eminent Christian, 
 and the phrase annoys me." 
 
 "To be sure, Excell Lordship." 
 
 "I am an American." 
 
 "Certainly, an American, Lordship," as if that 
 settled the matter entirely. If I had told him I was a 
 Caffre, it would have been just as clear to him. He 
 surrendered the "Excellency," but on general prin 
 ciples of human nature, I suppose, would not come a 
 step lower than "Lordship." So we compromised on 
 that. P.S. It is wonderful how soon a republican 
 ear reconciles itself with syllables of this description. 
 I think citizen would find greater difficulties in the 
 way of its naturalization, and as for brother ah ! 
 well, in a Christian sense, certainly. 
 
I3O FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 Three o clock found us at the Villa of Hadrian. 
 We had explored that incomparable ruin, and conse 
 crated it, in the Homeric and Anglo-Saxon manner, by 
 eating and drinking. Some of us sat in the shadow 
 of one of the great walls, fitter for a city than a palace, 
 over which a Nile of ivy, gushing from one narrow 
 source, spread itself in widening inundations. A 
 happy few listened to stories of Bagdad from Mrs. 
 
 , whose silver hair gleamed, a palpable anachro 
 nism, like a snow-fall in May, over that ever youthful 
 face, where the few sadder lines seemed but the signa 
 ture of Age to a deed of quitclaim and release. Dear 
 Tito, that exemplary traveller who never lost a day, 
 had come back from renewed explorations, convinced 
 by the eloquent custode that Serapeimuw&s the name 
 of an officer in the Praetorian Guard. I was explain 
 ing, in addition, that Naumachia, in the Greek tongue, 
 signified a place artificially drained, when the horses 
 were announced. 
 
 This put me to reflection. I felt, perhaps, a little 
 as Mazeprja must, when told that his steed was at the 
 door. For several years I had not been on the back 
 of a horse, and was it not more than likely that these 
 mountains might produce a yet more refractory breed 
 of these ferocious animals than common ? Who could 
 tell the effect of grazing on a volcanic soil like that 
 hereabout ? I had vague recollections that the saddle 
 nullified the laws governing the impulsion of inert 
 bodies, exacerbating the centrifugal forces into a 
 virulent activity, and proportionably narcotizing the 
 centripetal. The phrase ratio proportioned to the 
 
ITAL Y. 131 
 
 squares oj the distances impressed me with an awe 
 which explained to me how the laws of nature had 
 been of old personified and worshipped. Meditating 
 these things, I walked with a cheerful aspect to 
 the gate, where my saddled and bridled martyrdom 
 awaited me. 
 
 "Eocomiqua/" said Leopoldo, hilariously. "Gen 
 tlemen will be good enough to select from the three 
 best beasts in Tivoli." 
 
 "O, this one will serve me as well as any," said I, 
 with an air of indifference, much as I have seen a 
 gentleman help himself inadvertently to the best 
 peach in the dish. I am not more selfish than becomes 
 a Christian of the nineteenth century, but I looked 
 on this as a clear case of tabula in naufragio, and had 
 noticed that the animal in question had that tremulous 
 droop of the lower lip which indicates senility, and 
 the abdication of the wilder propensities. Moreover, 
 he was the only one provided with a curb bit, or rather 
 with two huge iron levers which might almost have 
 served ^rrchimedes for his problem. Our saddles 
 were flat /cushions covered with leather, brought by 
 years of iriction to the highest state of polish. In 
 stead of a pommel, a perpendicular stake, about ten 
 inches high, rose in front, which, in case of a stumble, 
 would save one s brains, at the risk of certain eviscera 
 tion. Behind, a glary slope invited me constantly to 
 slide over the horse s tail. The selfish prudence of my 
 choice had well-nigh proved the death of me, for this 
 poor old brute, with that anxiety to oblige a jorestiero 
 which characterizes everybody here, could never make 
 
132 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 up his mind which of his four paces (and he had the 
 rudiments of four walk, trot, rack, and gallop) 
 would be most agreeable to me. The period of tran 
 sition is always unpleasant, and it was all transition. 
 He treated me to a hodge-podge of all his several gaits 
 at once. Saint Vitus was the only patron saint I could 
 think of. My head jerked one way, my body another, 
 while each of my legs became a pendulum vibrating 
 furiously, one always forward while the other was 
 back, so that I had all the appearance and all the 
 labor of going afoot, and at the same time was bumped 
 within an inch of my life. Waterton s alligator was 
 nothing to it ; it was like riding a hard-trotting arma 
 dillo bare-backed. There is a species of equitation 
 peculiar to our native land, in which a rail from the 
 nearest fence, with no preliminary incantation of 
 Horse and hattock ! is converted into a steed, and this 
 alone may stand the comparison. Storg in the mean 
 while was triumphantly taking the lead, his trousers 
 working up very pleasantly above his knees, an insur 
 rectionary movement which I also was unable to sup 
 press in my own. I could bear it no longer. 
 
 "Le-e-o-o-p-o-o-o-l-l-l-d-d-o-o-o !" jolted I. 
 
 " Command, Lordship ! " and we both came to a stop. 
 
 "It is necessary that we change horses immediately, 
 or I shall be jelly." 
 
 "Certainly, Lordship" ; and I soon had the pathetic 
 satisfaction of seeing him subjected to all the excruci 
 ating experiments that had been tried upon myself. 
 Fiat experimentum in car pore vili, thought his ex 
 tempore lordship, Christopher Sly, to himself. 
 
ITALY. 133 
 
 Meanwhile all the other accessories of our ride were 
 delicious. It was a clear, cool day, and we soon left 
 the high road for a bridle-path along the side of the 
 mountain, among gigantic olive-trees, said to be five 
 hundred years old, and which had certainly employed 
 all their time in getting into the weirdest and wonder- 
 fullest shapes. Clearly in this green commonwealth 
 ( there was no heavy roller of public opinion to flatten 
 all character to a lawn-like uniformity. Everything 
 was individual and eccentric. And there was some 
 thing fearfully human, too, in the wildest contortions. 
 It was some such wood that gave Dante the hint of his 
 human forest in the seventh circle, and I should have 
 dreaded to break a twig, lest I should hear that voice 
 complaining, 
 
 " Perch6 mi scerpi ? 
 Non hai tu spirto di pietate alcuno ? " 
 
 Our path lay along a kind of terrace, and at every 
 opening we had glimpses of the billowy Campagna, 
 with the great dome bulging from its rim, while on our 
 right, changing ever as we rode, the Alban mountain 
 showed us some new grace of that sweeping outline 
 peculiar to volcanoes. At intervals the substructions 
 of Roman villas would crop out from the soil like 
 masses of rock, and deserving to rank as a geological 
 formation by themselves. Indeed, in gazing into these 
 dark caverns, one does not think of man more than at 
 Staffa. Nature has adopted these fragments of a race 
 who were dear to her. She has not suffered these 
 bones of the great Queen to lack due sepulchral rites, 
 but has flung over them the ceremonial handfuls of 
 
134 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 earth, and every year carefully renews the garlands of 
 memorial flowers. Nay, if what they say in Rome 
 be true, she has even made a new continent of the 
 Colosseum, and given it a flora of its own. 
 
 At length, descending a little, we passed through 
 farm-yards and cultivated fields, where, from Leo- 
 poldo s conversations with the laborers, we discov 
 ered that he himself did not know the way for which 
 he had undertaken to be guide. However, we pres 
 ently came to our ruin, and very noble it was. The 
 aqueduct had here been carried across a deep gorge, 
 and over the little brook which wimpled along below 
 towered an arch, as a bit of Shakespeare bestrides 
 the exiguous rill of a discourse which it was intended 
 to ornament. The only human habitation in sight 
 was a little casetta on the top of a neighboring hill. 
 What else of man s work could be seen was a ruined 
 castle of the Middle Ages, and, far away, upon the 
 horizon, the eternal dome. A valley in the moon 
 could scarce have been lonelier, could scarce have sug 
 gested more strongly the feeling of preteriteness and 
 extinction. The stream below did not seem so much 
 to sing as to murmur sadly, Conclusum est; periisti! 
 and the wind, sighing through the arch, answered, 
 Periisti ! Nor was the silence of Monte Cavi without 
 meaning. That cup, once full of fiery wine, in which 
 it pledged Vesuvius and y^Etna later born, was brimmed 
 with innocent water now. Adam came upon the 
 earth too late to see the glare of its last orgy, lighting 
 the eyes of saurians in the reedy Campagna below. I 
 almost fancied I could hear a voice like that which cried 
 
ITALY. 135 
 
 to the Egyptian pilot, Great Pan is dead! I was look 
 ing into the dreary socket where once glowed the eye 
 that saw the whole earth vassal. Surely, this was the 
 world s autumn, and I could hear the feet of Time 
 rustling through the wreck of races and dynasties, 
 cheap and inconsiderable as fallen leaves. 
 
 But a guide is not engaged to lead one into the 
 world of imagination. He is as deadly to sentiment as 
 a sniff of hartshorn. His position is a false one, like 
 that of the critic, who is supposed to know everything, 
 and expends himself in showing that he does not. If 
 you should ever have the luck to attend a concert of 
 the spheres, under the protection of an Italian cicerone, 
 he will expect you to listen to him rather than to it. 
 He will say: "Ecco, Signoria, that one in the red 
 mantle is Signer Mars, eh ! what a noblest basso is 
 Signer Mars! but nothing (Lordship understands?) 
 to what Signer Saturn used to be, (he with the golden 
 belt, Signorla,) only his voice is in ruins now, 
 scarce one note left upon another; but Lordship can 
 see what it was by the remains, Roman remains, 
 Signorta, Roman remains, the work of giants. (Lord 
 ship understands?) They make no such voices now. 
 Certainly, Signer Jupiter (with the yellow tunic, there) 
 is a brave artist and a most sincere tenor; but since 
 the time of the Republic" (if he think you an oscu- 
 rante, or since the French, if he suspects you of being 
 the least red} "we have no more good singing." And 
 so on. 
 
 It is a well-known fact to all persons who are in the 
 habit of climbing Jacob s-ladders, that, if any one 
 
136 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 speak to you during the operation, the fabric collapses, 
 and you come somewhat uncomfortably to the ground. 
 One can be hit with a remark, when he is beyond the 
 reach of more material missiles. Leopoldo saw by 
 my abstracted manner that I was getting away from 
 him, and I was the only victim he had left, for Storg 
 was making a sketch below. So he hastened to fetch 
 me down again. 
 
 "Nero built this arch, Lordship." (He didn t, 
 but Nero was Leopoldo s historical scape-goat.) 
 "Lordship sees the dome? he will deign to look the 
 least little to the left hand. Lordship has much in 
 telligence. Well, Nero always did thus. His works 
 always, always, had Rome in view." 
 
 He had already shown me two ruins, which he 
 ascribed equally to Nero, and which could only have 
 seen Rome by looking through a mountain. How 
 ever, such trifles are nothing to an accomplished guide. 
 
 I remembered his quoting Horace in the morning. 
 
 "Do you understand Latin, Leopoldo?" 
 
 "I did a little once, Lordship. I went to the 
 Jesuits school at Tivoli. But what use of Latin to a 
 poverino like me?" 
 
 "Were you intended for the church? Why did 
 you leave the school?" 
 
 "Eh, Lordship!" and one of those shrugs which 
 might mean that he left it of his own free will, or that 
 he was expelled at point of toe. He added some con 
 temptuous phrase about the priests. 
 
 "But, Leopoldo, you are a good Catholic?" 
 
 "Eh, Lordship, who knows? A man is no blinder 
 
ITALY. 137 
 
 for being poor, nay, hunger sharpens the eyesight 
 sometimes. The cardinals (their Eminences!) tell 
 us that it is good to be poor, and that, in proportion 
 as we lack on earth, it shall be made up to us in Para 
 dise. Now, if the cardinals (their Eminences !) be 
 lieve what they preach, why do they want to ride in 
 such handsome carriages?" 
 
 "But are there many who think as you do?" 
 
 "Everybody, Lordship, but a few women and 
 fools. What imports it what the fools think?" 
 
 An immense deal, I thought, an immense deal; 
 for of what material is public opinion manufactured ? 
 
 "Do you ever go to church?" 
 
 "Once a year, Lordship, at Easter, to mass and 
 confession." 
 
 "Why once a year?" 
 
 "Because, Lordship, one must have a certificate 
 from the priest.. One might be sent to prison else, 
 and one had rather go to confession than to jail. Eh, 
 Lordship, it is a porcheria" 
 
 It is proper to add, that in what Leopoldo said of 
 the priests he was not speaking of his old masters, the 
 Jesuits. One never hears anything in Italy against 
 the purity of their lives, or their learning and ability, 
 though much against their unscrupulousness. Nor 
 will any one who has ever enjoyed the gentle and 
 dignified hospitality of the Benedictines be ready to 
 believe any evil report of them. 
 
 By this time Storg had finished his sketch, and we 
 remounted our grazing steeds. They were brisker 
 as soon as their noses were turned homeward, and we 
 
138 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 did the eight miles back in an hour. The setting sun 
 streamed through and among the Michael Angelesque 
 olive-trunks, and, through the long colonnade of the 
 bridle-path, fired the scarlet waistcoats and bodices 
 of homeward villagers, or was sullenly absorbed in the 
 long black cassock arid flapped hat of a priest, who 
 courteously saluted the strangers. Sometimes a min 
 gled flock of sheep and goats (as if they had walked 
 out of one of Claude s pictures) followed the shepherd 
 who, satyr-like, in goat-skin breeches, sang such songs 
 as were acceptable before Tubal Cain struck out the 
 laws of musical time from his anvil. The peasant, in 
 his ragged brown cloak, or with blue jacket hanging 
 from the left shoulder, still strides Romanly, incedit 
 rex, and his eyes have a placid grandeur, inherited 
 from those which watched the glittering snake of the 
 Triumph, as it undulated along the Via Sacra. By 
 his side moves with equal pace his woman-porter, the 
 caryatid of a vast entablature of household-stuff, and 
 learning in that harsh school a sinuous poise of body 
 and a security of step beyond the highest snatch ot the 
 posture-master. 
 
 As we drew near Tivoli the earth was fast swinging 
 into shadow. The darkening Campagna, climbing 
 the sides of the nearer Monticelli in a gray belt of 
 olive-spray, rolled on towards the blue island of 
 Soracte, behind which we lost the sun. Yes, we had 
 lost the sun; but in the wide chimney of the largest 
 room at the Sibilla there danced madly, crackling 
 with ilex and laurel, a bright ambassador from Sun- 
 land, Monsieur Le Feu, no pinchbeck substitute for 
 
ITAL Y. I 39 
 
 his royal master. As we drew our chairs up, after 
 the dinner due to Leopoldo s forethought, "Behold," 
 said I, "the Resident of the great king near the court 
 of our (this-day-created) Hogan Moganships." 
 
 We sat looking into the fire, as it wavered from 
 shining shape to shape of unearthliest fantasy, and 
 both of us, no doubt, making out old faces among the 
 embers, for we both said together, "Let us talk of old 
 times." 
 
 "To the small hours," said the Edelmann; "and 
 instead of blundering off to Torneo to intrude chatter- 
 ingly upon the midnight privacy of Apollo, let us pro 
 mote the fire, there, to the rank of sun by brevet, and 
 have a kind of undress rehearsal of those night 
 wanderings of his here upon the ample stage of the 
 hearth." 
 
 So we went through the whole catalogue of Do you 
 remembers? and laughed at all the old stories, so 
 dreary to an outsider. Then we grew pensive, and 
 talked of the empty sockets in that golden band of 
 our young friendship, of S., with Grecian front, 
 but unsevere, and Saxon M., to whom laughter wcs 
 as natural as for a brook to ripple. 
 
 But Leopoldo had not done with us. We were 
 to get back to Rome in the morning, and to that end 
 must make a treaty with the company which ran the 
 Tivoli diligence, the next day not being the regular 
 period of departure for that prodigious structure. 
 We had given Leopoldo twice his fee, and, setting a 
 mean value upon our capacities in proportion, he ex 
 pected to bag a neat percentage on our bargain. 
 
140 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 \ 
 
 Alas ! he had made a false estimate of the Anglo- 
 Norman mind, which, capable of generosity as a com 
 pliment to itself, will stickle for the dust in the balance 
 in a matter of business, and would blush at being done 
 by Mercury himself. 
 
 Accordingly, at about nine o clock there came a 
 knock at the door, and, answering our Favorisca! in 
 stalked Leopoldo, gravely followed by the two com 
 missioners of the company. 
 
 " Behold me returned, Lordship, and these men are 
 the Vetturini." 
 
 Why is it that men who have to do with horses are 
 the sam? all over Christendom? Is it that they 
 acquire equine characteristics, or that this particular 
 mystery is magnetic to certain sorts of men? Cer 
 tainly they are marked unmistakably, and these two 
 worthies would have looked perfectly natural in York 
 shire or Vermont. They were just alike, jor- 
 temque Gyan, jortemque Cloanthum, and you could 
 not split an epithet between them. Simultaneously 
 they threw back their large overcoats, and displayed 
 spheroidal figures, over which the strongly pronounced 
 stripes of their plaided waistcoats ran like parallels 
 of latitude and longitude over a globe. Simul 
 taneously they took off their hats and said, "Your 
 servant, gentlemen." In Italy it is always necessary 
 to make a combinazione beforehand about even the 
 most customary matters, for there is no fixed highest 
 price for anything. For a minute or two we stood 
 reckoning each other s forces. Then I opened the 
 first trench with the usual, "How much do you wish 
 
ITALY. 141 
 
 for carrying us to Rome at half past seven to-morrow 
 morning?" 
 
 The enemy glanced one at the other, and the 
 result of this ocular witenagemot was that one said, 
 "Four scudi, gentlemen." 
 
 The Edelmann Storg took his cigar from his mouth 
 in order to whistle, and made a rather indecorous 
 allusion to four gentlemen in the diplomatic service 
 of his Majesty, the Prince of the Powers of the Air. 
 
 "Whe-ew! quattro diavoli!" said he. 
 
 "Maceht!" exclaimed I, attempting a flank move 
 ment, "I had rather go on foot!" and threw as much 
 horror into my face as if a proposition had been made 
 to me to commit robbery, murder, and arson all 
 together. 
 
 "For less than three scudi and a half the diligence 
 parts not from Tivoli at an extraordinary hour," 
 said the stout man, with an imperturbable gravity, 
 intended to mask his retreat, and to make it seem that 
 he was making the same proposal as at first. 
 
 Storg saw that they wavered, and opened upon 
 them with his flying artillery of sarcasm. 
 
 "Do you take us for Inglcsi? We are very well 
 here, and will stay at the Sibilla," he sniffed scornfully. 
 
 "How much will Lordship give?" (This was 
 showing the white feather.) 
 
 "Fifteen pauls," (a scudo and a half,) "buonamano 
 included." 
 
 "It is impossible, gentlemen; for less than two 
 scudi and a half the diligence parts not from Tivoli at 
 an extraordinary hour." 
 
142 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 "Fifteen pauls." 
 
 "Will Lordship give two scudi?" (with a slight 
 flavor of mendicancy.) 
 
 "Fifteen pauls," (growing firm as we saw them 
 waver.) 
 
 "Then, gentlemen, it is all over; it is impossible, 
 gentlemen." 
 
 "Very good; a pleasant evening to you !" and they 
 bowed themselves out. 
 
 As soon as the door closed behind them, Leopoldo, 
 who had looked on in more and more anxious silence 
 as the chance of plunder was whittled slimmer and 
 slimmer by the sharp edges of the parley, saw instantly 
 that it was for his interest to turn state s evidence 
 against his accomplices. 
 
 "They will be back in a moment," he said know 
 ingly, as if he had been of our side all along. 
 
 "Of course; we are aware of that." -It is always 
 prudent to be aware of everything in travelling. 
 
 And, sure enough, in five minutes re-enter the stout 
 men, as gravely as if everything had been thoroughly 
 settled, and ask respectfully at what hour we would 
 have the diligence. 
 
 This will serve as a specimen of Italian bargain- 
 making. They do not feel happy if they get their 
 first price. So easy a victory makes them sorry they 
 , had not asked twice as much, and, besides, they love 
 the excitement of the contest. I have seen as much 
 debate over a little earthen pot (value two cents) on 
 the Ponte Vccchio, in Florence, as would have served 
 for an operation of millions in the funds, the demand 
 
ITALY. 143 
 
 and the offer alternating so rapidly that the litigants 
 might be supposed to be playing the ancient game 
 of morra. It is a part of the universal fondness for 
 gaming, and lotteries. An English gentleman once 
 asked his Italian courier how large a percentage he 
 made on all of his employer s money which passed 
 through his hands. " About five per cent; some 
 times more, sometimes less," was the answer. "Well, 
 I will add that to your salary, in order that I maybe 
 rid of this uncomfortable feeling of being cheated." 
 The courier mused a moment, and said, "But no, sir, 
 I should not be happy ; then it would not be sometimes 
 more, sometimes less, and I should miss the excite 
 ment of the game." 
 
 22^. This morning the diligence was at the door 
 punctually, and, taking our seats in the coupe, we bade 
 farewell to La Sibilla. But first we ran back for a 
 parting glimpse at the water-fall. These last looks, 
 like lovers last kisses, are nouns of multitude, and 
 presently the povero stalliere, signori, waited upon us, 
 cap in hand, telling us that the vetturino was impa 
 tient, and begging for drink -money in the same 
 breath. Leopoldo hovered longingly afar, for these 
 vultures respect times and seasons, and while one is 
 fleshing his beak upon the foreign prey, the others 
 forbear. The passengers in the diligence were not 
 very lively. The Romans are a grave people, and 
 more so than ever since 49. Of course, there was 
 one priest among them. There always is; for the 
 mantis religiosa is as inevitable to these public con 
 veyances as the curculio is to the plum, and one could 
 
144 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 almost fancy that they were bred in the same way, 
 that the egg was inserted when the vehicle was green, 
 became developed as it ripened, and never left it till 
 it dropped withered from the pole. There was noth 
 ing noticeable on the road to Rome, except the strings 
 of pack-horses and mules which we met returning 
 with empty lime-sacks to Tivoli, whence comes the 
 supply of Rome. A railroad was proposed, but the 
 government would not allow it, because it would inter 
 fere with this carrying-trade, and wisely granted 
 instead a charter for a road to Frascati, where there 
 was no business whatever to be interfered with. 
 About a mile of this is built in a style worthy of ancient 
 Rome ; and it is possible that eventually another mile 
 may be accomplished, for some half-dozen laborers 
 are at work upon it with wheelbarrows, in the leisurely 
 Roman fashion. If it is ever finished, it will have 
 nothing to carry but the conviction of its own useless- 
 ness. A railroad has been proposed to Civita Vecchia ; 
 but that is out of the question because it would be 
 profitable. On the whole, one does not regret the 
 failure of these schemes. One would not approach 
 the solitary emotion of a lifetime, such as is the first 
 | sight of Rome, at the rate of forty miles an hour. It 
 j is better, after painfully crawling up one of those long 
 paved hills, to have the postilion turn in his saddle 
 and, pointing with his whip, (without looking, for he 
 knows instinctively where it is,) say, Ecco San Piclro ! 
 Then you look tremblingly, and see it hovering vision 
 ary on the horizon s verge, and in a moment you are 
 rattling and rumbling and wallowing down into the 
 
ITALY. 145 
 
 valley, and it is gone. So you play hide-and-seek 
 with it all the rest of the way, and have time to con 
 verse with your sensations. You fancy you have got 
 used to it at last ; but from the next hill-top, lo, there 
 it looms again, a new wonder, and you do not feel 
 sure that it will keep its tryst till you find yourself 
 under its shadow. The Dome is to Rome what 
 Vesuvius is to Naples; only a greater wonder, for 
 Michael Angelo hung it there. The traveller climbs 
 it as he would a mountain, and finds the dwellings 
 of men high up on its sacred cliffs. It has its annual 
 eruption, too, at Easter, when the fire trickles and 
 palpitates down its mighty shoulders, seen from far- 
 off Tivoli. No, the locomotive is less impertinent 
 at Portici, hailing the imprisoned Titan there with a 
 kindred shriek. Let it not vex the solemn Roman 
 ghosts, or the nobly desolate Campagna, with whose 
 solitudes the shattered vertebrae of the aqueducts are 
 in truer sympathy. 
 
 24th. To-day our journey to Subiaco properly 
 begins. The jocund morning had called the beggars 
 to their street -corners, and the v/omen to the win 
 dows; the players of morra (a game probably as old 
 as the invention of fingers), of chuck-farthing, and of 
 bowls, had cheerfully begun the labors of the day; 
 the plaintive cries of the chair-seaters, frog-venders, 
 and certain other peripatetic merchants, the meaning 
 of whose vocal advertisements I could never pene 
 trate, quaver at regular intervals, now near and now 
 far away ; a solitary Jew with a sack over his shoulder, 
 and who never is seen to stop, slouches along, every 
 
146 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 now and then croaking a penitential Cenci! as if he 
 were somehow the embodied expiation (by some post- 
 Ovidian metamorphosis) of that darkest Roman 
 tragedy; women are bargaining for lettuce and 
 endive; the slimy Triton in the Piazza Barberina 
 spatters himself with vanishing diamonds ; a peasant 
 leads an ass on which sits the mother with the babe in 
 her arms, a living flight into Egypt ; in short, the 
 beautiful spring day had awakened all of Rome that 
 can awaken yet (for the ideal Rome waits for another 
 morning), when we rattled along in our carrettella on 
 the way to Palestrina. A carrettella is to the per 
 fected vehicle, as the coracle to the steamship; it is 
 the first crude conception of a wheeled carriage. 
 Doubtless the inventor of it was a prodigious genius 
 in his day, and rode proudly in it, envied by the more 
 fortunate pedestrian, and cushioned by his own in 
 flated imagination. If the chariot of Achilles were 
 like it, then was Hector happier at the tail than the son 
 of Thetis on the box. It is an oblong basket upon 
 two wheels, with a single seat rising in the middle. 
 We had not jarred over a hundred yards of the Quattro 
 Fontane, before we discovered that no elastic pro- 
 pugnaculum had been interposed between the body 
 and the axle, so that we sat, as it were, on paving- 
 stones, mitigated only by so much as well-seasoned 
 ilex is less flinty-hearted than tujo or breccia. If there 
 were any truth in the theory of developments, I am 
 certain that we should have been furnished with a 
 pair of rudimentary elliptical springs, at least, before 
 half our day s journey was over. Howe\er, as one of 
 
ITALY. 147 
 
 those happy illustrations of ancient manners, which 
 one meets with so often here, it was instructive; for 
 I now clearly understand that it was not merely by 
 reason of pomp that Hadrian used to be three days 
 in getting to his villa, only twelve miles off. In spite 
 of the author of "Vestiges," Nature, driven to ex 
 tremities, can develop no more easy cushion than a 
 blister, and no doubt treated an ancient emperor and 
 a modern republican with severe impartiality. 
 
 It was difficult to talk without biting one s tongue; 
 but as soon as we had got fairly beyond the gate, and 
 out of sight of the last red-legged French soldier, and 
 tightly-buttoned doganiere, our driver became loqua 
 cious. 
 
 "I am a good Catholic, better than most," said 
 he, suddenly. 
 
 "What do you mean by that?" 
 
 "Eh! they say Saint Peter wrought miracles, and 
 there are enough who don t believe it; but / do. 
 There s the Barberini Palace, behold one miracle 
 of Saint Peter ! There s the Farnese, behold 
 another ! There s the Borghcse, behold a third ! 
 But there s no end of them. No saint, nor all the 
 saints put together, ever worked so many wonders as 
 he; and then, per Bacco ! he is the uncle of so many 
 folks, why, that s a miracle in itself, and of the 
 greatest!" 
 
 Presently he added : "Do you know how we shall treat 
 the priests when we make our next revolution? We 
 shall treat them as they treat us, and that is after the 
 fashion of the buffalo. For the buffalo is not content 
 
148 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 with getting a man down, but after that he gores him 
 and thrusts him, always, always, as if he wished to 
 cram him to the centre of the earth. Ah, if I were only 
 keeper of hell-gate ! Not a rascal of them all should 
 ever get out into purgatory while I stood at the 
 door!" 
 
 We remonstrated a little, but it only exasperated 
 him the more. 
 
 " Blood of Judas! they will eat nothing else than 
 gold, when a poor fellow s belly is as empty as San 
 Lorenzo yonder. They 11 have enough of it one of 
 these days but melted ! How do you think they 
 will like it for soup?" 
 
 Perhaps, if our vehicle had been blessed with springs 
 our vetturino would have been more placable. I con 
 fess a growing moroseness in myself, and a wander 
 ing speculation or two as to the possible fate of the 
 builder of our chariot in the next world. But I am 
 more and more persuaded every day, that, as far as 
 the popular mind is concerned, Romanism is a dead 
 thing in Italy. It survives only because there is noth 
 ing else to replace it with, for men must wear their old 
 habits (however threadbare and out at the elbows) 
 till they get better. It is literally a superstition, 
 a something left to stand over till the great commercial 
 spirit of the nineteenth century balances his accounts 
 again, and then it will be banished to the limbo of 
 profit and loss. The Papacy lies dead in the Vatican, 
 but the secret is kept for the present, and government 
 is carried on in its name. After the fact gets abroad, 
 perhaps its ghost will terrify men a little while longer, 
 
ITALY. 149 
 
 but only while they are in the dark, though the ghost 
 of a creed is a hard thing to give a mortal wound to, 
 and may be laid, after all, only in a Red Sea of blood. 
 
 So we rattled along till we came to a large albergo 
 just below the village of Colonna. While our horse 
 was taking his rinjresco, we climbed up to it, and 
 found it desolate enough, the houses never rebuilt 
 since Consul Rienzi sacked it five hundred years ago. 
 It was a kind of gray incrustation on the top of the 
 hill, chiefly inhabited by pigs, chickens, and an old 
 woman with a distaff, who looked as sacked ani 
 ruinous as everything around her. There she sat in 
 the sun, a dreary, doting Clotho, who had outlived 
 her sisters, and span endless destinies which none 
 was left to cut at the appointed time. Of course she 
 paused from her work a moment, and held out a 
 skinny hand, with the usual, "Noblest gentlemen, 
 give me something for charity." We gave her 
 enough to pay Charon s ferriage across to her sisters, 
 and departed hastily, for there was something un 
 canny about the place. In this climate even the 
 finger-marks of Ruin herself are indelible, and the 
 walls were still blackened with Rienzi s fires. 
 
 As we waited for our carrettella, I saw four or five 
 of the lowest-looking peasants come up and read the 
 handbill of a tombola (a kind of lottery) which was 
 stuck up beside the inn-door. One of them read it 
 aloud for our benefit, and with remarkable propriety 
 of accent and emphasis. This benefit of clergy, how 
 ever, is of no great consequence where there is nothing 
 to read. In Rome, this morning, the walls were 
 
ISO FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 spattered with placards condemning the works of 
 George Sand, Eugene Sue, Gioberti, and others. 
 But in Rome one may contrive to read any book he 
 likes; and I know Italians who are familiar with 
 Swedenborg, and even Strauss. 
 
 Our stay at the albergo was illustrated by one other 
 event, a nightingale singing in a full-blossomed 
 elder-bush on the edge of a brook just across the road. 
 So liquid were the notes, and so full of spring, that the 
 twig he tilted on seemed a conductor through which 
 the mingled magnetism of brook and blossom flowed 
 into him and were precipitated in music. Nature 
 understancls thoroughly the value of contrasts, and 
 accordingly a donkey from a shed hard by, hitched 
 and hesitated and agonized through his bray, so that 
 we might be conscious at once of the positive and 
 negative poles of song. It was pleasant to see with 
 what undoubting enthusiasm he went through his 
 solo, and vindicated Providence from the imputation 
 of weakness in making such trifles as the nightingale 
 yonder. " Give ear, O heaven and earth ! " he seemed 
 to say, "nor dream that good, sound common-sense 
 is extinct or out of fashion so long as / live." I sup 
 pose Nature made the donkey half abstractedly, while 
 she was feeling her way up to her ideal in the horse, 
 and that his bray is in like manner an experimental 
 sketch for the neigh of her finished animal. 
 
 We drove on to Palestrma, passing for some dis 
 tance over an old Roman road, as carriageable as 
 when it was built. Palestrina occupies the place of 
 the once famous Temple of Fortune, v/hose ruiiio 
 
ITAL Y. 151 
 
 are perhaps a fitter monument of the fickle goddess 
 than ever the perfect fane was. 
 
 Come hither, weary ghosts that wail 
 O er buried Nimroud s carven walls, 
 
 And ye whose nightly footsteps frail 
 
 From the dread hu>h of Memphian halls 
 Lead forth the whispering funerals ! 
 
 Come hither, shade of ancient pain 
 That, muffled sitting, hear st the foam 
 
 To death-deaf Cartilage shout in vain, 
 And thou that in the Sibyl s tome 
 Tear-stain st the never after Rome ! 
 
 Come, Marius, Wolsey, all ye great 
 
 On whom proud Fortune stamped her heel, 
 
 And see herself the sport of Fate, 
 Herself discrowned and made to feel 
 The treason of her slippery wheel ! 
 
 One climbs through a great part of the town by 
 stone steps, passing fragments of Pelasgic wall, (for 
 history, like geology, may be studied here in succes 
 sive rocky strata,} and at length reaches the inn, called 
 the Cappellaro, the sign of which is a great tin cardi 
 nal s hat, swinging from a small building on the other 
 side of the street, so that a better view of it may be 
 had from the hostelry itself. The landlady, a stout 
 woman of about sixty years, welcomed us heartily, 
 and burst forth into an eloquent eulogy on some fresh 
 sea-fish which she had just received from Rome. She 
 promised everything for dinner, leaving us to choose; 
 but as a skilful juggler flitters the cards before you, 
 and, while he seems to offer all, forces upon you the 
 one he wishes, so we found that whenever we under 
 took to select from her voluble bill of fare, we had in 
 
152 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 some unaccountable manner always ordered sea- 
 fish. Therefore, after a few vain efforts, we con 
 tented ourselves, and, while our dinner was cooking, 
 climbed up to the top of the town. Here stands the 
 deserted Palazzo Barberini, in which is a fine Roman 
 mosaic pavement. It was a dreary old place. On 
 the ceilings of some of the apartments were fading out 
 the sprawling apotheoses of heroes of the family, 
 (themselves long ago faded utterly,) who probably went 
 through a somewhat different ceremony after their 
 deaths from that represented here. One of the rooms 
 on the ground-floor was still occupied, and from its 
 huge grated windows there swelled and subsided at 
 intervals a confused turmoil of voices, some talking, 
 some singing, some swearing, and some lamenting, as 
 if a page of Dante s Inferno had become suddenly 
 alive under one s eye. This was the prison, and in 
 front of each window a large stone block allowed ttte- 
 a-tete discourses between the prisoners and their 
 friends outside. Behind the palace rises a steep, 
 rocky hill, with a continuation of ruined castle, the 
 innocent fastness now of rooks and swallows. We 
 walked down to a kind of terrace, and watched the 
 Alban Mount (which saw the sunset for us by proxy) 
 till the bloom trembled nearer and nearer to its sum 
 mit, then went wholly out, we could not say when, 
 and day was dead. Simultaneously we thought of 
 dining, and clattered hastily down to the Cappellaro. 
 We had to wait yet half an hour for dinner, and from 
 where I sat I could see through the door of the dining- 
 room a kind of large hall into which a door from the 
 
ITALY. 153 
 
 kitchen also opened. Presently I saw the landlady 
 come out with a little hanging lamp in her hand, and 
 seat herself amply before a row of baskets ranged 
 upside-down along the wall. She carefully lifted the 
 edge of one of these, and, after she had groped in it a 
 moment, I heard that hoarse choking scream peculiar 
 to fowls when seized by the leg in the dark, as if their 
 throats were in their tibiae after sunset. She took out 
 a fine young cock and set him upon his feet before 
 her, stupid with sleep, and blinking helplessly at the 
 lamp, which he perhaps took for a sun in reduced 
 circumstances, doubtful whether to crow or cackle. 
 She looked at him admiringly, felt of him, sighed, 
 gazed sadly at his coral crest, and put him back again. 
 This ceremony she repeated with five or six of the 
 baskets, and then went back into the kitchen. I 
 thought of Thessalian hags and Arabian enchantresses, 
 and wondered if these were transformed travellers 
 for travellers go through queer transformations some 
 times. Should Storg and I be crowing and scratching 
 to-morrow morning, instead of going to Subiaco? 
 Should we be Plato s men, with the feathers, instead 
 of without them? I would probe this mystery. So, 
 when the good woman came in to lay the table, I asked 
 what she had been doing with the fowls. 
 
 "I thought to kill one for the gentlemen s soup; 
 but they were so beautiful my heart failed me. Still, 
 if the gentlemen wish it only I thought two pigeons 
 would be more delicate." 
 
 Of course we declined to be accessory to such a 
 murder, and she went off delighted, returning in a 
 
154 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 few minutes with our dinner. First we had soup, 
 then a roasted kid, then boiled pigeons, (of which the 
 soup had been made,) and last the pesci di mare, which 
 were not quite so great a novelty to us as to our good 
 hostess. However, hospitality, like so many other 
 things, is reciprocal, and the guest must bring his half, 
 or it is naught. The prosperity of a dinner lies in the 
 heart of him that eats it, and an appetite twelve miles 
 long enabled us to do as great justice to the fish as if 
 we were crowding all Lent into our meal. The land 
 lady came and sat by us; a large and serious cat, 
 winding her great tail around her, settled herself com 
 fortably on the table, licking her paws now and then, 
 with a poor relation s look at the fish; a small dog 
 sprang into an empty chair, and a large one, with 
 very confidential manners, would go from one to the 
 other of us, laying his paw upon our arms as if he had 
 an important secret to communicate, and alternately 
 pricking and drooping his ears in hope or despond 
 ency. The albergatrice forthwith began to tell us her 
 story, how she was a widow, how she had borne 
 thirteen children, twelve still living, and how she re 
 ceived a pension of sixty scudi a year, under the old 
 Roman law, for her meritoriousness in this respect. 
 The portrait of the son she had lost hung over the 
 chimney-place, and, pointing to it, she burst forth into 
 the following droll threnody. The remarks in paren 
 thesis were screamed through the kitchen -door, which 
 stood ajar, or addressed personally to us. 
 
 "O my son, my son ! the doctors killed him, just as 
 truly as if they had poisoned him ! O how beautiful 
 
ITALY. 155 
 
 he was! beautiful! beautiful !! BEAUTIFUL!!! (Are 
 not those fish done yet?) Look, that is his likeness, 
 but he was handsomer. He was as big as that" (ex 
 tending her arms), "big breast, big shoulders, big 
 x sides, big legs ! (Eat em, eat em, they won t hurt 
 you, fresh sea-fish, fresh! fresh!! FRESH!!!) I told 
 them the doctors had murdered him, when they car 
 ried him with torches ! He had been hunting, and 
 brought home some rabbits, I remember, for he was 
 not one that ever came empty-handed, and got the 
 fever, and you treated him for consumption, and killed 
 him ! (Shall I come out there, or will you bring some 
 more fish?)" So she went on, talking to herself, to 
 us, to the little serva in the kitchen, and to the medi 
 cal profession in general, repeating every epithet three 
 times, with increasing emphasis, till her voice rose to 
 a scream, and contriving to mix up her living children 
 with her dead one, the fish, the doctors, the serva, and 
 the rabbits, till it was hard to say whether it was the 
 fish that had large legs, whether the doctors had killed 
 them, or the serva had killed the doctors, and whether 
 the bello ! bello ! ! bello ! ! ! referred to her son or a 
 particularly fine rabbit. 
 
 2$th. Having engaged our guide and horses the 
 night before, we set out betimes this morning for Ole- 
 vano. From Palestrina to Cavi the road winds along 
 a narrow valley, following the course of a stream which 
 rustles rather than roars below. Large chestnut-trees 
 lean every way on the steep sides of the hills above us, 
 and at every opening we could see great stretches of 
 Campagna rolling away and away toward the bases of 
 
156 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 purple mountains streaked with snow. The sides of 
 the road were drifted with heaps of wild hawthorn 
 and honeysuckle in full bloom, and bubbling with in 
 numerable nightingales that sang unseen. Overhead 
 , the sunny sky tinkled with larks, as if the frost in the 
 1 air were breaking up and whirling away on the swollen 
 currents of spring. 
 
 Before long we overtook a little old man hobbling 
 toward Cavi, with a bag upon his back. This was the 
 mail ! Happy country, which Hurry and Worry have 
 not yet subjugated ! Then we clattered up and down 
 the narrow paved streets of Cavi, through the market 
 place, full of men dressed all alike in blue jackets, blue 
 breeches, and white stockings, who do not stare at 
 the strangers, and so out at the farther gate. Now 
 oftener and oftener we meet groups of peasants in 
 gayest dresses, ragged pilgrims with staff and scallop, 
 singing (horribly) ; then processions with bag-pipes 
 and pipes in front, droning and squealing (horribly) ; 
 then strings of two-wheeled carts, eight or nine in 
 each, and in the first the priest, book in hand, setting 
 the stave, and all singing (horribly). This must be 
 inquired into. Gigantic guide, who, splendid with 
 blue sash and silver knee-buckles, has contrived, by 
 incessant drumming with his heels, to get his mule in 
 front, is hailed. 
 
 "Ho, Petruccio, what is the meaning of all this 
 press of people?" 
 
 "Festa, Lordship, at Genezzano." 
 
 "What/es/a?" 
 
 "Of the Madonna, Lordship," and touches his hat, 
 
ITALY. 157 
 
 for they are all dreadfully afraid of her for some reason 
 or other. 
 
 We are in luck, this being the great jesta of the year 
 among the mountains, a thing which people go out 
 of Rome to see. 
 
 "Where is Genezzano?" 
 
 Just over yonder, Lordship," and pointed to the 
 left, where was what seemed like a monstrous crystal 
 lization of rock on the crown of a hill, with three or 
 four taller crags of castle towering in the midst, and 
 all gray, except the tiled roofs, whose wrinkled sides 
 were gold -washed with a bright yellow lichen, as if 
 ripples, turned by some spell to stone, had contrived 
 to detain the sunshine \vith which they were touched 
 at the moment of transformation. 
 
 The road, wherever it came into sight, burned with 
 brilliant costumes, like an illuminated page of Frois- 
 sart. Gigantic guide meanwhile shows an uncom 
 fortable and fidgety reluctance to turn aside and enter 
 fairyland, which is wholly unaccountable. Is the huge 
 earthen creature an Afrite, under sacred pledge to Sol 
 omon, and in danger of being sealed up again, if he 
 venture near the festival of our Blessed Lady? If so, 
 that also were a ceremony worth seeing, and we insist. 
 He wriggles and swings his great feet with an evident 
 impulse to begin kicking the sides of his mule again 
 and fly. The way over the hills from Genezzano to 
 Olevano he pronounces scomodissima, demanding of 
 every peasant who goes by if it be not entirely impass 
 able. This leading question, put in all the tones of 
 plausible entreaty he can command, meets the inva- 
 
158 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 riable reply, "E scomoda, davvero ; ma per le bestie 
 eh!" (it is bad, of a truth, but for the beasts eh !) 
 and then one of those indescribable shrugs, unintelli 
 gible at first as the compass to a savage, but in which 
 the expert can make twenty hair s-breadth distinc 
 tions between N. E. and N. N. E. 
 
 Finding that destiny had written it on his forehead, 
 Ihe guide at last turned and went cantering and kick 
 ing toward Genezzano, we following. Just before 
 you reach the town, the road turns sharply to the right, 
 and, crossing a little gorge, loses itself in the dark gate 
 way. Outside the gate is an open space, which formi 
 cated with peasantry in every variety of costume that 
 was not Parisian. Laughing women were climbing 
 upon their horses (which they bestride like men) ; 
 pilgrims were chanting, and beggars (the howl of an 
 Italian beggar in the country is something terrible) 
 howling in discordant rivalry. It was a scene lively 
 enough to make Heraclitus shed a double allowance of 
 tears; but our giant was still discomforted. As soon 
 as we had entered the gate, he dodged into a little back 
 street, just as we were getting out of which the mys 
 tery of his unwillingness was cleared up. He had 
 been endeavoring to avoid a creditor. But it so 
 chanced (as Fate can hang a man with even a rope of 
 sand) that the enemy was in position just at the end 
 of this very lane, where it debouched into the Piazza 
 of the town. 
 
 The disputes of Italians are very droll things, and I 
 will accordingly bag the one which is now imminent, 
 as a specimen. They quarrel as unaccountably as 
 
ITALY. 159 
 
 dogs, who put their noses together, dislike each other s 
 kind of smell, and instantly tumble one over the other, 
 with noise enough to draw the eyes of a whole street. 
 So these people burst out, without apparent prelimina 
 ries, into a noise and fury and war-dance which would 
 imply the very utmost pitch and agony of exasperation. 
 And the subsidence is as sudden. They explode each 
 other on mere contact, as if by a law of nature, like 
 two hostile gases. They do not grow warm, but leap 
 at once from zero to some degree of white -heat, to in 
 dicate which no Anglo-Saxon thermometer of wrath 
 is highly enough graduated. If I were asked to name 
 one universal characteristic of an Italian town, I 
 should say, two men clamoring and shaking them 
 selves to pieces at each other, and a woman leaning 
 lazily out of a window, and perhaps looking at some 
 thing else. Till one gets used to this kind of thing, one 
 expects some horrible catastrophe; but during eight 
 months in Italy I have only seen blows exchanged 
 thrice. In the present case the explosion was of harm 
 less gunpowder. 
 
 " Why- haven t -you-paid-those-fifty-five-bajocchi at 
 the-pizzicarolo s?" began the adversary, speaking 
 with such inconceivable rapidity that he made only 
 one word, nay, as it seemed, one monosyllable, of the 
 whole sentence. Our giant, with a controversial gen 
 ius which I should not have suspected in him, imme 
 diately, and with great adroitness, changed the ground 
 of dispute, and, instead of remaining an insolvent 
 debtor, raised liimself at once to the ethical position of 
 a moralist resisting an unjust demand from principle, 
 
l6o FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 "It was only /07-ty-five," roared he. 
 
 "But I say #/ty-five," screamed the other, and 
 shook his close-cropped head as a boy does an apple 
 on the end of a switch, as if he meant presently to jerk 
 it off at his antagonist. 
 
 "Birbone!" yelled the guide, gesticulating so furi 
 ously with every square inch of his ponderous body 
 that I thought he would throw his mule over, the poor 
 beast standing all the while with drooping head and 
 ears while the thunders of this man-quake burst over 
 him. So feels the tortoise that sustains the globe 
 when earth suffers fiery convulsions. 
 
 "Birbante!" retorted the creditor, and the oppro 
 brious epithet clattered from between his shaking jaws 
 as a refractory copper is rattled out of a Jehoiada-box 
 by a child. 
 
 "Andate m jar friggere!" howled giant. 
 
 " Andate ditto, ditto!" echoed creditor, and be 
 hold, the thing is over ! The giant promises to attend 
 to the affair when he comes back, the creditor returns 
 to his booth, and we ride on. 
 
 Speaking of Italian quarrels, I am tempted to paren 
 thesize here another which I saw at Civita Vecchia. 
 We had been five days on our way from Leghorn in a 
 French steamer, a voyage performed usually, I think, 
 in about thirteen hours. It was heavy weather, blow 
 ing what a sailor would call half a gale of wind, and 
 the caution of our captain, not to call it fear, led him 
 to put in for shelter first at Porto Ferrajo in Elba, and 
 then at Santo Stefano on the Italian coast. Our little 
 black water-beetle of a mail-packet was knocked 
 
ITALY. l6l 
 
 about pretty well, and all the Italia? passengers dis 
 appeared in the forward cabin before we were out of 
 port. When we were fairly at anchor within the har 
 bor of Civita Vecchia, they crawled out again, sluggish 
 as winter flies, their vealy faces mezzotinted with soot. 
 One of them presently appeared in the custom 
 house, his only luggage being a cage closely covered 
 with a dirty red handkerchief, which represented his 
 linen. 
 
 "What have you in the cage ? " asked the doganiere. 
 
 "Eh ! nothing other than a parrot." 
 
 "There is a duty of one scudo and one bajoccho, 
 then." 
 
 "Santo diavolo ! but what hoggishness ! " 
 
 Thereupon instant and simultaneous blow-up, 01 
 rather a series of explosions, like those in honor of a 
 Neapolitan saint s-day, lasting about ten minutes, and 
 followed by as sudden quiet. In the course of it, the 
 owner of the bird, playing irreverently on the first half 
 of its name (pappagp&o), hinted that it would be a 
 high duty for his Holiness himself (Papa). After a 
 pause for breath, he said quietly, as if nothing had 
 happened, "Very good, then, since I must pay, I will," 
 and began fumbling for the money. 
 
 "Meanwhile, do me the politeness to show me the 
 bird," said the officer. 
 
 "With all pleasure," and, lifting a corner of the 
 handkerchief, there lay the object of dispute on his 
 back, stone-dead, with his claws curled up helplessly 
 on each side of his breast. I believe the owner would 
 have been pleased had it even been his grandmother 
 
1 62 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 who had thus evaded duty, so exquisite is the pleasure 
 of an Italian in escaping payment of anything. 
 
 "I make a present of the poor bird," said he 
 blandly. 
 
 The publican, however, seemed to feel that he had 
 been somehow cheated, and I left them in high debate, 
 as to whether the bird were dead when it entered the 
 custom-house, and, if it had been, whether a dead 
 parrot were dutiable. Do not blame me for being en 
 tertained and trying to entertain you with these trifles. 
 I remember Virgil s stern 
 
 " Che per poco e che teco non mi risso," 
 
 but Dante s journey was of more import to himself 
 and others than mine. 
 
 I am struck by the freshness and force of the pas 
 sions in Europeans, and cannot help feeling as if there 
 were something healthy in it. When I think of the 
 versatile and accommodating habits of America, it 
 seems like a land without thunder-storms. In pro 
 portion as man grows commercial, does he also be 
 come dispassionate and incapable of electric emotions? 
 The driving-wheels of all-powerful nature are in the 
 back of the head, and, as man is the highest type of 
 organization, so a nation is better or worse as it ad 
 vances toward the highest type of man, or recedes from 
 it. But it is ill with a nation when the cerebrum sucks 
 the cerebellum dry, for it cannot live by intellect alone. 
 The broad foreheads always carry the day at last, but 
 only when they are based on or buttressed with massive 
 hind-heads. It would be easier to make a people 
 
ITALY. 163 
 
 / great in whom the animal is vigorous, than to keep one 
 
 I so after it has begun to spindle into over-intellectuality. 
 
 ^ The hands that have grasped dominion and held it 
 have been large and hard; those from which it has 
 slipped, delicate, and apt for the lyre and the pencil. 
 Moreover, brain is always to be bought, but passion 
 never comes to market. On the whole, I am rather 
 inclined to like this European impatience and fire, 
 even while I laugh at it, and sometimes find myself 
 
 . surmising whether a people who, like the Americans, 
 put up quietly with all sorts of petty personal imposi 
 tions and injustices, will not at length find it too great 
 a bore to quarrel with great public wrongs. 
 
 Meanwhile, I must remember that I am in Genez- 
 zano, and not in the lecturer s desk. We walked 
 about for an hour or two, admiring the beauty and 
 grand bearing of the women, and the picturesque vi 
 vacity and ever-renewing unassuetude of the whole 
 scene. Take six of the most party-colored dreams, 
 break them to pieces, put them into a fantasy-kaleido 
 scope, and when you look through it you will see some 
 thing that for strangeness, vividness, and mutability 
 looked like the little Piazza of Genezzano seen from 
 the church porch. As we wound through the narrow 
 streets again to the stables where we had left our 
 horses, a branch of laurel or ilex would mark a wine 
 shop, and, looking till our eye cooled and toned itself 
 down to dusky sympathy with the crypt, we could see 
 the smoky interior sprinkled with white head-cloths 
 and scarlet bodices, with here and there a yellow spot 
 of lettuce or the red inward gleam of a wine-flask. 
 
1 64 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 The head-dress is precisely of that most ancient pat 
 tern seen on Egyptian statues, and so colossal are 
 many of the wearers, that you might almost think you 
 saw a party of young sphinxes carousing in the sunless 
 core of a pyramid. 
 
 We remourited our beasts, and, for about a mile, 
 cantered gayly along a fine road, and then turned into 
 a by-path along the flank of a mountain. Here the 
 guide s strada scomodissima began, and we were forced 
 to dismount, and drag our horses downward for a mile 
 or two. We crossed a small plain in the valley, and 
 then began to climb the opposite ascent. The path 
 was perhaps four feet broad, and was paved with 
 irregularly shaped blocks of stone, which, having been 
 raised and lowered, tipped, twisted, undermined, and 
 generally capsized by the rains and frosts of centuries, 
 presented the most diabolically ingenious traps and 
 pit-falls. All the while the scenery was beautiful. 
 Mountains of every shape and hue changed their slow 
 outlines ever as we moved, now opening, now closing 
 around us, sometimes peering down solemnly at us 
 over each other s shoulders, and then sinking slowly 
 out of sight, or, at some sharp turn of the path, seem 
 ing to stride into the valley and confront us with their 
 craggy challenge, a challenge which the little val 
 leys accepted, if we did not, matching their rarest tints 
 of gray and brown, and pink and purple, or that royal 
 dye to make which all these were profusely melted 
 together, for a moment s ornament, with as many 
 shades of various green and yellow. Gray towns 
 crowded and clung on the tops of peaks that seemed 
 
ITALY. 165 
 
 inaccessible. We owe a great deal of picturesqueness 
 to the quarrels and thieveries of the barons of the 
 Middle Ages. The traveller and artist should put up 
 a prayer for their battered old souls. It was to be out 
 of their way and that of the Saracens that people were 
 driven to make their homes in spots so sublime and 
 inconvenient that the eye alone finds it pleasant to 
 climb up to them. Nothing else but an American 
 land-company ever managed to induce settlers upon 
 territory of such uninhabitable quality. I have seen 
 an insect that makes a mask for himself out of the 
 lichens of the rock over which he crawls, contriving 
 so to deceive the birds; and the towns in this wild 
 region would seem to have been built on the same prin 
 ciple. Made of the same stone with the cliffs on which 
 they perch, it asks good eyesight to make them out at 
 the distance of a few miles, and every wandering 
 mountain-mist annihilates them for the moment. 
 
 At intervals, I could hear the giant, after digging at 
 the sides of his mule with his spurless heels, growling 
 to himself, and imprecating an apoplexy (accidente] 
 upon the path and him who made it. This is the uni 
 versal malediction here, and once it was put into 
 rhyme for my benefit. I was coming down the rusty 
 steps of San Gregorio one day, and having paid no 
 heed to a stout woman of thirty odd who* begged some 
 what obtrusively, she screamed after me, 
 
 " Ah, vi pigli un accidente, 
 Voi che non date niente ! " 
 
 Ah, may a sudden apoplexy, 
 
 You who give not, come and vex ye ! 
 
1 66 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 Our guide could not long appease his mind with this 
 milder type of objurgation, but soon intensified it into 
 accidentaccio, which means a selected apoplexy of un 
 common size and ugliness. As the path grew worse 
 and worse, so did the repetition of this phrase (for he 
 was slow of invention) become more frequent, till at 
 last he did nothing but kick and curse, mentally, 
 I have no doubt, including us in his malediction. I 
 think it would have gratified Langiaus orEusfili (both 
 of whom commended swearing) to have heard him. 
 Before long we turned the flank of the hill by a little 
 shrine of the Madonna, and there was Olevano just 
 above us. Like the other towns in this district, it was 
 the diadem of an abrupt peak of rock. From the 
 midst of it jutted the ruins of an old stronghold of the 
 Colonna. Probably not a house has been built in it 
 for centuries. To enter the town, we literally rode 
 up a long flight of stone steps, and soon found our 
 selves in the Piazza. We stopped to buy some cigars, 
 and the zigararo, as he rolled them up, asked if we did 
 not want dinner. We told him we should get it at 
 the inn. Benissimo, he would be there before us. 
 What he meant, we could not divine; but it turned 
 out that he was the landlord, and that the inn only 
 became such when strangers arrived, relapsing again 
 immediately fnto a private dwelling. We found our 
 host ready to receive us, and went up to a large room 
 on the first floor. After due instructions, we seated 
 ourselves at the open windows, Storg to sketch, and 
 I to take a mental calotype of the view. Among the 
 many lovely ones of the day, this was the loveliest, 
 
ITALY. 167 
 
 or was it only that the charm of repose was added? 
 On our right was the silent castle, and beyond it the 
 silent mountains. To the left we looked down over 
 the clustering houses upon a campagna-valley of 
 peaceful cultivation, vineyards, olive-orchards, grain- 
 fields, in their earliest green, and dark stripes of new- 
 ploughed earth, over which the cloud-shadows melted 
 tracklessly toward the hills which round softly up 
 ward to Monte Cavi. 
 
 When our dinner came, and with it a flask of drowsy 
 red Aleatico, like ink with a suspicion of life-blood in 
 it, such as one might fancy Shakespeare to have dipped 
 his quill in, we had our table so placed that the satis 
 faction of our hunger might be dissensualized by the 
 view from the windows. Many a glutton has eaten 
 up farms and woodlands and .pastures, and so did we, 
 aesthetically, saucing our jrittata and flavoring our 
 Aleatico with landscape. It is a fine thing when we 
 can accustom our animal appetites to good society, 
 when body and soul (like master and servant in an 
 Arab tent) sit down together at the same board. This 
 thought is forced upon one very often in Italy, as one 
 picnics in enchanted spots, where Imagination and 
 Fancy play the parts of the unseen waiters in the fairy 
 story, and serve us with course after course of their 
 ethereal dishes. Sense is satisfied with less and sim 
 pler food when sense and spirit are fed together, and 
 the feast of the loaves and fishes is spread for us anew. 
 , If it be important for a state to educate its lower classes, 
 i so is it for us personally to instruct, elevate, and refine 
 cur senses, the lower classes of our private body-politic, 
 
1 68 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 and which, if left to their own brute instincts, will dis- 
 \ order or destroy the whole commonwealth with flam- 
 I ing insurrection. 
 
 After dinner came our guide to be paid. He, too, 
 had had his jrittata and his fiasco (or two), and came 
 back absurdly comic, reminding one of the giant who 
 was so taken in by the little tailor. He was not in the 
 least tipsy; but the wine had excited his poor wits, 
 whose destiny it was (awkward servants as they were !) 
 to trip up and tumble over each other in proportion 
 as they became zealous. He was very anxious to do 
 us in some way or other; he only vaguely guessed how, 
 but felt so gigantically good-natured that he could not 
 keep his face sober long enough. It is quite clear why 
 the Italians have no word but recitare to express acting, 
 I for their stage is no more theatric than their street, and 
 \ to exaggerate in the least would be ridiculous. We 
 Waver tempered and mannered Septentrions must give 
 |the pegs a screw or two to bring our spirits up to nat 
 ure s concert-pitch. Storg and I sat enjoying the ex 
 hibition of our giant, as if we had no more concern in 
 it than as a comedy. It was nothing but a spectacle 
 to us, at which we were present as critics, while he 
 inveighed, expostulated, argued, and besought, in a 
 breath. Finding all his attempts miscarry, or result 
 ing in nothing more solid than applause, he said, 
 "Forse non capiscono?" (Perhaps you don t under 
 stand?) "Capiscono pur troppo" (They understand 
 only too well,) replied the landlord, upon which terra 
 filius burst into a laugh, and began begging for more 
 buonamano. Failing in this, he tightened his sash, 
 
ITALY. 169 
 
 offered to kiss our lordships hands, an act of homage 
 which we declined, and departed, carefully avoiding 
 Genezzano on his return, I make no doubt % 
 
 We paid our bill, and went down to the door, where 
 we found our guides and donkeys, the host s hand 
 some wife and handsomer daughter, with two of her 
 daughters, and a crowd of women and children wait 
 ing to witness the exit of the foreigners. We made all 
 the mothers and children happy by a discriminating 
 largesse of copper among the little ones. They are a 
 charming people, the natives of these out-of-the-way 
 Italian towns, if kindness, courtesy, and good looks 
 make people charming. Our beards and felt hats, 
 which make us pass for artists, were our passports to 
 the warmest welcome and the best cheer everywhere. 
 Reluctantly we mounted our donkeys, and trotted 
 away, our guides (a man and a boy) running by the 
 flank (true henchmen, haunchmen, flanquiers or flun 
 keys) and inspiring the little animals with pokes in the 
 side, or with the even more effectual ahrrrrrrr ! Is 
 there any radical affinity between this rolling fire of 
 r s and the word arra, which means hansel or earnest 
 money? The sound is the same, and has a marvel 
 lous spur-power over the donkey, who seems to under 
 stand that full payment of goad or cudgel is to follow. 
 I have known it to move even a Sicilian mule, the 
 least sensitive and most obstinate of creatures with 
 ears, except a British church-warden. 
 
 We wound along under a bleak hill, more desolate 
 than anything I had ever seen. The old gray rocks 
 seemed not to thrust themselves out of the rusty soil, 
 
I/O FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 but rather to be stabbed into it, as if they had been 
 hailed down upon it by some volcano. There was 
 nearly as much look of design as there is in a druidical 
 circle, and the whole looked like some graveyard in an 
 extinguished world, the monument of mortality itself, 
 such as Bishop Wilkins might have found in the moon, 
 if he had ever got thither. The path grew ever wilder, 
 and Rojate, the next town we came to, grim and 
 grizzly, under a grim and grizzly sky of low-trailing 
 clouds, which had suddenly gathered, looked drearier 
 even than the desolations we had passed. It was easy 
 to understand why rocks should like to live here well 
 enough; but what could have brought men hither, 
 and then kept them here ? was beyond all reasonable 
 surmise. Barren hills stood sullenly aloof all around, 
 incapable of any crop but lichens. 
 
 We entered the gate, and found ourselves in the 
 midst of a group of wild-looking men gathered about 
 the door of a wine-shop. Some of them were armed 
 with long guns, and we saw (for the first time in situ) 
 the tall bandit hat with ribbons wound round it, such 
 as one is familiar with in operas, and on the heads of 
 those inhabitants of the Scalimata in Rome, who have 
 a costume of their own, and placidly serve as models 
 through the whole pictorial range of divine and hu 
 man nature, from the Padre Eterno to Judas. Twenty 
 years ago, when my notion of an Italian was divided 
 between a monk and a bravo, the first of whom did 
 nothing but enter at secret doors and drink your health 
 in poison, while the other lived behind corners, support 
 ing himself by the productive industry of digging your 
 
ITALY. I/I 
 
 person all over with a stiletto, I should have looked 
 for instant assassination from these carousing 
 ruffians. But the only blood shed on the occasion 
 was that of the grape. A ride over the mountains for 
 two hours had made us thirsty, and two or three ba- 
 jocchi gave a tumbler of vino asciutto to all four of us. 
 "You are welcome," said one of the men, "we are 
 all artists after a fashion; we are all brothers." The 
 manners here are more republican, and the title of 
 lordship disappears altogether. Another came up and 
 insisted that we should drink a second flask of wine 
 as his guests. In vain we protested ; no artist should 
 pass through Rojate without accepting that token of 
 good-will, and with the liberal help of our guides we 
 contrived to gulp it down. He was for another; but 
 we protested that we were entirely full, and that it 
 was impossible. I dare say the poor fellow would 
 have spent a week s earnings on us, if we would have 
 allowed it. We proposed to return the civility, and 
 to leave a paul for them to drink a good journey to us 
 after we were gone; but they would not listen to it. 
 Our entertainer followed us along to the Piazza, beg 
 ging one of us to let him serve as donkey-driver to 
 Subiaco. When this was denied, he said that there 
 was a jesta here also, and that we must stop long 
 enough to see the procession of zitelle (young girls), 
 which would soon begin. But evening was already 
 gathering, the clouds grew momently darker, and 
 fierce, damp gusts, striking us with the suddenness 
 of a blow, promised a wild night. We had still eight 
 miles of mountain-path before us, and we struggled 
 
1/2 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 away. As we crossed the next summit beyond the 
 town, a sound of chanting drifted by us on the wind, 
 wavered hither and thither, now heard, now lost, then 
 a doubtful something between song and gust, and, 
 lingering a few moments, we saw the white head-dresses, 
 gliding two by two, across a gap between the houses. 
 The scene and the music were both in neutral tints, a 
 sketch, as it were, in sepia a little blurred. 
 
 Before long the clouds almost brushed us as they 
 eddied silently by, and then it began to rain, first mist 
 ily, and then in thick, hard drops. Fortunately there 
 was a moon, shining placidly in the desert heaven 
 above all this turmoil, or we could not have found our 
 path, which in a few moments became a roaring tor 
 rent almost knee-deep. It was a cold rain, and far 
 above us, where the mountain-peaks tore gaps in the 
 clouds, we could see the white silence of new-fallen 
 snow. Sometimes we had to dismount and wade, 
 a circumstance which did not make our saddles more 
 comfortable when we returned to them and could 
 hear them go crosh, crosh, as the water gurgled out of 
 them at every jolt. There was no hope of shelter 
 nearer than Subiaco, no sign of man, and no sound 
 but the multitudinous roar of waters on every side. 
 Rivulet whispered to rivulet, and water-fall shouted 
 to water -fall, as they leaped from rock to rock, all 
 hurrying to reinforce the main torrent below, which 
 hummed onward toward the Anio with dilated heart. 
 So gathered the hoarse Northern swarms to descend 
 upon sunken Italy; and so forever does physical and 
 intellectual force seek its fatal equilibrium, rushing 
 
ITALY. 173 
 
 in and occupying wherever it is drawn by the attrac 
 tion of a lower level. 
 
 We forded large streams that had been dry beds an 
 hour before; and so sudden was the creation of the 
 floods, that it gave one almost as fresh a feeling of 
 water as if one had been present in Eden when the 
 first rock gave birth to the first fountain. I had a 
 severe cold, I was wet through from the hips down 
 ward, and yet I never enjoyed anything more in my 
 life, so different is the shower-bath to which we 
 doom ourselves from that whose string is pulled by 
 the prison-warden compulsion. After our little bear 
 ers had tottered us up and down the dusky steeps of a 
 few more mountain-spurs, where a misstep would 
 have sent us spinning down the fathomless black no 
 where below, we came out upon the high-road, and 
 found it a fine one, as all the great Italian roads are. 
 The rain broke off suddenly, and on the left, seeming 
 about half a mile away, sparkled the lights of Subiaco, 
 flashing intermittently like a knot of fire-flies in a 
 meadow. The town, owing to the necessary wind 
 ings of the road, was still three miles off, and just as 
 the guides had progued and ahrred the donkeys into 
 a brisk joggle, I resolved to give up my saddle to the 
 boy, and try Tom Coryate s compasses. It was 
 partly out of humanity to myself and partly to him, 
 for he was tired and I was cold. The elder guide 
 and I took the lead, and, as I looked back, I laughed 
 to see the lolling ears of Storg s donkey thrust from 
 under his long cloak, as if he were coming out from a 
 black Arab tent. We soon left them behind, and 
 
174 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 paused at a bridge over the Anio till we heard the 
 patter of little hoofs again. The bridge is a single 
 arch, bent between the steep edges of a gorge through 
 which the Anio huddled far below, showing a green 
 gleam here and there in the struggling moonlight, as 
 if a fish rolled up his burnished flank. After another 
 mile and a half, we reached the gate, and awaited our 
 companions. It was dreary enough, waiting al 
 ways is, and as the snow-chilled wind whistled 
 through the damp archway where we stood, my legs 
 illustrated feelingly to me how they cool water in the 
 East, by wrapping the jars with wet woollen, and set 
 ting them in a draught. At last they came; I re 
 mounted, and we went sliding through the steep, wet 
 streets till we had fairly passed through the whole 
 town. Before a long building of two stories, without 
 a symptom of past or future light, we stopped. " Ecco 
 la Paletta!" said the guide, and began to pound furi 
 ously on the door with a large stone, which he some 
 time before provided for the purpose. After a long 
 period of sullen irresponsiveness, we heard descending 
 footsteps, light streamed through the chinks of the 
 door, and the invariable "Chi e?" which precedes 
 the unbarring of all .portals here, came from within. 
 "Due jorestieri" answered the guide, and the bars 
 rattled in hasty welcome. "Make us," we exclaimed, 
 as we stiffly climbed down from our perches, "your 
 biggest fire in your biggest chimney, and then we will 
 talk of supper!" In five minutes two great laurel- 
 fagots were spitting and crackling in an enormous 
 fire-place; and Storg and I were in the costume which 
 
ITALY. 1/5 
 
 Don Quixote wore on the Brown Mountain. Of 
 course there was nothing for supper but a jrittata; 
 but there are worse things in the world than a jrittata 
 col prosciutto, and we discussed it like a society just 
 emerging from barbarism, the upper half of our per 
 sons presenting all the essentials of an advanced civ 
 ilization, while our legs skulked under the table as 
 free from sartorial impertinences as those of the noblest 
 savage that ever ran wild in the woods. And so eccoci 
 finalmente arrivati I 
 
 27th. Nothing can be more lovely than the scen 
 ery about Subiaco. The town itself is built on a kind 
 of cone rising from the midst of a valley abounding 
 in olives and vines, with a superb mountain horizon 
 around it, and the green Anio cascading at its feet. As 
 you walk to the high-perched convent of San Bene 
 detto, you look across the river on your right just after 
 leaving the town, to a cliff over which the ivy pours in 
 torrents, and in which dwellings have been hollowed 
 out. In the black doorway of every one sits a woman 
 in scarlet bodice and white head-gear, with a distaff 
 spinning, while overhead countless nightingales sing 
 at once from the fringe of shrubbery. The glorious 
 great white clouds look over the mountain -tops into 
 our enchanted valley, and sometimes a lock of their 
 vapory wool would be torn off, to lie for a while in 
 some inaccessible ravine like a snow-drift; but it 
 seemed as if no shadow could fly over our privacy of 
 sunshine to-day. The approach to the monastery is 
 delicious. You pass out of the hot sun into the green 
 shadows of ancient ilexes, leaning and twisting every 
 
1/6 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 way that is graceful, their branches velvety with bril 
 liant moss, in which grow feathery ferns, fringing 
 them with a halo of verdure. Then comes the con 
 vent, with its pleasant old monks, who show their 
 sacred vessels (one by Cellini) and their relics, among 
 which is a finger-bone of one of the Innocents. Lower 
 down is a convent of Santa Scolastica, where the first 
 book was printed in Italy. 
 
 But though one may have daylight till after twenty- 
 four o clock in Italy, the days are no longer than ours, 
 and I must go back to La Paletta to see about a vettura 
 to Tivoli. I leave Storg sketching, and walk slowly 
 down, lingering over the ever-changeful views, lin 
 gering opposite the nightingale-cliff, but get back to 
 Subiaco and the vetturino at last. The growl of a 
 thunder-storm soon brought Storg home, and we leave 
 Subiaco triumphantly, at five o clock, in a light car 
 riage, drawn by three gray stallions (harnessed 
 abreast) on the full gallop. I cannot describe our 
 drive, the mountain-towns, with their files of girls 
 winding up from the fountain with balanced water- 
 jars of ruddy copper, or chattering around it bright- 
 hued as parrots, the ruined castles, the green gleams 
 of the capricious river, the one great mountain that 
 soaked up all the rose of sunset, and, after all else grew 
 dim, still glowed as if with inward fires, and, later, the 
 white spray smoke of Tivoli that drove down the 
 valley under a clear cold moon, contrasting strangely 
 with the red glare of the lime-furnace on the opposite 
 hillside. It is well that we can be happy sometimes 
 without peeping and botanizing in the materials that 
 
ITALY. 177 
 
 make us so. It is not often that we can escape the 
 evil genius of analysis that haunts our modern day 
 light of self -consciousness (wir haben ja aujgekldrt!} 
 and enjoy a day of right Chaucer. 
 
 P.S. Now that I am printing this, a dear friend 
 sends me an old letter, and says, "Slip in somewhere, 
 by way of contrast, what you wrote me of your visit 
 to Passawampscot." It is odd, almost painful, to be 
 confronted with your past self and your past self s 
 doings, when you have forgotten both. But here is 
 my bit of American scenery, such as it is. 
 
 While we were waiting for the boat, we had time to 
 investigate P. a little. We wandered about with no 
 one to molest us or make us afraid. No cicerone was 
 lying in wait for us, no verger expected with funeral 
 solemnity the more than compulsory shilling. I re 
 member the whole population of Cortona gathering 
 round me, and beseeching me not to leave their city 
 till I had seen the lampadone, whose keeper had un 
 happily gone out to walk, taking the key with him. 
 Thank Fortune, here were no antiquities, no galleries 
 of Pre-Raphaelite art, every lank figure looking as if 
 it had been stretched on a rack, before which the 
 Anglo-Saxon writhes because he ought to like them 
 and cannot for the soul of him. It is a pretty little 
 village, cuddled down among the hills, the clay soil 
 of which gives them, to a pilgrim from the parched 
 gravelly inland, a look of almost fanatical green. 
 The fields are broad, and wholly given up to the graz 
 ing of cattle and sheep, which dotted them thickly 
 
178 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 in the breezy sunshine. The open doors of a barn, 
 through which the wind flowed rustling the loose locks 
 of the mow, attracted us. Swallows swam in and out 
 with level wings, or crossed each other, twittering in 
 the dusky mouth of their hay-scented cavern. Two 
 or three hens and a cock (none of your gawky Shang 
 hais, long-legged as a French peasant on his stilts, 
 but the true red cock of the ballads, full-chested, coral- 
 combed, fountain -tailed) were inquiring for hay-seed 
 in the background. What frame in what gallery ever 
 enclosed such a picture as is squared within the 
 groundsel, side-posts, and lintel of a barn-door, 
 whether for eye or fancy ? The shining floor suggests 
 the flail-beat of autumn, that pleasantest of monoto 
 nous sounds, and the later husking-bee, where the lads 
 and lasses sit round laughingly busy under the swing 
 ing lantern. 
 
 Here we found a fine, stalwart fellow shearing sheep. 
 This was something new to us, and we watched him 
 for some time with many questions, which he an 
 swered with off-hand good-nature. Going away, I 
 thanked him for having taught me something. He 
 laughed, and said, "Ef you 11 take off them gloves o 
 yourn, I 11 give ye a try at the practical part on t." 
 He was in the right of it. I never saw anything hand 
 somer than those brown hands of his, on which the 
 sinews stood out, as he handled his shears, tight as a 
 drawn bow-string. How much more admirable is 
 this tawny vigor, the badge of fruitful toil, than the 
 crop of early muscle that heads out under the forcing- 
 glass of the gymnasium ! Foreigners do not feel easy 
 
ITAL Y. 1 79 
 
 in America, because there are no peasants and under 
 lings here to be humble to them. The truth is, that 
 none but those who feel themselves only artificially 
 the superiors of our sturdy yeomen see in their self- 
 respect any uncomfortable assumption of equality. It 
 is the last thing the yeoman is likely to think of. They 
 do not like the "I say, ma good fellah" kind of style, 
 and commonly contrive to snub it. They do not value 
 condescension at the same rate that he does who 
 vouchsafes it to them. If it be a good thing for an 
 English duke that he has no social superiors, I think 
 it can hardly be bad for a Yankee farmer. If it be a 
 bad thing for the duke that he meets none but infe 
 riors, it cannot harm the farmer much that he never 
 has the chance. At any rate, there was no thought 
 of incivility in my friend Hobbinol s jibe at my kids, 
 only a kind of jolly superiority. But I did not like to 
 be taken for a city gent, so I told him I was born and 
 bred in the country as well as he. He laughed again, 
 and said, "Wai, anyhow, I ve the advantage of ye, 
 for you never see a sheep shore, an I ve ben to the 
 Opery and shore sheep myself into the bargain." He 
 told me that there were two hundred sheep in the 
 town, and that his father could remember when there 
 were four times as many. The sea laps and mumbles 
 the soft roots of the hills, and licks away an acre or 
 two of good pasturage every season. The father, an 
 old man of eighty, stood looking on, pleased with his 
 son s wit, and brown as if the Passawampscot fogs 
 were walnut-juice. 
 
 We dined at a little tavern, with a gilded ball hung 
 
180 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 out for sign, a waif, I fancy, from some shipwreck. 
 The landlady was a brisk, amusing little body, who 
 soon informed us that her husband was own cousin to 
 a Senator of the United States. A very elaborate 
 sampler in the parlor, in which an obelisk was wept 
 over by a somewhat costly willow in silver thread, 
 recorded the virtues of the Senator s maternal grand- 
 father and grandmother. After dinner, as we sat 
 smoking our pipes on the piazza, our good hostess 
 brought her little daughter, and made her repeat 
 verses utterly unintelligible, but conjecturally moral, 
 and certainly depressing. Once set agoing, she ran 
 down like an alarm-clock. We awaited her subsi 
 dence as that of a shower or other inevitable natural 
 phenomenon. More refreshing was the talk of a tall 
 returned Californian, who told us, among other things, 
 that "he should n t mind Panahmy s bein sunk, oilers 
 providin there warn t none of our folks onto it when 
 it went down !" 
 
 Our landlady s exhibition of her daughter puts me 
 in mind of something similar, yet oddly different, 
 which happened to Storg and me at Palestrina. We 
 happened to praise the beauty of our stout locandiera? s 
 little girl. "Ah, she is nothing to her elder sister just 
 married," said the mother. "If you could see her! 
 She is bella, bella, BELLA!" We thought no more of 
 it ; but after dinner, the good creature, with no warn 
 ing but a tap at the door and a humble con permesso, 
 brought her in all her bravery, and showed her off 
 to us as simply and naturally as if she had been a 
 picture. The girl, who was both beautiful and mod- 
 
ITALY. l8l 
 
 est, bore it with the dignified aplomb of a statue. She 
 knew we admired her, and liked it, but with the in 
 difference of a rose. There is something very charm 
 ing, I think, in this wholly unsophisticated conscious 
 ness, with no alloy of vanity or coquetry. 
 
A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 
 
 BYRON hit the white, which he often shot very wide 
 of in his Italian Guide-Book, when he called Rome 
 "my country." But it is a feeling which comes to 
 one slowly, and is absorbed into one s system during 
 a long residence. Perhaps one does not feel it till he 
 has gone away, as things always seem fairer when 
 we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible 
 tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons. 
 However it be, Fancy gets a rude shock at entering 
 Rome, which it takes her a great while to get over. 
 She has gradually made herself believe that she is ap 
 proaching a city of the dead, and has seen nothing on 
 the road from Civita Vecchia to disturb that theory. 
 Milestones, with "Via Aurelia" carved upon them, 
 have confirmed it. It is eighteen hundred years ago 
 with her, and on the dial of time the shadow has not 
 yet trembled over the line that marks the beginning of 
 the first century. She arrives at the gate, and a dirty, 
 blue man, with a cocked hat and a white sword-belt, 
 asks for her passport. Then another man, as like 
 the first as one spoon is like its fellow, and having, 
 like him, the look of being run in a mould, tells her 
 that she must go to the custom-house. It is as if a 
 ghost, who had scarcely recovered from the jar of 
 hearing Charon say, "I 11 trouble you for your 
 182 
 
A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 183 
 
 obolus, if you please," should have his portmanteau 
 seized by the Stygian tide-waiters to be searched. Is 
 there anything, then, contraband of death ? asks poor 
 Fancy of herself. 
 
 But it is the misfortune (or the safeguard) of the 
 English mind that Fancy is always an outlaw, liable 
 to be laid by the heels wherever Constable Common 
 Sense can catch her. She submits quietly as the 
 postilion cries, "Yee-ip!" and cracks his whip, and 
 the rattle over the pavement begins, struggles a mo 
 ment when the pillars of the colonnade stalk ghostly 
 by in the moonlight, and finally gives up all for lost 
 when she sees Bernini s angels polking on their pedes 
 tals along the sides of the Ponte Sant Angelo with the 
 emblems of the Passion in their arms. 
 
 You are in Rome, of course ; the sbirro said so, the 
 doganiere bowed it, and the postilion swore it; but it 
 is a Rome of modern houses, muddy streets, dingy 
 caffh, cigar-smokers, and French soldiers, the mani 
 fest junior of Florence. And yet full of anachronisms, 
 for in a little while you pass the column of Antoninus, 
 find the Dogana in an ancient temple whose furrowed 
 pillars show through the recent plaster, and feel as 
 if you saw the statue of Minerva in a Paris bonnet. 
 You are driven to a hotel where all the barbarian 
 languages are spoken in one wild conglomerate by the 
 Commissionnaire, have your dinner wholly in French, 
 and wake the next morning dreaming of the Tenth 
 Legion, to see a regiment of Chasseurs de Vincennes 
 trotting by. 
 
 For a few days one undergoes a tremendous recoil. 
 
1 84 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 Other places have a distinct meaning. London is 
 the visible throne of King Stock; Versailles is the 
 apotheosis of one of Louis XIV. s cast periwigs; 
 Florence and Pisa are cities of the Middle Ages ; but 
 Rome seems to be a parody upon itself. The ticket 
 that admits you to see the starting of the horses at 
 carnival has S. P. Q. R. at the top of it, and you give 
 the custode a paul for showing you the wolf that suckled 
 Romulus and Remus. The Senatus seems to be a 
 score or so of elderly gentlemen in scarlet, and the 
 Populusque Romanus a swarm of nasty friars. 
 
 But there is something more than mere earth in the 
 spot where great deeds have been done. The sur 
 veyor cannot give the true dimensions of Marathon 
 or Lexington, for they are not reducible to square 
 acres. Dead glory and greatness leave ghosts behind 
 them, and departed empire has a metempsychosis, if 
 nothing else has. Its spirit haunts the grave, and 
 waits and waits, till at last it finds a body to its mind, 
 slips into it, and historians moralize on the fluctuation 
 of human affairs. By and by, perhaps, enough ob 
 servations will have been recorded to assure us that 
 these recurrences are firmamental, and historionomers 
 will have measured accurately the sidereal years of 
 races. When that is once done, events will move 
 with the quiet of an orrery, and nations will consent 
 to their peridynamis and apodynamis with planetary 
 composure. 
 
 Be this as it may, you become gradually aware of 
 the presence of this imperial ghost among the Roman 
 ruins. You receive hints and startles of it through 
 
A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 185 
 
 the senses first, as the horse always shies at the appari 
 tion before the rider can see it. Then, little by little, 
 you become assured of it, and seem to hear the brush 
 of its mantle through some hall of Caracalla s baths, 
 or one of those other solitudes of Rome. And those 
 solitudes are without a parallel ; for it is not the mere 
 absence of man, but the sense of his departure, that 
 makes a profound loneliness. Musing upon them, 
 you cannot but feel the shadow of that disembodied 
 empire, and, remembering how the foundations of the 
 Capitol were laid where a head was turned up, you 
 are impelled to prophesy that the Idea of Rome will 
 incarnate itself again as soon as an Italian brain is 
 found large enough to hold it, and to give unity to 
 those discordant members. 
 
 But, though I intend to observe no regular pattern 
 in my Roman mosaic, which will resemble more what 
 one finds in his pockets after a walk, a pagan cube 
 or two from the palaces of the Caesars, a few Byzan 
 tine bits, given with many shrugs of secrecy by a lay 
 brother at San Paolo fuori le mura, and a few more 
 (quite as ancient) from the manufactory at the Vati 
 can, it seems natural to begin what one has to say 
 of Rome with something about St. Peter s; for the 
 saint sits at the gate here as well as in Paradise. 
 
 It is very common for people to say that they are 
 disappointed in the first sight of St. Peter s ; and one 
 hears much the same about Niagara. I cannot help 
 thinking that the fault is in themselves ; and that if the 
 church and the cataract were in the habit of giving 
 away their thoughts with that rash generosity which 
 
1 86 FIRESIDE TRAVELS, 
 
 characterizes tourists, they might perhaps say of their 
 visitors, "Well, if you are those men of whom we have 
 heard so much, we are a little disappointed, to tell the 
 truth!" The refined tourist expects somewhat too 
 much when he takes it for granted that St. Peter s will 
 at once decorate him with the order of imagination, 
 just as Victoria knights an alderman when he presents 
 an address. Or perhaps he has been getting up a little 
 architecture on the road from Florence, and is dis 
 comfited because he does not know whether he ought 
 to be pleased or not, which is very much as if he should 
 wait to be told whether it was fresh water or salt which 
 makes the exhaustless grace of Niagara s emerald 
 curve, before he benignly consented to approve. It 
 would be wiser, perhaps, for him to consider whether, 
 if Michael Angelo had had the building of him, his 
 own personal style would not have been more im 
 pressive. 
 
 It is not to be doubted that minds are of as many 
 different orders as cathedrals, and that the Gothic 
 imagination is vexed and discommoded in the vain 
 endeavor to flatten its pinnacles, and fit itself into the 
 round Roman arches. But if it be impossible for a 
 man to like everything, it is quite possible for him to 
 avoid being driven mad by what does not please him; 
 nay, it is the imperative duty of a wise man to find 
 out what that secret is which makes a thing pleasing 
 to another. In approaching St. Peter s, one must 
 take his Protestant shoes off his feet, and leave them 
 behind him, in the Piazza Rusticucci. Otherwise the 
 great Basilica, with those outstretching colonnades 
 
A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. l8/ 
 
 of Bramante, will seem to be a bloated spider lying 
 in wait for him, the poor Reformed fly. As he lifts 
 the heavy leathern flapper over the door, and is dis 
 charged into the interior by its impetuous recoil, let 
 him disburden his mind altogether of stone and mor 
 tar, and think only that he is standing before the 
 throne of a dynasty which, even in its decay, is the 
 most powerful the world ever saw. Mason-work is 
 all very well in itself, but it has nothing to do with the 
 affair at present in hand. 
 
 Suppose that a man in pouring down a glass of 
 claret could drink the South of France, that he could 
 so disintegrate the wine by the force of imagination 
 as to taste in it all the clustered beauty and bloom of 
 the grape, all the dance and song and sunburnt jollity 
 of the vintage. Or suppose that in eating bread he 
 could transubstantiate it with the tender blade of 
 spring, the gleam-flitted corn-ocean of summer, the 
 royal autumn, with its golden beard, and the merry 
 funerals of harvest. This is what the great poets do 
 for us, we cannot tell how, with their fatally-chosen 
 words, crowding the happy veins of language again 
 with all the life and meaning and music that had been 
 dribbling away from them since Adam. And this is 
 what the Roman Church does for religion, feeding 
 the soul not with the essential religious sentiment, not 
 with a drop or two of the tincture of worship, but 
 making us feel one by one all those original elements 
 of which worship is composed; not bringing the end 
 to us, but making us pass over and feel beneath our 
 feet all the golden rounds of the ladder by which the 
 
1 88 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 climbing generations have reached that end; not 
 handing us dryly a dead and extinguished Q.E.D., 
 but letting it rather declare itself by the glory with 
 which it interfuses the incense-clouds of wonder and 
 aspiration and beauty in which it is veiled. The 
 secret of her power is typified in the mystery of the 
 Real Presence. She is the only church that has been 
 loyal to the heart and soul of man, that has clung to 
 her faith in the imagination, and that would not give 
 over her symbols and images and sacred vessels to the 
 perilous keeping of the iconoclast Understanding. 
 She has never lost sight of the truth, that the product 
 human nature is composed of the sum of flesh and 
 spirit, and has accordingly regarded both this world 
 and the next as the constituents of that other world 
 which we possess by faith. She knows that poor 
 Panza, the body, has his kitchen longings and visions, 
 as well as Quixote, the soul, his ethereal, and has wit 
 enough to supply him with the visible, tangible raw 
 material of imagination. She is the only poet among 
 the churches, and, while Protestantism is unrolling a 
 pocket surveyor s-plan, takes her votary to the pin 
 nacle of her temple, and shows him meadow, upland, 
 and tillage, cloudy heaps of forest clasped with the 
 river s jewelled arm, hillsides white with the perpetual 
 snow of flocks, and, beyond all, the interminable 
 heave of the unknown ocean. Her empire may be 
 traced upon the map by the boundaries of races; the 
 understanding is her great foe ; and it is the people 
 whose vocabulary was incomplete till they had in 
 vented the arch -word Humbug that defies her. With 
 
A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 189 
 
 that leaden bullet John Bull can bring down Senti 
 ment when she flies her highest. And the more the 
 pity for John Bull. One of these days some one 
 whose eyes are sharp enough will read in the Times a 
 standing advertisement, "Lost, strayed, or stolen 
 from the farm-yard of the subscriber the valuable 
 horse Pegasus. Probably has on him part of a new 
 plough-harness, as that is also missing. A suitable 
 reward, etc. J. BULL." 
 
 Protestantism reverses the poetical process I have 
 spoken of above, and gives not even the bread of life, 
 but instead of it the alcohol, or distilled intellectual 
 result. This was very well so long as Protestantism 
 continued to protest; for enthusiasm sublimates the 
 understanding into imagination. But now that she 
 also has become an establishment, she begins to per 
 ceive that she made a blunder in trusting herself to 
 the intellect alone. She is beginning to feel her way 
 back again, as one notices in Puseyism, and other 
 such hints. One is put upon reflection when he sees 
 burly Englishmen, who dine on beef and porter every 
 day, marching proudly through Saint Peter s on Palm 
 Sunday, with those frightfully artificial palm-branches 
 in their hands. Romanism wisely provides for the 
 childish in men. 
 
 Therefore I say again, that one must lay aside his 
 Protestantism in order to have a true feeling of Saint 
 Peter s. Here in Rome is the laboratory of that mys 
 terious enchantress, who has known so well how to 
 adapt herself to all the wants, or, if you will, the weak 
 nesses of human nature, making the retirement of the 
 
1 90 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 convent-cell a merit to the solitary, the scourge or the 
 fast a piety to the ascetic, the enjoyment of pomp and 
 music and incense a religious act in the sensual, and 
 furnishing for the very soul itself a confidante in that 
 ear of the dumb confessional, where it may securely 
 disburden itself of its sins and sorrows. And the 
 dome of St. Peter s is the magic circle within which 
 jshe works her most potent incantations. I confess 
 (that I could not enter it alone without a kind of awe. 
 
 But, setting entirely aside the effect of this church 
 upon the imagination, it is wonderful, if one con 
 sider it only materially. Michael Angelo created a 
 new world in which everything was colossal, and it 
 might seem that he built this as a fit temple for those 
 gigantic figures with which he peopled it to worship in. 
 Here his Moses should be high-priest, the service 
 should be chanted by his prophets and sibyls, and 
 those great pagans should be brought hither from 
 San Lorenzo in Florence, to receive baptism. 
 
 However unsatisfactory in other matters, statistics 
 are of service here. I have seen a refined tourist who 
 entered, Murray in hand, sternly resolved to have 
 St. Peter s look small, brought to terms at once by 
 being told that the canopy over the high altar (looking 
 very like a four-post bedstead) was ninety-eight feet 
 high. If he still obstinates himself, he is finished by 
 being made to measure one of the marble putti, which 
 look like rather stoutish babies, and are found to be 
 six feet, every sculptor s son of them. This ceremony 
 is the more interesting, as it enables him to satisfy the 
 guide of his proficiency in the Italian tongue by calling 
 
A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 19 1 
 
 them putty at every convenient opportunity. Other 
 wise both he and his assistant terrify each other into 
 mutual unintelligibility with that lingua franca of the 
 English-speaking traveller, which is supposed to bear 
 some remote affinity to the French language, of which 
 both parties are as ignorant as an American Am 
 bassador. 
 
 Murray gives all these little statistical nudges to the 
 Anglo-Saxon imagination ; but he knows that its finest 
 nerves are in the pocket, and accordingly ends by 
 \ telling you how much the church cost. I forget how 
 \ much it is; but it cannot be more, I fancy, than the 
 [English national debt multiplied into itself three hun 
 dred and sixty -five times. If the pilgrim, honestly 
 anxious for a sensation, will work out this little sum, 
 he will be sure to receive all that enlargement of the 
 imaginative faculty which arithmetic can give him. 
 Perhaps the most dilating fact, after all, is that this 
 architectural world has also a separate atmosphere, 
 distinct from that of Rome by some ten degrees, and 
 unvarying through the year. 
 
 I think that, on the whole, Jonathan gets ready to 
 be pleased with St. Peter s sooner than Bull. Ac 
 customed to our lath and plaster expedients for 
 churches, the portable sentry-boxes of Zion, mere 
 solidity and permanence are pleasurable in them 
 selves; and if he get grandeur also, he has Gospel 
 measure. Besides, it is easy for Jonathan to travel. 
 He is one drop of a fluid mass, who knows where his 
 home is to-day, but can make no guess of where it 
 may be to-morrow. Even in a form of government 
 
I Q2 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 he only takes lodgings for the night, and is ready to 
 pay his bill and be off in the morning. He should take 
 his motto from Bishop Golias s " Mihi est proposilum 
 in tabernd mori" though not in the sufistic sense of 
 that misunderstood Churchman. But Bull can sel 
 dom be said to travel at all, since the first step of a 
 true traveller is out of himself. He plays cricket and 
 hunts foxes on the Campagna, makes entries in his 
 betting-book while the Pope is giving his benediction, 
 and points out Lord Calico to you awfully during the 
 Sistine Miserere. If he let his beard grow, it always 
 has a startled air, as if it suddenly remembered its 
 treason to Sheffield and only makes him look more 
 English than ever. A masquerade is impossible, to 
 him, and his fancy balls are the solemnest facts in the 
 world. Accordingly, he enters St. Peter s with the 
 dome of St. Paul s drawn tight over his eyes, like a 
 criminal s cap, and ready for instant execution rather 
 [than confess that the English Wren had not a stronger 
 jwing than the Italian Angel. I like this in Bull, and 
 it renders him the pleasantest of travelling com 
 panions; for he makes you take England along with 
 you, and thus you have two countries at once. And 
 one must not forget in an Italian inn that it is to Bull 
 he owes the clean napkins and sheets, and the privi 
 lege of his morning bath. Nor should Bull himself 
 Jail to remember that he ate with his fingers till the 
 Italian gave him a fork. 
 
 Browning has given the best picture of St. Peter s 
 on a festival day, sketching it with a few verses in his 
 large style. And doubtless it is the scene of the 
 
A FF.W BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 193 
 
 grandest spectacles which the world can see in these 
 latter days. Those Easter pomps, where the antique 
 world marches visibly before you in gilded mail and 
 crimson doublet, refresh the eyes, and are good so 
 long as they continue to be merely spectacle. But 
 if one think for a moment of the servant of the ser 
 vants of the Lord in cloth of gold, borne on men s 
 shoulders, or of the children receiving the blessing of 
 their Holy Father, with a regiment of French soldiers 
 to protect the father from the children, it becomes a 
 little sad. If one would feel the full meaning of thoss 
 ceremonials, however, let him consider the coinci 
 dences between the Romish and the Buddhist forms 
 of worship, and remembering that the Pope is the 
 direct heir, through the Pontifex Maximus, of rites 
 that were ancient when the Etruscans were modern, he 
 will look with a feeling deeper than curiosity upon 
 forms which record the earliest conquests of the In 
 visible, the first triumphs of mind over muscle. 
 
 To me the noon silence and solitude of St. Peter s 
 were most impressive, when the sunlight, made visible 
 1 by the mist of the ever-burning lamps in which it was 
 entangled, hovered under the dome like the holy dove 
 goldenly descending. Very grand also is the twilight, 
 when all outlines melt into mysterious vastness, and 
 the arches expand and lose themselves in the deepen 
 ing shadow. Then, standing in the desert transept, 
 you hear the far-off vespers swell and die like low 
 breathings of the sea on some conjectured shore. 
 
 As the sky is supposed to scatter its golden star- 
 pollen once every year in meteoric showers, so the 
 
194 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 dome of St. Peter s has its annual efflorescence of fire. 
 This illumination is the great show of Papal Rome. 
 Just after sunset, I stood upon the Trinita dei Monti 
 and saw the little drops of pale light creeping down 
 ward from the cross and trickling over the dome. 
 Then, as the sky darkened behind, it seemed as if the 
 setting sun had lodged upon the horizon and there 
 burned out, the fire still clinging to his massy ribs. 
 And when the change from the silver to the golden 
 illumination came, it was as if the breeze had fanned 
 the embers into flame again. 
 
 Bitten with the Anglo-Saxon gadfly that drives us 
 all to disenchant artifice, and see the springs that fix 
 it on, I walked down to get a nearer look. My next 
 glimpse was from the bridge of Sant Angelo; but 
 there was no time nor space for pause. Foot-pas 
 sengers crowding hither and thither, as they heard 
 the shout of Avanti! from the mile of coachmen 
 behind, dragoon -horses curtsying backward just 
 where there were most women and children to be 
 flattened, and the dome drawing all eyes and thoughts 
 the wrong way, made a hubbub to be got out of at any 
 desperate hazard. Besides, one could not help feeling 
 nervously hurried; for it seemed quite plain to every 
 body that this starry apparition must be as momentary 
 as it was wonderful, and that we should find it van 
 ished when we reached the piazza. But suddenly 
 you stand in front of it, and see the soft travertine of 
 the front suffused with a tremulous, glooming glow, a 
 mildened glory, as if the building breathed, and so 
 transmuted its shadow into soft pulses of light 
 
A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 195 
 
 After wondering long enough, I went back to the 
 Pincio, and watched it for an hour longer. But I did 
 not wish to see it go out. It seemed better to go home 
 and leave it still trembling, so that I could fancy a 
 kind of permanence in it, and half believe I should 
 find it there again some lucky evening. Before 
 leaving it altogether, I went away to cool my eyes with 
 darkness, and came back several times; and every 
 time it w r as a new miracle, the more so that it was a 
 human piece of faery-work. Beautiful as fire is in 
 itself, I suspect that part of the pleasure is meta 
 physical, and that the sense of playing with an ele 
 ment which can be so terrible adds to the zest of the 
 spectacle. And then fire is not the least degraded by 
 it, because it is not utilized. If beauty were in use, 
 the factory would add a grace to the river, and we 
 should turn from the fire-writing on the wall of 
 heaven to look at a message printed by the magnetic 
 telegraph. There may be a beauty in the use itself; 
 but utilization is always downward, and it is this feel 
 ing that makes Schiller s Pegasus in yoke so univer 
 sally pleasing. So long as the curse of work clings to 
 man, he will see beauty only in play. The capital of 
 the most frugal commonwealth in the world burns 
 up five thousand dollars a year in gunpowder, and 
 nobody murmurs. Provident Judas wished to utilize 
 the ointment, but the Teacher would rather that it 
 should be wasted in poem. 
 
 The best lesson in aesthetics I ever got (and, like 
 most good lessons, it fell from the lips of no regular 
 professor) was from an Irishman on the day the 
 
196 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 Nymph Cochituate was formally introduced to the 
 people of Boston. I made one with other rustics in 
 the streets, admiring the dignitaries in coaches with 
 as much Christian charity as is consistent with an 
 elbow in the pit of your stomach and a heel on that 
 toe which is your only inheritance from two excellent 
 grandfathers. Among other allegorical phenomena, 
 there came along what I should have called a hay-cart, 
 if I had not known it was a triumphal car, filled with 
 that fairest variety of mortal grass which with us is 
 apt to spindle so soon into a somewhat sapless woman 
 hood. Thirty-odd young maidens in white gowns, 
 with blue sashes and pink wreaths of French crape, 
 represented the United States. (How shall we limit our 
 number, by the way, if ever Utah be admitted ?) The 
 ship, the printing-press, even the wondrous train of 
 express-wagons, and other solid bits of civic fantasy, 
 had left my Hibernian neighbor unmoved. But this 
 brought him down. Turning to me, as the most ap 
 preciative public for the moment, with face of as much 
 delight as if his head had been broken, he cried, 
 "Now this is raly beautiful! Tothally regyardless 
 uv expinse!" Methought my shirt-sleeved lecturer 
 on the Beautiful had hit at least one nail full on the 
 head. Voltaire but epigrammatized the same thought 
 when he said, Le superflu, chose trh-necessaire. 
 
 As for the ceremonies of the Church, one need not 
 waste time in seeing many of them. There is a dreary 
 sameness in them, and one can take an hour here 
 and an hour there, as it pleases him, just as sure of 
 
A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 197 
 
 finding the same pattern as he would be in the first 
 or last yard of a roll of printed cotton. For myself, I 
 do not like to go and look with mere curiosity at what 
 is sacred and solemn to others. To how many these 
 Roman shows are sacred, I cannot guess; but cer 
 tainly the Romans do not value them much. I 
 walked out to the grotto of Egeria on Easter Sunday? 
 that I might not be tempted down to St. Peter s to 
 see the mockery of Pio Nono s benediction. It is 
 certainly Christian, for he blesses them that curse him, 
 and does all the good which the waving of his fingers 
 can do to people who would use him despitefully if 
 they had the chance. I told an Italian servant she 
 might have the day; but she said she did not care 
 for it. 
 
 "But," urged I, will you not go to receive the 
 blessing of the Holy Father?" 
 
 "No, sir." 
 
 "Do you not wish it?" 
 
 "Not in the least: his blessing would do me no 
 good. If I get the blessing of Heaven, it will serve 
 my turn." 
 
 There were three families of foreigners in our house, 
 and I believe none of the Italian servants went to St. 
 Peter s that day. Yet they commonly speak kindly 
 of Pius. I have heard the same phrase from several 
 Italians of the working-class. "He is a good man," 
 they said, "but ill-led." 
 
 What one sees in the streets of Rome is worth more 
 than what one sees in the churches. The churches 
 themselves are generally ugly. St. Peter s has 
 
1 98 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 crushed all the life out of architectural genius, and 
 all the modern churches look as if they were swelling 
 themselves in imitation of the great Basilica. There 
 is a clumsy magnificence about them, and their 
 heaviness oppresses you. Their marble incrusta 
 tions look like a kind of architectural elephantiasis, 
 and the parts are puffy with a dropsical want of pro 
 portion. There is none of the spring and soar which 
 one may see even in the Lombard churches, and a 
 Roman column standing near one of them, slim and 
 gentleman-like, satirizes silently their tawdry parcenu- 
 ism. Attempts at mere bigness are ridiculous in a 
 city where the Colosseum still yawns in crater-like 
 ruin, and where Michael Angelo made a noble church 
 out of a single room in Diocletian s baths. 
 
 Shall I confess it? Michael Angelo seems to me, 
 in his angry reaction against sentimental beauty, to 
 have mistaken bulk and brawn for the antithesis of 
 feebleness. He is the apostle of the exaggerated, the 
 Victor Hugo of painting and sculpture. I have a 
 feeling that rivalry was a more powerful motive with 
 him than love of art, that he had the conscious inten 
 tion to be original, which seldom leads to anything 
 better than being extravagant. The show of muscle 
 proves strength, not power; and force for mere force s 
 sake in an makes one think of Milo caught in his own 
 log. This is my second thought, and strikes me as 
 perhaps somewhat niggardly toward one in whom 
 you cannot help feeling there was so vast a possibility. 
 And then his Eve, his David, his Sibyls, his Prophets, 
 his Sonnets ! Well, I take it all back, and come round 
 
A FEW BITS OF It OMAN MOSAIC. 199 
 
 to St. Peter s again just to hint that I doubt about 
 domes. In Rome they are so much the fashion that 
 I felt as if they were the goitre of architecture. Gen 
 erally they look heavy. Those on St. Mark s in Ven 
 ice are the only light ones I ever saw, and they look 
 almost airy, like tents puffed out with wind. I sup 
 pose one must be satisfied with the interior effect, 
 which is certainly noble in St. Peter s. But for im- 
 pressiveness both within and without there is nothing 
 like a Gothic cathedral for me, nothing that crowns 
 a city so nobly, or makes such an island of twilight 
 silence in the midst of its noonday clamors. 
 
 Now as to what one sees in the streets, the beggars 
 are certainly the first things that draw the eye. Beg- 
 gary is an institution here. The Church has sancti 
 fied it by the establishment of mendicant orders, and 
 indeed it is the natural result of a social system where 
 the non-producing class makes not only the laws, but 
 the ideas. The beggars of Rome go far toward prov 
 ing the diversity of origin in mankind, for on them 
 surely the curse of Adam never fell. It is easier to 
 fancy that Adam Vaurien, the first tenant of the Fool s 
 Paradise, after sucking his thumbs for a thousand 
 years, took to wife Eve Faniente, and became the 
 progenitor of this race, to whom also he left a calendar 
 in which three hundred and sixty-five days in the year 
 were made feasts, sacred from all secular labor. 
 Accordingly, they not merely do nothing, but they do 
 it assiduously and almost with religious fervor. I 
 have seen ancient members of this sect as constant at 
 their accustomed street-corner as the bit of broken 
 
200 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 column on which they sat ; and when a man does this 
 in rainy weather, as rainy weather is in Rome, he has 
 the spirit of a fanatic and martyr. 
 
 It is not that the Italians are a lazy people. On the 
 contrary, I am satisfied that they are industrious so 
 far as they are allowed to be. But, as I said before, 
 when a Roman does nothing, he does it in the high 
 Roman fashion. A friend of mine was having on 
 of his rooms arranged for a private theatre, and sent 
 for a person who was said to be an expert in the busi 
 ness to do it for him. After a day s trial, he was sit- 
 isfied that his lieutenant was rather a hindrance than 
 a help, and resolved to dismiss him. 
 
 "What is your charge for your day s services?" 
 
 "Two scudi, sir." 
 
 "Two scudi! Five pauls would be too much. 
 You have done nothing but stand with your hands 
 in your pockets and get in the way of other people." 
 
 "Lordship is perfectly right; but that is my way of 
 working." 
 
 It is impossible for a stranger to say who may not 
 beg in Rome. It seems to be a sudden madness that 
 may seize any one at the sight of a foreigner. You 
 see a very respectable looking person in the street, 
 and it is odds but, as you pass him, his hat comes off, 
 his whole figure suddenly dilapidates itself, assuming 
 a tremble of professional weakness, and you hear the 
 everlasting qualche cosa per carita? You are in 
 doubt whether to drop a bajoccho into the next car 
 dinal s hat which offers you its sacred cavity in answer 
 to your salute. You begin to believe that the hat was 
 
A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 2OI 
 
 invented for the sole purpose of ingulfing coppers, and 
 that its highest type is the great Triregno itself, into 
 which the pence of Peter rattle. 
 
 But you soon learn to distinguish the established 
 beggars, and to the three professions elsewhere con 
 sidered liberal you add a fourth for this latitude, 
 mendicancy. Its professors look upon themselves as 
 a kind of guild which ought to be protected by the 
 government. I fell into talk with a woman who 
 begged of me in the Colosseum. Among other things 
 she complained that the government did not at all 
 consider the poor. 
 
 "Where is the government that does?" I said. 
 
 u Eh gia! Excellency; but this government lets 
 beggars from the country come into Rome, which is 
 a great injury to the trade of us born Romans. There 
 is Beppo, for example ; he is a man of property in his 
 own town, and has a dinner of three courses every 
 day. He has portioned two daughters with three 
 thousand scudi each, and left Rome during the time 
 of the Republic with the rest of the nobility." 
 
 At first, one is shocked and pained at the exhibition 
 of deformities in the street. But by and by he comes 
 to look upon them with little more emotion than is 
 excited by seeing the tools of any other trade. The 
 melancholy of the beggars is purely a matter of busi 
 ness; and they look upon their maims as Fortunatus 
 purses, which will always give them money. A 
 withered arm they present to you as a highwayman 
 would his pistol; a goitre is a life-annuity; a St. 
 Vitus dance is as good as an engagement as prima 
 
202 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 ballerina at the Apollo; and to have no legs at all is 
 to stand on the best footing with fortune. They are 
 a merry race, on the whole, and quick-witted, like the 
 rest of their countrymen. I believe the regular fee 
 for a beggar is a quattrino, about a quarter of a cent; 
 but they expect more of foreigners. A friend of mine 
 once gave one of these tiny coins to an old woman; 
 she delicately expressed her resentment by exclaim 
 ing, "Thanks, signoria. God will reward even you !" 
 
 A begging friar came to me one day with a sub 
 scription for repairing his convent. "Ah, but I am 
 a heretic," said I. "Undoubtedly," with a shrug, 
 implying a respectful acknowledgment of a foreigner s 
 right to choose warm and dry lodgings in the other 
 world as well as in this, "but your money is perfectly 
 orthodox." 
 
 Another favorite way of doing nothing is to exca 
 vate the Forum. I think the Fanientes like this all 
 the better, because it seems a kind of satire upon work, 
 as the witches parody the Christian offices of devotion 
 at their Sabbath. A score or so of old men in volu 
 minous cloaks shift the earth from one side of a large 
 pit to the other, in a manner so leisurely that it is posi 
 tive repose to look at them. The most bigoted anti- 
 Fourierist might acknowledge this to be attractive 
 industry. 
 
 One conscript father trails a small barrow up to 
 another, who stands leaning on a long spade. Ar 
 riving, he fumbles for his snuff-box, and offers it de 
 liberately to his friend. Each takes an ample pinch, 
 and both seat themselves to await the result. If one 
 
A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 2O3 
 
 should sneeze, he receives the Felicita! of the other; 
 and, after allowing the titillation to subside, he re 
 plies, Grazia ! Then follows a little conversation, and 
 then they prepare to load. But it occurs to the 
 barrow-driver that this is a good opportunity to fill 
 and light his pipe ; and to do so conveniently he needs 
 his barrow to sit upon. He draws a few whiffs, and 
 a little more conversation takes place. The barrow 
 is now ready; but first the wielder of the spade will 
 fill his pipe also. This done, more whiffs and more 
 conversation. Then a spoonful of earth is thrown 
 into the barrow, and it starts on its return. But 
 midway it meets an empty barrow, and both stop to 
 go through the snuff-box ceremonial once more, and 
 to discuss whatever new thing has occurred in the 
 excavation since their last encounter. And so it goes 
 on all day. 
 
 As I see more of material antiquity, I begin to 
 suspect that my interest in it is mostly factitious. The 
 relations of races to the physical world (only to be 
 studied fruitfully on the spot) do not excite in me an 
 interest at all proportionate to that I feel in their in 
 fluence on the moral advance of mankind, which one 
 may as easily trace in his own library as on the spot. 
 The only useful remark I remember to have made 
 here is, that, the situation of Rome being far less 
 strong than that of any city of the Etruscan league, it 
 must have been built where it is for purposes of com 
 merce. It is the most defensible point near the mouth 
 of the Tiber. It is only as rival trades-folk that Rome 
 
2O4 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 and Carthage had any comprehensible cause of quar 
 rel. It is only as a commercial people that we can 
 understand the early tendency of the Romans towards 
 democracy. As for antiquity, after reading history, 
 one is haunted by a discomforting suspicion that the 
 names so painfully deciphered in hieroglyphic or 
 arrow-head inscriptions are only so many more 
 Smiths and Browns masking it in unknown tongues. 
 Moreover, if we Yankees are twitted with not know 
 ing the difference between big and great, may not 
 those of us who have learned it turn round on many 
 a monument over here with the same reproach? I 
 confess I am beginning to sympathize with a country 
 man of ours from Michigan, who asked our Minister 
 to direct him to a specimen ruin and a specimen gallery, 
 that he might see and be rid of them once for all. I 
 saw three young Englishmen going through the Vati 
 can by catalogue and number, the other day, in a 
 fashion which John Bull is apt to consider exclusively 
 American. "Number 300!" says the one with cata 
 logue and pencil, "have you seen it?" "Yes," 
 answer his two comrades, and, checking it off, he 
 goes on with Number 301. Having witnessed the 
 unavailing agonies of many Anglo-Saxons from both 
 sides of the Atlantic in their effort to have the correct 
 sensation before many hideous examples of antique 
 bad taste, my heart warmed toward my business-like 
 British cousins, who were doing their aesthetics in this 
 thrifty auctioneer fashion. Our cart-before-horse 
 education, which makes us more familiar with the 
 history and literature of Greeks and Romans than with 
 
A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 2OS 
 
 those of our own ancestry, (though there is nothing in 
 ancient art to match Shakespeare or a Gothic min 
 ster,) makes us the gulls of what we call classical 
 antiquity. In sculpture, to be sure, they have us on 
 the hip. Europe were worth visiting, if only to be 
 rid of this one old man of the sea. 
 
 I am not ashamed to confess a singular sympathy 
 with what are known as the Middle Ages. I cannot 
 help thinking that few periods have left behind them 
 such traces of inventiveness and power. Nothing 
 is more tiresome than the sameness of modern cities; 
 and it has often struck me that this must also have 
 been true of those ancient ones in which Greek archi 
 tecture or its derivatives prevailed, true at least 
 as respects public buildings. But mediaeval towns, 
 especially in Italy, even when only fifty miles asunder, 
 have an individuality of character as marked as that 
 of trees. Nor is it merely this originality that attracts 
 me, but likewise the sense that, however old, they are 
 nearer to me in being modern and Christian. I find 
 it harder to bridge over the gulf of Paganism than of 
 centuries. Apart from any difference in the men, I 
 had a far deeper emotion when I stood on the Sasso 
 di Dante, than at Horace s Sabine farm or by the tomb 
 of Virgil. The latter, indeed, interested me chiefly 
 by its association with comparatively modern legend; 
 and one of the buildings I am most glad to have seen 
 in Rome is the Bear Inn, where Montaigne lodged on 
 his arrival. 
 
 I think it must have been for some such reason that 
 T liked my Florentine better than my Roman walks, 
 
206 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 though I am vastly more contented with merely being 
 in Rome. Florence is more noisy; indeed, I think 
 it the noisiest town I was ever in. What with the 
 continual jangling of its bells, the rattle of Austrian 
 drums, and the street-cries, Ancora mi raccapriccia. 
 The Italians are a vociferous people, and most so 
 among the Florentines. Walking through a back 
 street one day, I saw an old woman higgling with a 
 peripatetic dealer, who, at every interval afforded him 
 by the remarks of his veteran antagonist, would tip 
 his head on one side, and shout, with a kind of won 
 dering enthusiasm, as if he could hardly trust the 
 evidence of his own senses to such loveliness, O, che 
 bellezza! che belle-e-ezza ! The two had been con 
 tending as obstinately as the Greeks and Trojans 
 over the body of Patroclus, and I was curious to know 
 what was the object of so much desire on the one side 
 and admiration on the other. It was a half-dozen 
 of weazeny baked pears, beggarly remnant of the 
 day s traffic. Another time I stopped before a stall, 
 debating whether to buy some fine-looking peaches. 
 Before I had made up my mind, the vender, a stout 
 fellow, with a voice like a prize-bull of Bashan, opened 
 a mouth round and large as the muzzle of a blunder 
 buss, and let fly into my ear the following pertinent 
 observation: "Belle pesche! belle pe-e-esche!" (cres 
 cendo). I stared at him in stunned bewilderment; 
 but, seeing that he had reloaded and was about to fire 
 again, took to my heels, the exploded syllables rattling 
 after me like so many buckshot. A single turnip is 
 argument enough with them till midnight; nay, I 
 
A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 2O/ 
 
 have heard a ruffian yelling over a covered basket, 
 which, I am convinced, was empty, and only carried 
 as an excuse for his stupendous vocalism. It never 
 struck me before what a quiet people Americans are. 
 Of the pleasant places within easy walk of Rome, I 
 prefer the garden of the Villa Albani as being most 
 Italian. One does not go to Italy for examples of 
 Price on the Picturesque. Compared with land 
 scape-gardening, it is Racine to Shakespeare, I grant; 
 but it has its own charm, nevertheless. I like the 
 balustraded terraces, the sun -proof laurel walks, the 
 vases and statues. It is only in such a climate that it 
 does not seem inhuman to thrust a naked statue out 
 of doors. Not to speak of their incongruity, how 
 dreary do those white figures look at Fountains Abbey 
 in that shrewd Yorkshire atmosphere ! To put them 
 there shows the same bad taste that led Prince Polonia, 
 as Thackeray calls him, to build an artificial ruin 
 within a mile of Rome. But I doubt if the Italian 
 garden will bear transplantation. Farther north, or 
 under a less constant sunshine, it is but half-hardy at 
 the best. Within the city, the garden of the French 
 Academy is my favorite retreat, because little fre 
 quented; and there is an arbor there in which I have 
 read comfortably (sitting where the sun could reach 
 me) in January. By the way, there is something very 
 agreeable in the way these people have of making a 
 kind of fireside of the sunshine. With us it is either 
 too hot or too cool, or we are too busy. But, on the 
 other hand, they have no such thing as a chimney- 
 corner. 
 
2C8 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 
 
 Of course I haunt the collections of art faithfully; 
 . but my favorite gallery, after all, is the street. There 
 \ I always find something entertaining, at least. The 
 i other day, on my way to the Colonna Palace, I passed 
 the Fountain of Trevi, from which the water is now 
 shut off on account of repairs to the aqueduct. A 
 scanty rill of soap-sudsy water still trickled from one 
 of the conduits, and, seeing a crowd, I stopped to find 
 out what nothing or other had gathered it. One 
 charm of Rome, is that nobody has anything in par 
 ticular to do, or, if he has, can always stop doing it on 
 the slightest pretext. I found that some eels had been 
 discovered, and a very vivacious hunt was going on, 
 the chief Nimrods being boys. I happened to be the 
 first to see a huge eel wriggling from the mouth of a 
 pipe, and pointed him out. Two lads at once rushed 
 upon him. One essayed the capture with his naked 
 hands, the other, more provident, had armed him 
 self with a rag of woollen cloth with which to maintain 
 his grip more securely. Hardly had this latter ar 
 rested his slippery prize, when a ragged rascal, watch 
 ing his opportunity, snatched away the prize, and 
 instantly secured it by thrusting the head into his 
 mouth, and closing on it a set of teeth like an ivory 
 vice. But alas for ill -got gain ! Rob Roy s 
 
 " Good old plan, 
 
 That he should take who has the power 
 And he should keep who can," 
 
 did not serve here. There is scarce a square rood 
 in Rome without one or more stately cocked hats in it, 
 emblems of authority and police. I saw the flash of 
 
A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 2OQ 
 
 the snow-white cross-belts, gleaming through that 
 dingy crowd like the panache of Henry Quatre at 
 Ivry, I saw the mad plunge of the canvas-shielded 
 head-piece, sacred and terrible as that of Gessler; 
 and while the greedy throng were dancing about the 
 anguilliceps, each taking his chance twitch at the 
 undulating object of all wishes, the captor dodging 
 his head hither and thither, (vulnerable, like Achilles, 
 only in his eel, as a British tourist would say,) a pair 
 of broad blue shoulders parted the assailants as a 
 ship s bows part a wave, a pair of blue arms, ter 
 minating in gloves of Berlin thread, were stretched 
 forth, not in benediction, one hand grasped the 
 slippery Briseis by the waist, the other bestowed a 
 cuff on the jaw-bone of Achilles, which loosened 
 (rather by its authority than its physical force) the 
 hitherto refractory incisors, a snuffy bandanna was 
 produced, the prisoner was deposited in this tempo 
 rary watch-house, and the cocked hat sailed majes 
 tically away with the property thus sequestered for 
 the benefit of the state. 
 
 " Gaudeant anguillse si mortuus sit homo illo, 
 Qui, quasi morte reas, excruciabat eas! " 
 
 If you have got through that last sentence without 
 stopping for breath, you are fit to begin on the Homer 
 of Chapman, who, both as translator and author, has 
 the longest wind, (especially for a comparison,) with 
 out being long-winded, of all writers I know anything 
 of, not excepting Jeremy Taylor. 
 
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